Residents reflect on a painful legacy as the city remains among the most racially divided in America
in 1873, was a haven on theEast Side, marked by a tree-lined median. In the late 19th century, Buffalo’s east end was home to European immigrants. A century later, it became a destination for the city’s Black residents.
As a teenager in the 1960s, Giles, 71, often visited Buffalo from Niagara Falls, just 18 miles away. “Man, it was a friendly time,” he said. “Everybody was engaged with each other. You wouldn’t even have a lot of fights. You didn’t have a lot of drugs. It was a community. We were being oppressed and we didn’t know it.”
“You had a lot of Black people buying these big, old, wonderful houses on the parkway,” he said. “Those people couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that somebody would destroy such a magnificent parkway. It was beyond comprehension … The community was divided. Wealth was lost, but even more treacherous: these cars would create air and noise pollution.”continued to force Black people from longtime communities along the waterfront.