Buffalo's Delaware Avenue

Book excerpt: With a robust, four-part, 32-page Index by Buffalo History Museum Assistant Librarian Amy Miller and an Introduction to the Second Edition by Buffalo History Museum Research Librarian Cynthia Van Ness, there is finally excellent access to this encyclopedic book's amazing contents, street by street, family by family. The decades between the Mexican War and the beginning of World War I revolutionized America's cities. Industrial prosperity produced an astonishing proliferation of capitalists and industrialists positioned to garner a disproportionate share of the profits. These noveau riches erected magnificent mansions, creating aristocratic residential thoroughfares in cities like Chicago, Boston and Buffalo, of which Delaware Avenue was surely among the most magnificent. Classic Delaware Avenue ran two and a quarter miles, from Niagara Square to Chapin - now Gates - Circle. Four generations of inter-Avenue marriages created a closely knit, complicated cousinry. Encyclopedic in scope, Buffalo's Delaware Avenue: Mansions and Families is an immense book of facts that covers Buffalo's grandest Avenue.Discover the tales behind these mansions and their illustrious families.