Canal Street (Buffalo)

Canal Street was the name of a thoroughfare as well as a district in Buffalo in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Originally called Rock Street, Canal Street ran parallel to and just to the west of the famed Erie Canal at its western terminus in Buffalo. The area had been the site of the original Village of Buffalo, near a Seneca Indian village on Buffalo Creek, and the eventual city expanded outward from the waterfront location.

The Canal, completed in 1825, opened up the western United States to travelers and trade from the east coast. With it came a tremendous increase in Great Lakes freighter traffic at Buffalo harbor, and with that an influx of canal and freighter crewmen who were often paid off in Buffalo and spent freely in the bars and brothels that sprang up in the district, known variously as "Canal Street", "Five Points" "the Flats" and "the Hooks".

In the early 20th century, the district became the focus of a massive immigration of Italians, mostly Sicilian, to Buffalo. "Canal Street" was changed to "Dante Place", the neighborhood was known as "Dante Place" or "Little Italy", and most of the bars and brothels gave way to three- and four-story brick tenements, each housing multiple families.

Throughought its existence, the neighborhood suffered numerous fires, explosions and other disasters. By the late 1920s, the Canal had been filled in, and in the 1950s, urban renewal of the area virtually obliterated the historic site. In recent years, an Erie Canal Redevelopment project has begun to unearth some elements of the Canal-era neighborhood, including the re-watering of the Commercial Slip, which formed the original natural outlet of Little Buffalo Creek into the Buffalo River.

External links

* [http://www.conigliofamuly.com/Buffalo Maps of Buffalo's "Erie Canal District" then and now]

References

* "AMERICA'S CROSSROADS Buffalo's Canal Street/Dante Place", Vogel, M.N., Patton, E.J., Redding, P.F., The Heritage Press (ISBN 1-878097-12-1)