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Buffalo’s Bison Plumbing
I came across this old ad for Buffalo Plumbing Discount while digging around in a basement crawl space in my other life. There were several old newspapers, Buffalo Evening News and Courier Express from the 1960s and 70s.
Most were in pretty rough shape, but they were still better to work around then the pile of broken windows on the other side of the crawlspace. The few Metro pages that didn’t disintegrate had some cool old ads in them. Most were pretty much what you’d expect; Sattlers, Kleinhans, Sears. One smalll ad that caught my eye was for Buffalo Plumbing Discount Center.
When I saw it, I thought it was actually for a different plumbing place we’ve passed over on Fillmore on our way to B&L. For some reason, that place had stuck with me, so when I saw the ad I took a few pictures of it. It wasn’t until later I double-checked the addresses and it looks like they’re different bison plumbing companies. There seems to be (or at least have been) a lot of “Bison Plumbing” companies.
Apparently naming every business in Buffalo with some variation of Buffalo, Bison, Queen City or Nickel City in the name wasn’t limited to the city’s renaissance and was just as prevalent back in the day when Broadway and Fillmore were lined with successful businesses.
The Bison Plumbing City on Fillmore is now a boarded up building, and Bison Discount Plumbing Center on Broadway is just an empty lot. It isn’t the only empty lot along Broadway or throughout the city’s East Side and the Broadway-Fillmore District. Those empty lots, sadly, represent the sum total of redevelopment that the city had invested in for those areas while Canalside and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus swell and absorb millions of dollars.
The newspaper wasn’t in the best shape, but that was cool, it gave the logo a distressed look. The problem was keeping that distressed, worn look without there being a lot of white scratchiness in the letters when I added a background color. There are probably actual ways of fixing that, but I don’t know what they are; I layered a couple copies each of the logo and background color of varying opacity, merged them, and then tweaked the lighting. It’s worked for the past when I’ve wanted to layer in a texture or old paper look, like on my Whistle Pig logo, and it did the trick here, too.
Party at the Plumbers Local No. 36
I came across this old advertisement, framed, saved, taken care of, in the basement of a house I was doing some work on, updating it before it would be sold. This basement was definitely a working man’s basement, an organized basement, one well maintained with a workbench and assortment of tools and saved parts and old metal coffee cans full of screws and more tools older then I am that still looked as good as the day they were purchased, collected odds and ends and useful bits that could be put together to tackle any type of household handyman task. This was a good basement.
Seeing this framed ad, this simple small poster, I was intrigued. It wasn’t just the awkward sizing of letters in some places that drew my attention; or the date or ticket price, or even the mention of the Harugari Temple, a “secret” society I’d never heard of before a week prior to finding this sign, when I’d driven past another sign for the Ancient Order of the Harugari, or my interest in local history and what might be at this location now. It was a little bit of each of those things sure, but I wondered if there was something more personal to it.
Here was an old framed advertisement in this meticulous basement. What did this mean to the man who kept an organized workbench and well maintained tools, a space that was functional and purpose driven, not cluttered by the accumulated detritus that seems to swallow up any spare space one in my generation might happen upon. What was significant about this event? I wondered what this event, this night may have meant, that the advertisement was saved, preserved, framed and held onto. Protected just as any work of art or family photograph would have been.
What kind of story does this prompt for you? Was there something historically significant that occurred on that date? Or was it something at that party to be personally commemorated?
Or maybe it was a cool looking old poster
Gas Station Burrito 