BUFFALO, NY - City Hall, the Queen City's 32-story Art Deco masterpiece, was one of the tallest municipal buildings in the country when it was built and certainly one of the most beautiful. And as iconic an image the building is, it also has ties to a pair of Buffalo favorites, beer and beef on weck!
"Sounds like Buffalo doesn't it? " says Marty Schwab, the grandson of the mayor who oversaw its construction, Mayor Francis Xavier Schwab.
Schwab was one of the most colorful mayors in our city's history. "Speaking to his flamboyant side", says Marty, "One day a reporter found him walking in city hall with a lantern and asked what he was doing. He said, 'I am like the Greek God Diogenes, I'm looking for an honest man. "
Another thing that Schwab was famous for was taking on the Ku Klux Klan. After they burned a cross on his lawn in protest of his anti-prohibition stance, he fought back. Buffalo Police responded to a break-in at the KKK offices in the Calumet building. While there, they found roster sheets of all Buffalo-area members. After the newspapers declined printing them, Mayor Schwab decided to post the names of members publicly outside precinct houses to drive the KKK out of Buffalo.
Being a brewer, he ran and won on an anti-prohibition platform, what was known as the wet party and was even hauled into prohibition court himself and was prosecuted by another well known Western New Yorker, Bill Donovan, who started the agency that would become the CIA.
"His (Schwab) so-called near-beer exceeded one percent of alcohol and he went in and he surprised everyone pleading nolo contendere, paid his fine which was I believe 500 dollars. He thought it would be cheaper than fighting and paying those extra legal fees."
In 1930, a changing of the guard. Mayor Schwab made way for Mayor Charles Roesch, The grandfather of Charlie The Butcher. "He was a butcher by trade, grew up in that business, the wholesale side of the Washington Market, and then he had a retail side and then he got on the political bandwagon."
Roesch was the first mayor to occupy the newly completed City Hall in 1931."He was a real active mayor. he was the type of mayor who would go out on Saturday nights with the police department and if he saw some people misbehaving he would get out of the car with the police officer and say hey this is Buffalo, get your act together" recalls Charlie.
Roesch assumed the office as the country was in the throes of the Great Depression and was a leader and innovator in the relief programs for the unemployed. "He did another progressive thing that went around the country. He did a *man on the block* program where everyone on the block, if you had a business, hired people from your block to go to work because there were a lot of unemployed people and that model helped people get back to work and off of unemployment."
After serving one term, he returned to his wholesale and retail meat business, feeling that he accomplished what he had set out to do. If only Theresa Bellissimo would have invented her wing recipe 30 years earlier, she could have run to follow Roesch and complete the Queen City culinary combination of beer, beef and wings.