A Brief History of Niagara Square
Buffalo, NY



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Joseph Ellicott

1805 map by Joseph Ellicott

C. 1912 map illustrates the street name changes. Once City Hall is built over it, Court Street will no longer cross through Niagara Square.

Frederick Law Olmsted

See also Niagara Square for pages on the buildings - past and present

Calvert Vaux, Olmsted's partner

Olmsted & Vaux's plan for Niagara Square.. At this time the Square actually was square, and its intersecting avenues converged around a much smaller inner circle.

2002 map
Drawn by C. LaChiusa




1804 New Amsterdam mapped out

The conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763 ended French domination of the Niagara Frontier and marked the advent of permanent settlement of the area. This trend increased after the Revolution, and in 1804 Joseph Ellicott (1760-1826) mapped a town on the banks of Lake Erie at the mouth of the Buffalo Creek. The site of the city was part of the vast land holdings of the Holland Land Company, a Dutch firm that had purchased most of western New York. Ellicott, who was the local Holland Land Company agent, had earlier in his career helped his brother Andrew survey Pierre L'Enfant's plan for the new capital at Washington.

The influence of L'Enfant's Washington is readily apparent in Ellicott's design for Buffalo (first named New Amsterdam). Niagara Square, located near the lakefront, became the center from which eight streets radiated in several directions. Among the streets passing through Niagara Square was Delaware Street (after 1879 called Delaware Avenue), which Ellicott is said to have named for one of the Indian groups that frequented the portage road around nearby Niagara Falls. Apparently in Ellicott's mind the street was destined to become a magnificent residential district.

Despite Ellicott's lofty vision for the new city -- he said that the site was "developed by nature for the grand emporium of the Western world" -- Buffalo remained for the first quarter of the nineteenth century an inconsequential village.



1813 Buffalo Burned
British troops invading from Canada during the War of 1812 burned most of the buildings that were standing at the time. The destruction, however, was a blow from which the populace, which had fled in advance of the attack, quickly recovered.



1825 Thayer brothers executed
Hanging of the the three Thayer brothers took place in the presence of 30,000 citizens after the brothers were convicted of murdering John Love, a farmer of Boston, NY, over a trivial quarrel. Love had disappeared mysteriously late in 1824 and his body was discovered several months later in a frozen shallow grave on a slope near Israel Thayer's cabin. They were hanged on one gallows near what is now the entrance to City Hall.

1832 Buffalo incorporated

In 1832, when the town incorporated as a city, Niagara Square was its chief residential quarter. Comfortable, freestanding residences must have given it more the air of a New England town commons than the look of urban residential squares in eastern cities.



1874 Olmsted's Plan

For many years Niagara Square was a poorly defined space. In 1874 Olmsted & Vaux presented a plan for it that crated a series of planted angles between incoming streets and envisioned a Civil War memorial arch (never erected) after a design by H. H. Richardson to stand where Delaware Ave. enters the square from the north.


1923 Delaware Avenue Association organized

The Association succeeded in 1924 in having the city widen the avenue from Niagara Square almost up to North Street. The widening of the roadway from forty feet to sixty feet was accompanied by the laying of new sewer lines, the placement of traffic signals, and the installation at one-hundred-foot intervals of 1500-candlepower electric light standards. The modernization of the avenue, however, occasioned the destruction of most of the splendid elm trees that had lined the thoroughfare, two rows on each side, since even before Olmsted's day.


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See also: History of Neighborhoods in Buffalo, New York - Links

Page by Chuck LaChiusa
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