A Silver Lining	by Geoff Kelly

On January 9, a fierce windstorm sheared the roof from McBride’s, the venerable bar at 115 Chicago Street. The three-storey brick structure was opened to the rain and snow and remained that way until this Wednesday’s even wilder windstorm, which appeared to finish the job: The brick wall on the Chicago Street side caved inward that morning, and by Wednesday afternoon it did not seem possible that the structure could be salvaged.

Like its counterparts, the nearby Swannie House at Michigan and Ohio and Ulrich’s Tavern at Virginia and Ellicott, the building that housed McBride’s enjoyed a long history: It was there that the quixotic Fenian invasion of Canada was planned in 1866; the city’s first Saint Patrick’s Day Parade was conceived there, too; and the building itself dates back to the 1850s, when it was a German hotel and tavern.

After the January 10 storm, the owner, Buffalo Police Detective Sergeant William Crawford, told the Buffalo News he hoped to repair the building and move it down to the Central Wharf, which he considered an appropriate site for an Erie Canal era tavern. He seemed to suggest that he would look for funding to realize that project.

But 12 days after the building lost its roof, the rain and snow were still pouring in. There were no tarps or boards covering the damage—no apparent sign that Crawford or his partners had done any repair work. During a visit to the site on the afternoon of Monday, January 21, two pickup trucks pulled up and the men in them began loading the beds with what seemed to be pieces of the awning that had been situated on the Miami Street side.

One of the men identified himself only as a friend of the owner, and, over the sound of a police radio squawking in his pocket, affirmed the owner’s hope to restore the structure. Asked why the roof had not been sealed, if that was the case, the man blamed the insurance company: He claimed that the insurance company had told the owner not to do anything to the roof, not even to stretch a tarp, until an adjuster had examined the damage.

That was more than a week before this Wednesday’s brutal storm, and there is no question that the rain and snow of three weeks had weakened the beams and the mortar inside the structure, and led directly to its collapse that morning. It will surely be on the city’s demolition list soon, and is possibly a candidate for an immediate emergency demolition.

The bar’s liquor license (issued to Molly Crawford of Orchard Park) had expired at the end of November 2007, but the bar remained open—often the only lit building on an otherwise lifeless street. Lately the Seneca Nation of Indians has been buying property in the neighborhood, no doubt to buttress its investment in the new casino, though there is no sign that new development is forthcoming on Chicago Street.

Still, the Senecas have purchased most of the property surrounding McBride’s. That may be the silver lining the storm clouds that the owners of McBride’s were hoping for all along: Soon enough 115 Chicago Street will be an empty lot, free of McBride’s and the preservation issues that attend an historic, 150-year-old structure associated with the city’s raucous, rich Erie Canal days. That soon-to-be empty lot is in close vicinity to the casino, in a footprint where the Senecas are paying good prices for property and the City of Buffalo is jealously guarding its development opportunities, in case a full-blown casino ever is built. Someone, most likely the Senecas, will pay a decent price for a lot like that.