Leslie Feinberg's Buffalo

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;... 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

—Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

Leslie Feinberg’s Buffalo is a digital exhibit that spatially maps and documents the architectural and social history of sites represented in, or directly connected to, trans lesbian activist and writer Leslie Feinberg’s award-winning novel Stone Butch Blues, originally published in 1993 by Firebrand Books. Though often not read as such, Stone Butch Blues is a particularly spatial and geographic work. Feinberg based many of the novel’s locations, events, and characters on her own lived experiences coming of age in the factories and bars of Buffalo, New York. Some sites are referenced by their real names, others via fictional analogues, and others more vaguely, for example, through general geographic descriptions.

Stone Butch Blues provides a blueprint from which to document and interpret places where queer and transgender people (including queer people of color) worked and socialized in 1960s and 1970s Buffalo, a city largely ignored within mainstream narratives of LGBTQ history that focus on coastal geographies. Furthermore, it allows us to see known Buffalo landmarks through a queer lens. The buildings documented, both extant and demolished, collectively constitute an archive of queer Buffalo. Stone Butch Blues can, therefore, be read as a map of Buffalo’s (queer) history, and “Leslie Feinberg’s Buffalo” makes apparent a geography hidden just beneath the surface of Feinberg’s text. 

Site identifications were made based on correlating details in Stone Butch Blues to periodicals, maps, atlases, city directories, travel guides, postcards, oral history interviews with LGBTQ elders, materials from the Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York (housed in the E. H. Butler Library at SUNY Buffalo State), materials from the Buffalo History Museum Research Library, and the Firebrand Books records (part of the Cornell University Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections). Sites are organized by the order they appear in the novel to allow the viewer to travel the streets of Buffalo alongside Feinberg’s central character, Jess Goldberg. A free, author-approved PDF version of Stone Butch Blues can be downloaded from Feinberg's website.

The city of Buffalo, New York, nestled on the eastern end of Lake Erie, saw its origins in 1794 when the Holland Land Company purchased over 5 million acres of land in Western and Upstate New York. The present site of Buffalo was then inhabited by the Seneca, the largest of the five nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy. The city was platted in 1804 by Joseph Ellicott, a surveyor and city planner from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Originally called “New Amsterdam,” but popularly known as “Buffalo,” the fledgling settlement was laid out with a radial street plan overlaid on an orthogonal (right angle) grid, an unusual and complicated design for the time. Ellicott drew inspiration from his brother Andrew’s design for the District of Columbia.

The centerpiece of Buffalo’s plan was Niagara Square, conceived as a traditional American village square from which roads were constructed outward in a radial pattern. Niagara Square remains the center of the city today and is home to City Hall and the McKinley Monument, a 96-foot-tall obelisk that designates the site where all the city’s major roads converge. The city, betraying its name, was not home to bison; “Buffalo,” according to one theory, was a mispronunciation of the French “beau fleuve,” or “beautiful river,” a reference to the Buffalo Creek.

The status of the settlement was elevated when, in 1819, the State of New York announced its intentions to construct a canal from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. When the Erie Canal opened in October of 1825, Buffalo established itself as a Great Lakes industrial and commercial center, and the city was officially incorporated on April 20, 1832. In the 1840s, Buffalo significantly expanded its rail system as a complement to the Erie Canal, and with the development of the Joseph Dart grain elevator in 1842, the city became a grain port as well. By the 1850s, a population explosion resulted in an expansion of the city’s boundaries. During the 1860s and 1870s, noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted added a network of parks, including Delaware Park, the Buffalo Zoological Gardens, and several tree-lined parkways, to Ellicott’s original grid. 

By the turn of the century, Buffalo was the second largest city in New York State and the eighth largest in the United States. In 1901, the city hosted the Pan-American Exposition, a world’s fair staged on the western edge of Delaware Park from May 1st to November 2nd. By night, the exposition was lit with electric power generated at Niagara Falls. By that same year, plans for a steel plant in a location south of the city were underway. The Lackawanna Steel Company, originally founded in Scranton, Pennsylvania, relocated their plant to Buffalo in 1902, and the city of Lackawanna was founded as a result. The company was purchased in 1922 by the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, who became a major employer and source of industry in the region.

The population of Buffalo peaked alongside U.S. manufacturing during the 1950s and then began to decline. By the 1970s, manufacturing cities in the Great Lakes Region were de-industrializing. Plants and factories relocated south to the Sun Belt or overseas. Buffalo’s industrial sector continued to shrink throughout the 1980s, and by the early 1990s the metropolis had become, in the words of activist and historian Madeline Davis, “a Rust Belt city on the edge of the Midwest.”

A preservation movement in Buffalo emerged during the 1960s in the midst of urban renewal, the demolition of historic resources, and the beginnings of deindustrialization. In 1960, civic activist and feminist Olive Williams, troubled by changes in the Allentown neighborhood, where she had lived since her birth in 1890, held a meeting for like-minded citizens at her residence, 54 Irving Place. 

Williams, who was “passionately dedicated to preserving the old and comprehending the new,” was particularly concerned by the actions of the Benderson Company, then Buffalo’s largest and most destructive developer. During the 1950s, as Delaware Avenue became less residential, the company bought up key intersections, all sites of Victorian-era mansions that were demolished in order to construct office buildings. Among these was the family home of Louise Michael, Williams’s longtime friend, neighbor, and companion.

The meeting at 54 Irving Place resulted in the founding of the North Street Community Association. In 1963, the organization expanded its mission and changed its name to the Allentown Association. Williams served as the first president of both.

In 1966, residents concerned by the further loss of historic buildings in Allentown, including Williams and architect Olaf Shelgren, Jr., founded the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier, Buffalo’s first citywide historic preservation organization. The Landmark Society was primarily motivated by the potential loss of the Coit House, a Federal style residence constructed circa 1815 for prominent Buffalo businessman George Coit and one of the oldest surviving homes in the city. The house, originally sited on the southeast corner of Swan and Pearl streets, was relocated to 414 Virginia Street in 1867 following Coit’s death. By the 1960s, the once-handsome residence was a run-down boarding house slated for demolition. In an early victory for Buffalo’s fledgling preservation movement, the Landmark Society purchased and restored the Coit House before selling it to a private owner with the stipulation that its historic features be preserved.

Today, the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier lives on as Preservation Buffalo Niagara. Along with the Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project, founded in 1978, local preservationists were the first to document LGBTQ historic places in Buffalo. On June 8, 1991, John Feather, a volunteer for the Buffalo Gay & Lesbian Community Network, led what was likely the first LGBTQ history walking tour in Buffalo. The tour, organized in partnership with the Preservation Coalition of Buffalo and Erie County, “[covered] the interesting architecture and history of Buffalo’s ‘gay’ West Side,” according to a Community Network newsletter. 

The city’s industrial growth throughout the early twentieth century also prompted the growth of queer nightlife, and as an industrial metropolis, Buffalo’s emerging gay and lesbian community was centered around bars and clubs. As extensively documented by Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project co-founders Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis in their groundbreaking analysis of Buffalo’s lesbian community, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993), during the heyday of the bar scene in the 1940s and 1950s, there were at least 26 known lesbian and gay gathering places in the city.

The Great Migration, which began in 1916, led to an increase in Buffalo’s African American population, and the city was racially segregated along the boundary of Main Street; Black Buffalonians lived primarily on the city’s East Side, while white Buffalonians lived west of Main. The bar scene was similarly segregated based on location, causing some queer Black Buffalonians to socialize at house parties rather than face racial hostilities in the city’s bars and clubs.

Working-class lesbian relationships at this time, according to Kennedy and Davis, were based on butch-femme, masculine-feminine roles that functioned as a form of community organization and resistance (not a mere imitation of heterosexuality). Butches sought to express themselves as masculine women—not men—and used their masculinity to defend the right to public space for queer people. Their gender nonconformity further alerted others to places where lesbians and gays socialized at a time when rainbow flags were not proudly hung from the façades of gay bars. Femmes, on the other hand, could often “pass” as straight and were publicly identifiable as gay through their association with butches.

By the late 1960s, Buffalo’s queer nightlife was in decline. The election of Nelson Rockefeller as governor of New York State in 1959, coupled with changes in the Buffalo Police Department, resulted in the targeting and closure of establishments associated with queer people. In 1963, Rockefeller empaneled a Moreland Act Commission —a law that allows the governor to examine the affairs of any state department or agency —to investigate New York’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Law. The commission revealed widespread corruption in the distribution and sale of alcohol. As a result, businesses that sold liquor came under increased scrutiny by state and local law enforcement, such as the Buffalo Police Department Bureau of Vice Enforcement. Furthermore, under State Liquor Authority regulations, the mere presence of gay people in a bar constituted that premise as “disorderly” and in violation. Establishments catering to Buffalonian lesbians and gays, in particular, vanished as soon as they appeared. The city’s urban renewal plans, adopted in 1965 and 1968 respectively, also targeted the area east of the downtown business district where the majority of bars that catered towards gays and lesbians were located. In response to local police harassment, the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier, Buffalo’s first gay and lesbian civil rights organization, was founded in 1970. 

Homophobia and sexism, coupled with the city’s de-industrialization, had a particularly negative impact on working-class butch lesbians, who, along with their drag queen sisters, were not wholly welcome within the emerging gay liberation and women’s movements of the 1970s and struggled to find employment in Buffalo’s decaying factories. Nevertheless, many of these brave gender outlaws persisted and took the road less traveled by.

She was born in winter’s fury,

with the wind about her ears.

She was raised on strife and sadness,

and the city-dweller’s fears.

She was nursed on wine and bloodshed

and she cut her teeth on steel;

and she wept alone in darkness

for the pain she was to feel.

—Madeline Davis, “Boots of Leather” (1974)

Transgender lesbian activist and writer Leslie Diane Feinberg was born in 1949 to working-class Jewish parents in Buffalo, New York. Growing up differently gendered in the blue-collar Buffalo of the 1950s was not easy. As a butch lesbian, Feinberg was harassed simply for walking down the street. Her family was not particularly accepting of her difference either. As a result, she dropped out of school at age fourteen and worked various low-wage jobs to support herself. Her first position was in the display sign shop of a local department store.

Around this time, Feinberg first entered Buffalo’s factories and bars. Gay bars were both a space of community and a source of fear. The harassment and physical violence gay and gender-nonconforming Buffalonians faced at the hands of the Buffalo Police Department was little different from the conditions that precipitated the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco or the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Greenwich Village.

These early experiences shaped Feinberg’s first, and most celebrated, book, Stone Butch Blues. The novel tells the story of Jess Goldberg, a so-called “he-she” from a working-class background who, like Feinberg herself, comes of age in Buffalo. Despite similarities to Feinberg’s own biography, she insisted the novel was a “work of fiction, written by an author who has lived the non-fiction.” Feinberg combined elements of her own biography, stories told to her by older butches and drag queens, and research into the history of gender nonconformity to create the life of her protagonist.

Notably, the majority of Stone Butch Blues was not written in Buffalo, but Feinberg's apartment building on Summit Avenue in Jersey City, New Jersey. In July/August of 1992, she began a romance with poet Minnie Bruce Pratt and revised the manuscript at Pratt's Washington, D.C. residence. The pair moved to an apartment at 147 Chestnut Avenue in Jersey City in 1993 while Stone Butch Blues was in production with Firebrand Books. The novel won the 1994 Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award from the American Library Association, and was translated into numerous languages. 

Stone Butch Blues quickly became, and remains, important to a broad range of people. As Feinberg reflected in the author’s note to the 2004 Alyson Books edition:

"Like my own life, this novel defies easy classification. If you found ‘Stone Butch Blues’ in a bookstore or library, what category was it in? Lesbian fiction? Gender studies? Like the germinal novel ‘The Well of Loneliness’ by Radclyffe/John Hall, this is a lesbian novel and a transgender novel—making ‘trans’ genre a verb, as well as an adjective."

In addition to Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg wrote several works of non-fiction that brought transgender people, issues, and language to mainstream awareness. In Transgender Warriors, a personal and historical study of gender nonconformity, she expansively defined “transgender” as: “all people who cross the cultural boundaries of gender.” Feinberg came to describe herself as transgender as well. “When I first worked in the factories of Buffalo as a teenager,” she wrote, “women like me were called ‘he-shes.’ Although ‘he-shes’ in the plants were most frequently lesbians, we were recognized not by our sexual preference, but by the way we expressed our gender.”

Feinberg was also a leader of the Workers World Party (WWP), an independent Marxist-Leninist political party, and served as the managing editor of its newsletter. An avowed anti-racist, she was always attentive to the ways gay and trans liberation intersected with the liberation struggles of other oppressed peoples. As part of her work with the WWP, Feinberg took on America’s racist criminal justice system, co-founding Rainbow Flags for Mumia, a coalition of LGBTQ organizers who, on April 19, 1999, marched in support of a new trial for death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, sentenced to death in 1981 for his alleged shooting of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. 

Around 2007, Feinberg discovered that the health issues she had struggled with since the 1990s were the result of Lyme disease. The illness had long gone undiagnosed due to the discrimination she faced from the medical community. Despite being critically ill, she continued her revolutionary work. Feinberg agitated for the release of CeCe McDonald, a Black transgender woman from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who stabbed and killed Dean Schmitz, a white man, in self defense after he attacked her at a bar in 2012. McDonald was the only person arrested following the altercation.

Feinberg died on November 15, 2014 from complications related to late-stage Lyme disease in the home she shared with Minnie Bruce Pratt in Syracuse, New York. 

Buffalo was not an untroubled place for Leslie Feinberg, but it was a formative one. It was a place—because of the marks it made and the community she found there—she never fully left behind, but returned to time and again. It was here she found, and regained, in her own words, “communities, struggle, my voice, and pride.”

Feinberg used the pronouns “she” and “her,” as well as the gender-expansive pronouns “zie” and “hir,” throughout her life. This exhibit refers to Feinberg as “she” and “her.” In oral history interviews conducted with LGBTQ elders from Buffalo who knew Feinberg personally, all referred to her as “she” and “her.” “Leslie Feinberg’s Buffalo,” accordingly, defers to the knowledge and wisdom of queer working-class people from Feinberg's city of origin. Similarly, “she” and “her” are used when referring to Feinberg’s character, Jess Goldberg, as these are the pronouns Jess uses in Stone Butch Blues. As Feinberg herself said:

"I care which pronoun is used, but people have been respectful to me with the wrong pronoun and disrespectful with the right one. It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect."

Sites followed by an asterisk (*) have been demolished.

1. The Senate Grill (181 Rhode Island Street, Buffalo, New York)
2. Bell Aircraft Corporation (2041 Niagara Falls Boulevard, Niagara Falls, New York)
3. Bennett High School (2885 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)
4. Ninfa's Restaurant (342 Main Street, Niagara Falls, New York)*
5. Feinberg Family Home (510 Tacoma Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
6. Leslie Feinberg's Apartment Building (400 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
7. Tiki Restaurant (330 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York)*
8. Benjy's Lounge & Restaurant (334 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York)*
9. Laughlin's (333 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York)
10. Coffee Encores (341-343 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York)
11. Eagle Inn (90 Washington Street, Buffalo, New York)*
12. Club Ki-Yo (172 East North Street, Buffalo, New York)*
13. Little Harlem Hotel (496 Michigan Avenue, Buffalo, New York)*
14. The Kleinhans Company/Brisbane Building (403 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)
15. Kleinhans Music Hall (3 Symphony Circle, Buffalo, New York)
16. Deco Restaurant (273 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)*
17. Ralph Martin's Grill (58 Ellicott Street, Buffalo, New York)*
18. Genesee Hotel (308 Pearl Street, Buffalo, New York)*
19. Freezer Queen Foods Plant (975 Furhmann Boulevard, Buffalo, New York)*
20. Bethlehem Steel Corporation (Route 5, Lackawanna, New York)*
21. Buffalo Milk Company Building/Queen City Dairy Company Building (885 Niagara Street, Buffalo, New York)
22. Women's Studies College House (108 Winspear Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
23. Buffalo Radicalesbians Apartment Building (3234 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)
24. Edmund B. Hayes Hall (3435 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)
25. Tiki 2/Mattachine Club (70 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York)*
26. Buffalo City Hall (65 Niagara Square, Buffalo, New York)
27. Loblaws Supermarket (250 or 765 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
28. The Children's Hospital of Buffalo (219 Bryant Street, Buffalo, New York)
29. Buffalo Museum of Science (1020 Humboldt Parkway, Buffalo, New York)
30. Gioia Macaroni Company (1700 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
31. Confer Plastics Company (101 East Avenue, North Tonawanda, New York)
32. Air Lock Plastics (580 Fillmore Avenue, Tonawanda, New York)
33. Milton J Brounshidle Post No. 205/Memorial Hall (3354 Delaware Avenue, Tonawanda, New York)
34. The Buffalo Zoological Gardens (300 Parkside Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
35. T&T Western Paradise/M.C. Compton's (1239 Niagara Street, Buffalo, New York)
36. The Lavender Door (32 Tonawanda Street, Buffalo, New York)*
37. "Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane"; Richardson Olmsted Complex, Building 45 (400 Forest Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
38. Andrus/Home Dairy/Firebrand Books Building (143 East State Street, Ithaca Commons, Ithaca, New York)
39. Church of the Ascension/Ascension for the Arts (16 Linwood Avenue/67 North Street, Buffalo, New York)
40. Sidney B. Pfeifer Theatre (681 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)
41. Buffalo & Erie County Central Library (1 Lafayette Square, Buffalo, New York)

Bars, Clubs, & Restaurants

1. The Senate Grill (181 Rhode Island Street, Buffalo, New York)
2. Ninfa's Restaurant (342 Main Street, Niagara Falls, New York)*
3. Tiki Restaurant (330 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York)*
4. Benjy's Lounge & Restaurant (334 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York)*
5. Laughlin's (333 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York)
6. Coffee Encores (341-343 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York)
7. Eagle Inn (90 Washington Street, Buffalo, New York)*
8. Club Ki-Yo (172 East North Street, Buffalo, New York)*
9. Little Harlem Hotel (496 Michigan Avenue, Buffalo, New York)*
10. Deco Restaurant (273 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)*
11. Ralph Martin's Grill (58 Ellicott Street, Buffalo, New York)*
12. Genesee Hotel (308 Pearl Street, Buffalo, New York)*
13. Tiki 2/Mattachine Club (70 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York)*
14. T&T Western Paradise/M.C. Compton's (1239 Niagara Street, Buffalo, New York)
15. The Lavender Door (32 Tonawanda Street, Buffalo, New York)*

Factories & Labor-Related Sites

1. Bell Aircraft Corporation (2041 Niagara Falls Boulevard, Niagara Falls, New York)
2. Freezer Queen Foods Plant (975 Furhmann Boulevard, Buffalo, New York)*
3. Bethlehem Steel Corporation (Route 5, Lackawanna, New York)*
4. Buffalo Milk Company Building/Queen City Dairy Company Building (885 Niagara Street, Buffalo, New York)
5. Gioia Macaroni Company (1700 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
6. Confer Plastics Company (101 East Avenue, North Tonawanda, New York)
7. Air Lock Plastics (580 Fillmore Avenue, Tonawanda, New York)
8. Milton J Brounshidle Post No. 205/Memorial Hall (3354 Delaware Avenue, Tonawanda, New York)

Residential Sites

1. Feinberg Family Home (510 Tacoma Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
2. Leslie Feinberg's Apartment Building (400 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
3. Buffalo Radicalesbians Apartment Building (3234 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)

Commercial Sites

1. The Kleinhans Company/Brisbane Building (403 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)
2. Loblaws Supermarket (250 or 765 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York)

Educational & Cultural Sites

1. Bennett High School (2885 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)
2. Kleinhans Music Hall (3 Symphony Circle, Buffalo, New York)
3. Women's Studies College House (108 Winspear Avenue, Buffalo, New York)
4. Edmund B. Hayes Hall (3435 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)
5. Buffalo Museum of Science (1020 Humboldt Parkway, Buffalo, New York)
6. The Buffalo Zoological Gardens (300 Parkside Avenue, Buffalo, New York)

Medical Sites

1. The Children's Hospital of Buffalo (219 Bryant Street, Buffalo, New York)
2. "Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane"; Richardson Olmsted Complex, Building 45 (400 Forest Avenue, Buffalo, New York)

Municipal Sites

1. Buffalo City Hall (65 Niagara Square, Buffalo, New York)

Sites Related to the Publication of Stone Butch Blues & Feinberg’s Legacy

1. Andrus/Home Dairy/Firebrand Books Building (143 East State Street, Ithaca Commons, Ithaca, New York)
2. Episcopal Church of the Ascension/Ascension for the Arts (16 Linwood Avenue/67 North Street, Buffalo, New York)
3. Sidney B. Pfeifer Theatre (681 Main Street, Buffalo, New York)
4. Buffalo & Erie County Central Library (1 Lafayette Square, Buffalo, New York)

To locate a site, open the legend on the map below, then select the corresponding address.

181 Rhode Island Street, Buffalo, New York

Stone Butch Blues opens with a letter the novel’s central character, Jess Goldberg, writes to her former lover Theresa, a classic 1950s femme. As Jess remembers:

"The older butches warned me: if you wanted to keep your marriage, don’t go to the bars. But I’ve always been a one-woman butch. Besides, this was our community, the only one we belonged to, so we went every weekend. There were two kinds of fights in the bars. Most weekends had one kind or the other, some weekends both. There were the fist fights between the butch women—full of booze, shame, jealous insecurity. Sometimes the fights were awful and spread like a web to trap everyone in the bar, like the night Heddy lost her eye when she got hit upside the head with a bar stool." 

In her description of bar fights, Feinberg was likely referencing a particularly memorable fight that occurred at the Senate Grill, a rough and rowdy establishment at 181 Rhode Island Street on Buffalo’s West Side.

The Senate was located in a commercial building near the corner of Rhode Island and West Avenue from the 1940s to the 1980s. The bar and grill was owned by Daniel Zendano, a Buffalonian with a checkered criminal past, and was a place where lesbians and gays socialized durings the 1960s. In 1964, Zendano’s liquor license was temporarily revoked by the State Liquor Authority for “allowing immoral persons to behave indecently on the premises.” The majority of what is known about the Senate Grill as a lesbian and gay gathering place comes from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold and is mentioned briefly by several of Kennedy’s and Davis’s narrators. This is likely because it became popular just prior to the bar scene’s decline in the late 1960s.

Bobbi Prebis, a butch who came of age in Buffalo at this time, remembers the fight at the Senate during which a woman named Marie lost her eye:

"I went to this bar called Tom & Len’s that was on Goodell and then I guess… I can’t remember the rotation of the bars, there was one on Delaware and then there was one on Swan Street. There was the Senate on the West Side. That’s where there was a big fight between the Black women and the white women. [It happened in] ‘62, ‘63, somewhere around in there. It was a huge fight, it was really uncalled for, because it just got out of control. There was a fight between the woman that was working behind the bar and this young Black woman. The woman didn’t have proof of age and she was asked to leave, she pulled a knife on this woman and the woman took the knife away from her and threw her out. And there was no incident over that, the woman was wrong, she shouldn’t have been in there, and she certainly shouldn’t have pulled a knife. And what she did was come back later on and she brought, I don’t know how many, two or three or four straight guys back with her, and she was after the woman that had thrown her out. By then more Black women had come into the bar, and I don’t know what the reason was, the bar would segregate, Black women would be in the back room and whites would be up front. And there’d be some mixing, because people knew one another. I didn’t know many of the Black women at that point. And all of a sudden everything just sort of exploded. And the woman that had been thrown out originally, that was after the woman behind the bar, got up and was… The whole place just started turning over, you have no idea what it was like. And people were trying to stop it, both Black and white were trying to stop it, it just… You know, I’d go up to you and say, why don’t you back off, and somebody would see me with my hands on you and I would get grabbed, and then you’d be saying, wait a minute, it’s not what you think it is. And then before that somebody’d grab you because it looked like two on one. And in the events of that night this woman, Laura, who was the one that was thrown out, was up on the bar walking back and forth on the bar screaming. And then she saw Andy, the woman that she was after, and threw a beer bottle at her, and this other woman, Marie, walked into the beer bottle and lost her eye."

2041 Niagara Falls Boulevard, Niagara Falls, New York

The Bell Aircraft Corporation, headquartered in Buffalo, New York, from 1935 to 1960, was the foremost aircraft firm of its time. The company was founded by Lawrence “Larry” Dale Bell (1894-1956), a pilot and businessman from Santa Monica, California. Bell got his start building airplanes for the Martin Company and then went to work for Consolidated Aircraft in Buffalo, New York, where he eventually became the general manager. When Consolidated relocated to California, Bell had the opportunity to found a company with his own name on the front door. 

Bell Aircraft was officially founded on July 10, 1935. The company was first housed in the former Consolidated plant located at 2050 Elmwood Avenue, originally built in 1916 for the Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor Company. Bell greatly expanded its operations during World War II. In addition to the Buffalo plant (technically located in Wheatfield, near Niagara Falls), Bell also opened operations in Marietta, Georgia, and Burlington, Vermont. The company soon developed a record of innovation within the wartime defense industry. Its most notable invention was the Bell X-1, a distinctive orange-colored, experimental rocket plane designed in 1945—the first to fly faster than the speed of sound. Bell also produced other fighter aircraft and helicopters. 

As World War II wound to a close, Bell consolidated its operations at the Wheatfield plant. However, with employment down and the future of the aircraft industry uncertain, Bell was impacted by a series of strikes that began in 1949 and lasted through the early 1950s. The ongoing strikes were contentious and sometimes violent. On September 8, 1949, 13 weeks into the strike, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a federation that organized workers in industrial unions, issued a resolution regarding Bell at their state convention. It charged that, “Bell, by its every action, has made it all too clear that it has no real desire to settle this strike. It has but one objective—to smash the union.”

The following day, on September 9th, fourteen people were injured when demonstrators allegedly attacked work-bound employees who attempted to cross the picket line. In response, Niagara County District Attorney William E. Miller issued arrest warrants for the 24 strike leaders who were blamed for “riots and hysteria.”

When Larry Bell died from a stroke in 1956, the company was in significant financial difficulty. Textron, Inc. purchased the defense business of Bell in 1960, and the Wheatfield plant continued for a time as the Bell Aerosystems Division before being absorbed into the larger Textron firm. 

Leslie Feinberg’s father, Irving, worked at Bell in the years following World War II. The Feinberg family lived in the Bell Aircraft Projects: inexpensive, temporary housing constructed near the plant to accommodate Bell workers. In Transgender Warriors, she explains,

“I was raised in the 1950s—an era marked by rigidly enforced social conformity and fear of difference. Our family lived in the Bell Aircraft Factory housing projects. The roads were not paved; the coal truck, ice man’s van, and knife-sharpener’s cart crunched along narrow strips of gravel.”

Stone Butch Blues foregrounds the lives of working-class queer people. The reader immediately enters this perspective when Jess Goldberg’s life in Buffalo opens with a description of the Bell Aircraft projects. The history of the company often focuses on the management, not the workers whose labor elevated Bell to national prominence within the aircraft industry.

2885 Main Street, Buffalo, New York

In 1923, Lewis Jackson Bennett, an entrepreneur who owned a successful cement company, donated land on Main Street to the city of Buffalo for the construction of a school. The building was designed by architect Ernest Cremi of Buffalo Associate Architects in the Georgian Revival style. It was four stories and had a B-shaped plan in homage to its namesake. Lewis J. Bennett’s name was engraved above the front doors on the building’s primary façade, and the names of United States presidents up until 1925 wrap around the school to either side.

Bennett opened to students in 1925 and soon earned a reputation among Buffalo public schools for its rigorous academics and the variety of extracurricular activities offered. The student population increased following the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Black students enrolled, and African American studies were added to the curriculum, but the newly integrated Bennett was not immune to the racism affecting school desegregation throughout the country. In addition to changes in the student body, the building underwent major renovations during the 1950s and 1960s, shortly before the time Feinberg attended. Classrooms were remodeled, and the fourth floor, which originally housed a model apartment for home economics courses, was converted into regular classrooms. The exterior of the school was also rehabilitated to repair damage to the mortar from overgrown ivy.  

In 2014, following years of administrative turnover that resulted in declining enrollment and a loss of prestige, the Board of Education voted to close Bennett and give its buildings to the Tapestry Charter School. Minority members of the board, along with alumni, filibustered to keep Bennett within the Buffalo Public School system. An Alumni Redesign Plan was created, and, in 2017, a new curriculum introduced. The school was renamed the Lewis J. Bennett High School of Innovative Technology.

According to Leslie Feinberg’s obituary, authored by her longtime partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt: 

"At age 14 [Feinberg] began supporting herself by working in the display sign shop of a local department store, and eventually stopped going to her Bennett High School classes, though officially she received her diploma. It was during this time that she entered the social life of the Buffalo gay bars."

Jess Goldberg has a similar trajectory, and Bennett High School is explicitly named in Stone Butch Blues. After experiencing sexual violence due to her gender nonconformity and being suspended for crossing Bennett’s unspoken, but understood, racial boundaries through her friendship with Carla, an African American student, Jess chooses to drop out of school. She leaves her family’s home and enters, as Feinberg did, a chosen family within Buffalo’s gay social scene.

342 Main Street, Niagara Falls, New York

Demolished

Given the lack of places to mingle within Buffalo proper, many gays and lesbians also ventured to Niagara Falls. Their destination was most often Ninfa’s Restaurant, which was owned by Italian American proprietress Mrs. Ninfa DiRocco and managed by Anthony J. Infantino. The lower area of Main Street, where Ninfa’s resided, was home to a host of popular bars, clubs, and entertainment venues and regarded as the vice district of Niagara Falls, New York. Lower Main was, in fact, called “the Tijuana of Canada.” Ninfa’s was not an exclusively gay establishment, but was, in the words of Feinberg, “gay by percentage.” Gay patrons jokingly called the bar “Nympha’s,” a sexualized reference to the term “nymphomaniac."

Marilyn “Mernie” Kern, a working-class lesbian from Buffalo and Feinberg’s girlfriend during the late 1960s, remembers Ninfa’s and its place in Buffalo’s gay social scene like this:

"There was a gay bar in Niagara Falls called Ninfa’s, like nymphomaniacs. It might have been a straight bar during the day time, but at night it was gay. And they used to have the Miss Buffalo Contest. So, yeah, Ninfa’s was there when we needed a gay bar because Benjy’s didn’t really cut it, and more people had come over to Benjy’s. They would go to the Tiki for awhile and then come over to Benjy’s and all of a sudden—lots of lesbians in Buffalo were bar flies—so they started turning Benjy’s into a gay bar. Anyways, some of us would go up to Niagara Falls. We would either take a bus or ride with somebody. Ninfa’s every year had the Miss Buffalo Contest. Why they called it Miss Buffalo when they were in Niagara Falls, I don't know. They had drag queens that came from Erie, Rochester, Buffalo, to compete for Miss Buffalo. And it was an all evening thing, it started early and it went late. And they had singing—of course they were just lip syncing—and they had the bathing suit competition."

Tangarra, the stage name of John Minzer and Buffalo’s first female impersonator, performed at Ninfa’s during the 1960s.

Ninfa’s was owned by DiRocco from 1909 until her death in 1969 and went out of business when, on April 9, 1971, its liquor license was revoked for the sale of narcotics on the premises. The building was demolished during the 1970s as part of the City of Niagara Falls's urban renewal efforts. 

The restaurant most certainly appears in Stone Butch Blues as the bar Tifka’s. Tifka’s is the first gay bar Jess Goldberg goes to and, like Ninfa’s, is located on the tenderloin strip in Niagara Falls. Here Jess meets “mentors” Butch Al, her femme Jacqueline, and the drag queen Peaches, who usher her into Buffalo's mid-twentieth-century bar scene. 

510 Tacoma Avenue, Buffalo, New York

The Feinberg family home was located at 510 Tacoma Avenue in North Buffalo between Norwalk and Sterling Avenues. The house is an example of a traditional “Buffalo double,” or two-flat residence, which is a local version of the American Foursquare style. Buffalo doubles are examples of a standard type of housing used by middle-class workers. Most two-flat homes were built during the city’s industrial prime between approximately 1890 and 1929. The double house represented a step up from apartment buildings or boarding houses for workers, as families often lived in one flat and used the rent from the second to pay their mortgages. 

Irving D. Feinberg and his wife, Vance Hyde, purchased 510 Tacoma Avenue on September 25, 1962. The couple’s acquisition of the property is representative of the upward mobility of Jewish Buffalonians. Many of the double houses in North Buffalo, particularly in the Hertel Avenue and North Park areas, were constructed by Jewish builders and realtors beginning in the 1920s. From the 1950s through the 1970s, these areas developed rapidly and became the locus of Buffalo’s working-class Jewish community. The Feinbergs bought a classic Buffalo double and lived in the downstairs flat while renting the upstairs to help pay down their mortgage.

Hyde, originally from Silver Spring, Maryland, attended the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in Pittsburgh where she studied child psychology and creative writing. She moved to Washington, D.C., after graduation to work as a fashion coordinator. There she met Buffalo native Irving D. Feinberg, who was completing his undergraduate education at George Washington University. They married in August of 1948 and relocated to Lockport, New York, where Irving worked at the Bell Aircraft Factory and, later, for radio station WUSJ. Leslie, their first child, was born in 1949. Christine followed in 1951 and Linda in 1955. As the family grew, Irving took a position as an external expeditor with the Sylvania Electric Company. 

The Feinbergs were an especially artistic family. Irving was a musician and had a band that played on the weekends. Though Vance studied creative writing at the PCW, she gave up her literary ambitions to be a wife and mother. In 1959, however, her first book, And Everything Nice, was published by the David McKay Company. The book, a guide to raising daughters, was based on Hyde’s own experiences coupled with her background in child psychology. She credited her confidence as an author in part to her 1958 crowning as “Mrs. Buffalo,” a local division of the national Mrs. America contest. Christine, the middle Feinberg sibling, became involved in theater, sang in a folk group, and wrote poetry. Leslie wanted to be a writer, and Linda, too, had literary ambitions. 

The Goldberg residence in Stone Butch Blues is clearly based on 510 Tacoma Avenue. Jess, like Feinberg herself, leaves home at an early age to enter the world of Buffalo’s factories and bars. Minnie Bruce Pratt notes that:

"[Feinberg] moved out of a biological family hostile to her sexuality and gender expression, and to the end of her life carried legal documents that made clear they were not her family. Discrimination against her as a transgender person made it impossible for her to get steady work. She earned her living for most of her life through a series of low-wage temp jobs, including working in a PVC pipe factory and a book bindery, cleaning out ship cargo holds and washing dishes, serving as an ASL interpreter, and doing medical data inputting."

During this period, Feinberg lived for a time in the four-story, U-shaped, Classical Revival style apartment building located at 400 Elmwood Avenue in what is today the Elmwood Historic District. This apartment likely served as inspiration for one of Jess Goldberg’s residences following her departure from her family’s home.

330 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York

Demolished

330 Franklin Street, a Federal style building formerly located in downtown Buffalo at the intersection of West Tupper, was home to the Tiki, a 24-hour restaurant and coffee house that served as the hub of Buffalo’s gay social scene from 1968 to 1969. The owner of the Tiki, James F. Garrow, was unable to procure a liquor license due to the Buffalo Bureau of Vice Enforcement’s crackdown on gay social spaces in the late 1960s. Buffalo gays and lesbians would instead go to Benjy’s Lounge & Restaurant, located at the adjacent 334 Franklin Street (demolished), to drink, and then move on to the Tiki. Queer people also socialized at Laughlin’s, a beatnik bar on the first story of the Second Empire style building at 333 Franklin Street, directly across from Benjy’s, and Coffee Encores, the Allentown neighborhood’s first coffeehouse and gallery located at 341-343 Franklin Street, just north of the intersection of Franklin and West Tupper, from 1955 to 1968. Other gay bars Feinberg frequented during the late 1960s were the Eagle Inn, located at 90 Washington Street (demolished) and Club Ki-Yo, located at 172 East North Street (demolished).

An incident that occurred at Club Ki-Yo formed the basis of a bar raid depicted in Stone Butch Blues. The club was located on Buffalo’s East Side and, according to the 1968 Bob Damron’s Address Book, a travel guide aimed at gay men, it was a very popular bar with dancing. Following a series of raids, Club Ki-Yo lost its liquor license and went out of business in 1967.

In Feinberg’s novel, Meg, a bartender at Abba’s, is arrested after serving alcohol to an underage plant by the police. In her interview with the Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project, Marge Thomas recounts a similar story during her time bartending at Club Ki-Yo. Thomas, a butch, began her long career as a bartender at the Eagle Inn during the 1960s. When the Eagle closed, she subsequently worked at Club Ki-Yo, the Villa Capri, located, first, at 937 Main Street (demolished) and, later, at 926 Main Street, and, during the early 1980s, The Betsy, a women’s bar at 454 Pearl Street. Thomas was a well-known figure in Buffalo’s gay bar scene, and her nickname was 5x5 because she was supposedly 5 feet tall and 5 feet wide. She is likely also the inspiration for the character Meg. 

Mernie Kern, Feinberg’s girlfriend during the late 1960s, recalls the Tiki distinctly:

"We had a period of time where there were no bars. That is when all of a sudden the Tiki Club showed up and I don’t remember how I heard about it but, you know, we had quite a network or whatever. So the Tiki was on Franklin and Tupper… It had two rooms and they both had tables… Jim [Garrow] would—it was just a coffee house, there was no booze—make a turkey every day, so he started getting a lunch bunch every day from downtown. He would either have a hot roast, with bread and gravy or cold turkey sandwiches and he would serve that until he ran out of turkey and that was it. So there was many a night I went down there for dinner at around 5-6 o’clock and had turkey and that was it. He only made turkey that was the only thing on his menu—and he made damn good coffee. And once in a while, he would have a folk singer come in... We weren’t real happy about it—there were straight people who would come in for that. If you didn’t have a folk singer it would be a Friday or Saturday night with like a jukebox and we would be dancing all the time. I’m pretty sure that the place was open like 24 hours a day... We had this bar across the street [from the Tiki], Benjy’s, and it was just a neighborhood dive. So we would go over there and have a few beers and then go back to the Tiki. So it was almost like a bar. You would go over there to get a buzz and then go back to the Tiki and dance, so they worked out pretty good."

Garrow befriended Kern and Feinberg, who became regulars at his establishment. Kern remembers that Feinberg even worked at the Tiki for a time. The two often came in to chat and drink coffee. The Tiki is also the place where Feinberg met local singer and future activist Madeline Davis. Davis came out within the late-1960s gay social scene encompassed by this downtown intersection and performed at the Tiki as an out dyke folksinger. She was likely the first publicly out gay person in Buffalo. Due to Davis’s notoriety in the community, she became the face of Buffalo’s gay liberation movement during the 1970s.

The building at 330 Franklin was demolished sometime between 1970 and 1979. Though not officially a bar, the Tiki Restaurant can be read as the basis for the bar called the Malibou in Stone Butch Blues. Given the time period and Feinberg's description, the Tiki was likely her inspiration.

496 Michigan Avenue, Buffalo, New York

Demolished

The Little Harlem Hotel, located on Buffalo’s East Side at 494-496 Michigan Avenue, was an historic nightspot that played a prominent role in the jazz movement and the development of the local African American community. By 1900, a distinct African American district developed east of the downtown business district. The city’s African American population grew during the World War I era due to the need for increased steel production and the Great Migration. The 1920s saw a rise in Black-owned businesses, including entertainment bars. The Little Harlem Hotel emerged in the 1930s alongside other entertainment establishments such as the Colored Musicians Club (145 Broadway), Club Moonglo (398 Michigan), and Dan Montgomery’s. These clubs nurtured the careers of nationally-renowned jazz performers such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Della Reese, and Sarah Vaughn and brought economic growth to Buffalo’s East Side. 

The Little Harlem Hotel was founded by Ann Montgomery, one of Buffalo’s foremost Black business women. Montgomery was born in Americus, Georgia, and moved to Los Angeles, California, as an infant with her parents. She attended school in Los Angeles and, later, in Texas before moving to Buffalo in 1910. 

Little Harlem originated from the consolidation of two separate commercial and residential buildings, originally constructed in 1868, in which Montgomery owned businesses. In 1922, she opened an ice cream parlor at 496 Michigan Avenue and an Oriental billiard parlor at 494. The second story rooms were rented for additional income. Ann’s husband, Dan Montgomery, owned and operated his own club located at 158 Exchange Street. In the late 1920s, Montgomery converted her ice cream parlor to a cabaret. The business was so successful that Montgomery consolidated both buildings in order to create a larger and more prosperous establishment. 

The renovation, completed by 1932, resulted in a two-story commercial and residential building with Art Deco influence and included a stucco exterior with octagonal bay windows. The interior featured geometric wall and ceiling stencils and Art Deco-style tables, chairs, and booths. The newly opened Little Harlem had a dinner menu with American and Chinese-inspired dishes and a stage for cabaret entertainment and nightly floor shows. During the 1930s, Little Harlem was the largest restaurant in Buffalo to employ Black entertainers. A drum bar that could accommodate 24 persons was later installed in 1941.

Little Harlem became a frequent stop on the jazz circuit between Chicago and New York City and was listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual guidebook for Black road-trippers that provided guidance on safe places to rest and eat during the Jim Crow era. Buffalo was thus a natural stopping point for professional jazz musicians. 

Queer and gender-nonconforming people were allowed space at the Little Harlem, though gay and Black Buffalonians simply shared outsider status more than having a formal coalition. Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis note that lesbians frequented the Little Harlem, as well as other Black-owned “entertainment bars” in the Jazz Triangle (the area between Michigan and Broadway South) such as Club Moonglo, the Vendome, Pearl’s, and the Lucky Clover, but are careful to explain, “these were not gay bars, but they were hospitable to lesbians.”

One of Kennedy’s and Davis’s narrators, identified in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by the pseudonym “Arden,” noted that Little Harlem “was free and open and there was no pretense.” Arden also recounted fond memories of Ann Montgomery, who would toss mail out the window and ask her to take it to the post box. In return, Ann would tell Arden to “go into the bar and tell George [the bartender] to give you what you want.” Montgomery, known for her bold personality, was also well aware of who patronized her club. Arden recounted that one night:

"There was a whole slew of people at the bar and Ann came in and told the bartender to give everyone a drink. They were all black at the bar. I was the only white. The bartender hesitated when he got to me and Ann said, ‘Yes, give that lesbian a drink too.’ I nearly died."

The club remained a significant entertainment spot until the 1960s when the converging forces of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and economic decline resulted in a less populous downtown business district. Little Harlem survived the city’s urban renewal plans of the 1960s and remained a noted establishment into the 1970s; however, only the bar remained in operation. 

When Ann Montgomery died in 1978, her second husband, Paul Woodson, assumed ownership of Little Harlem. Few changes had been made since the 1930s and 1940s, and during his tenure, Woodson preserved the club’s interior and exterior features. In September of 1980, the Little Harlem Hotel was designated as a local landmark by the Buffalo Preservation Board, but was demolished in 1993 following extensive damage from a grease fire. At that time, it was one of the oldest extant buildings in the city’s downtown commercial core. An historic marker now designates the spot where Little Harlem once stood.

After much deliberation, Jess Goldberg's friend Edwin, a black butch, takes her to a black club on the East Side of Buffalo. Ed's resistance speaks to the city's racial segregation and that some Black Buffalonians were suspicious of both white and gay people. When Ed commits suicide later in the novel, it is apparent that, because she was both black and queer, she faced barriers Jess did not. Buffalo's Jazz Triangle contained a host of clubs hospitable to gays and lesbians, and it is likely that, due to the reputation of Little Harlem Hotel, it served as the primary inspiration for the East Side bar that appears in Stone Butch Blues.

403 Main Street at Lafayette Square, Buffalo, New York

Joseph Ellicott Historic District

The Brisbane Building was designed by architects Milton E. Beebe & Son in 1894 as a mixed commercial and professional space at the intersection of Main, Clinton, and Washington Streets overlooking Lafayette Square. Originally known as the Mooney-Brisbane Building, the property was jointly owned by businessmen James Brisbane of New York City and James Mooney, a member of Buffalo’s first Board of Park Commissioners who assisted in planning the city’s parks system. Brisbane became sole owner of the building upon Mooney’s death in 1906. The Brisbane Building replaced The Arcade, an office and retail space destroyed by fire in 1893. In contrast to The Arcade, the Brisbane Building was constructed of fire-resistant brick, stone, and terracotta in a Beaux Arts style with Classical Revival details such as pilasters with Corinthian capitals. The seven-story building covers over half of a city block (180 by 200 feet) and at the time of its completion was the largest edifice for mercantile firms and business offices in Buffalo.

From 1894 to 1992, the Brisbane Building was home to the flagship location of “Buffalo's greatest clothiers,” the Kleinhans Company, a local chain specializing in premier men’s clothing for middle-to-upper income earners. The Kleinhans Company was founded by brothers and entrepreneurs Edward Livingston Kleinhans and Horace Kleinhans in 1893, and by the early 1900s was one of the largest men’s clothing stores in the country. The brothers, originally from New Jersey, initially opened a clothing store in Louisville, Kentucky, under the moniker Kleinhans Brothers. Realizing there was money to be made in the fashion industry in northern industrial cities, they relocated the business to Buffalo.

Horace retired in 1901 due to ill health, and when he died from a heart attack in 1903, Edward became sole owner of the Kleinhans Company. Edward and his wife, Mary Seaton, a talented vocalist and pianist, died within months of one another in 1934. The couple, both lovers of the arts, specified their estate be used to build a music hall for their adopted city and in memory of Seaton and Edward’s mother, Mary Livingston Kleinhans. “I made my money in Buffalo,” Kleinhans said, “and I want to leave it to Buffalo, and I want to leave it for something that Mary and I care about most, and that’s music.”

Kleinhans Music Hall, located at 3 Symphony Circle in what is today the Allentown historic district, was constructed between 1938 and 1940 by Finnish-American architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen, a father and son team, with funding from the Kleinhans estate and the Works Progress Administration. The Modernist style building, defined by sweeping curvilinear lines that mimic the flow of musical performance, is renowned for its acoustic excellence. Kleinhans Music Hall was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1989.

The Kleinhans Company was purchased by the Hartmarx Corporation following Edward’s and Mary’s deaths. All stores, including the flagship location in the Brisbane Building, closed in 1992 due to increased market competition and declining sales.

Stone Butch Blues shows that the Kleinhans Company was also a place where butch lesbians shopped for clothing, especially for special occasions, as the store was considered more upscale. “Pearl,” one of Kennedy’s and Davis’s narrators, also recounts that Lafayette Square, near Kleinhans, “was a notorious pickup spot for men interested in men, as well as for men and some women interested in women.” Kennedy and Davis further observe that, prior to the 1970s in working-class lesbian communities, “the butch projected the masculine image of her particular time period—at least regarding dress and mannerisms—and the fem, the feminine image.” Jess Goldberg and her fellow butches accordingly shop at popular Buffalo men’s stores of the era such as the Kleinhans Company, A. M. & A.’s (Adam, Meldrum, and Anderson’s), and Seeburg’s.

When Jess is chosen to emcee the Monte Carlo Night Drag Show Extravaganza at the Malibou, her drag queen friends, Peaches, Justine, and Georgetta, take her to buy a suit. Jess makes clear, however, that while butches shopped at Kleinhans, they were not accepted or welcome:

"I had heard horror stories about butches and their femmes trying to shop for a suit at Kleinhans clothing store. But this time Kleinhans was in for some discomfort as three powerful queens in full drag helped me pick it out... The salesman pulled the tape measure from around his neck and tried to chalk the trousers and jacket without touching me. Finally he straightened up. ‘You can pick it up in one week,’ he announced."

Jess and her fellow “gender outlaws” bear this treatment because the opportunity to express their identities through dress, though momentary, is worth the price of a rude salesman.

273 Main Street Location, Buffalo, New York

Demolished

At one time, during the 1940s and ’50s, Deco restaurants were on nearly every corner in downtown Buffalo. The chain, founded by local entrepreneur Gregory J. Deck in 1918, featured restaurants that were open 24 hours and known for their fresh coffee and hamburgers. The name “Deco” came from a combination of “Deck” and his “co”-workers. Deco originally began as several outdoor food stands. By the early 1920s, Deck opened his first enclosed restaurant at the corner of Eagle and Pearl streets. A cup of coffee at Deco cost a mere 5 cents, and the restaurant’s slogan was “that extra bite,” emphasizing the chain’s freshly brewed coffee and good food at a fair price.

In the late 1920s, as the business expanded, Deck worked with coffee growers to perfect a high quality blend for his restaurants. By the late 1940s, Deco became famous for its coffee and changed its tagline to “Buffalo’s best cup of coffee.” Customers could also purchase one pound bags of locally roasted and ground coffee from all Deco locations. At the company’s peak, there were 50 Deco restaurants in Buffalo, and Deck staged parades on Main Street to herald the opening of each new location. In Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Kennedy and Davis explain that Deco Restaurants “served low-priced meals and were ‘hangouts’ for students, neighborhood residents, and workers.”

Deco restaurants were also a feature of Buffalo’s gay and lesbian nightlife. When the bars and clubs closed down in the early morning hours, gay Buffalonians continued to socialize at 24-hour restaurants, coffeehouses, and cafes such as Deco. Ralph Martin’s Grill, a popular gay and lesbian bar during the 1940s located at 58 Ellicott Street (demolished), was next door to a Deco Restaurant. “Reggie,” one of Kennedy and Davis’s narrators, remembers, “Ralph’s was notorious. It was one of the hugest, biggest. Anyone who came from out of town knew right away where Ralph’s [was].” “Reggie” also recalls going to Deco for hamburgers with her friends as part of a typical evening out at Ralph Martin’s.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Deco restaurant at 273 Main Street was a particularly popular after-hours meeting place for gay people and sex workers. Located at the intersection of Main and Swan streets, this Deco was in close proximity to the bars frequented by gays and lesbians on Chippewa, Franklin, Main, Pearl, and Swan streets. The National Register of Historic Places certification report for the Joseph Ellicott Historic District, where the property was located, describes 273-275 Main as “a one-story concrete block commercial building with two modern storefronts with a denticulated cornice” (a decorative horizontal molding at the roofline ornamented by a series of small blocks). From the 1930s to the 1980s, one of the storefronts was home to Bernstone’s Cigar Store. By the 1960s, the half of the building designated as 273 Main was a Deco location, and the 1977 City Directory lists its manager as Mrs. Pearl V. Bogardus.

Anthony “Tony” Zanetta, who was a student at SUNY Buffalo State during the 1960s, remembers going to 24-hour coffee shops like Deco after frequenting the popular bars of the time, such as the Eagle Inn at 90 Washington Street (demolished), Laughlin’s at 333 Franklin Street, and Tom & Len’s, a popular bar located at 132 Goodell Street (demolished). Zanetta also recalls gay men engaging in the practice of “wrecking” at Deco and other after-hours coffee shops: flamboyantly displaying and playing up one’s femininity to show, in Zanetta’s words, they were “man enough to be a woman.”

The 1979 Bob Damron’s Address Book lists the Deco located at 273 Main as a tearoom (a place where gay men met for anonymous sex in public bathrooms) and cruising area that was frequented by “raunchy types” (sex workers, hustlers, and drag queens). Given that 273 Main became a Deco during the 1960s, this is likely the Deco frequented by Zanetta and his friends.

The description provided in the Damron’s Address Book aligns with Zanetta’s experience and Feinberg’s representation of the after-hours coffeehouses frequented by Jess Goldberg and her friends in Stone Butch Blues. After a night out at the fictionalized bar the Malibou, Jess and her friend Ed meet Darlene, Ed’s girlfriend and a “pro” (sex worker), and other “working girls” at a restaurant for breakfast. 

The area around the Chippewa strip was frequented by sex workers, and some took their johns to establishments such as the Genesee Hotel. The hotel, located at 308 Pearl Street, was constructed circa 1910 and had nine stories, 300 rooms, and a bar on the first floor. Originally owned by the adjoining Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) at 45 West Mohawk Street, the building operated as the Genesee Hotel, initially a men’s hotel and social center, from 1937 to 1978. The hotel was vacated in 1978 and demolished in 1986.

Feinberg places her characters in the general location of Chippewa Street in downtown Buffalo (not far from 273 Main, 308 Pearl, and other popular gay establishments of the 1960s). She likely used a Deco Restaurant as the model for the 24-hour coffee shop where her characters meet and socialize after leaving the bar scene.

As D. John Bray, the former director of public relations at D’Youville College and a writer for The Buffalo News, observes about the legacy of Deco Restaurants in Buffalo:

"From the 1920s through the 1960s, a neighborhood Deco was the place to hang out... Each Deco had its own personality, formed by the people who frequented a particular location. The cook, the waitresses, the regulars lingering over coffee, businessmen, policemen and drunks, bikers and motorheads, teen-agers and tradesmen in and out, their favorite selections on the jukebox; it was 'their’ Deco. They all became part of the passing scene in the city, non-stop, 24 hours a day."

Gay and lesbian Buffalonians formed the personality of the Deco located at 273 Main Street, and possibly other branches of the chain as well. Decos began to close during the 1950s and 1960s as Gregory J. Deck shifted focus from his business to his spiritual life. 273 Main Street was demolished circa 2015. 

975 Fuhrmann Boulevard, Buffalo, New York

Demolished

Freezer Queen Foods, a Buffalo-based frozen food company, was founded by local businessman Paul L. Snyder in 1957. The company was acquired by Nabisco Inc. in 1970. Freezer Queen specialized in frozen single-serving meals and school lunches and helped to popularize the TV dinner: a frozen, prepackaged meal in a tray that was meant to be heated and eaten in front of the television. The wildly successful concept was pioneered by the Swanson company in 1953 with competitors creating their own versions thereafter. Freezer Queen’s plant and warehouse was located at 975 Fuhrmann Boulevard in Buffalo, and its executive offices were located at 2544 Clinton Street. The company also had processing facilities in Cleveland and Marion, Ohio.

The building at 975 Fuhrmann Boulevard, a six-story industrial complex located south of the city of Buffalo along the shore of Lake Erie, was constructed in 1927 in the International Style. It was originally used as a public warehouse and terminal for the Merchants Refrigerating Company. The property was leased by Freezer Queen in 1967 and significantly remodeled in 1968 as the company expanded.

Following the Nabisco acquisition, Freezer Queen employees engaged in several strikes over disputed contract negotiations. On October 1, 1973, the approximately 500-member union, Local 2000-A, Food Processors, International Longshoremen’s Association, voted to strike after their current three-year contract expired. On Friday, October 6, 1973, the striking employees met at 1 p.m. at the Peace Bridge Exhibition Center on Porter Avenue to vote on a proposed new contract following lengthy negotiations between the union and the company. 270 Local 2000-A union members turned out to vote and ratify the new three-year collective bargaining agreement.

In 1976, Freezer Queen Foods underwent a 2-million-dollar expansion and hired 120 new production and maintenance workers. By October of that year, employees were again on strike following the expiration of the 1973 contract. By 1977, 167 workers were laid off from the plant and 338 were placed on short weeks when the company bid on, but lost, a contract with New York State’s school lunch program. Yet, the company carried on and was purchased by Massachusetts-based Home Market Foods in 2004. Following the acquisition, the plant began to lose money and abruptly closed in 2006, leaving 175 workers unemployed and Freezer Queen’s lakefront facility abandoned.

In May 2016, the Buffalo Planning Board approved a proposal to demolish the vacant Freezer Queen Foods plant and warehouse. The building was slated to be replaced with a 23-story apartment tower.

Jess Goldberg, struggling to find steady employment in 1970s Buffalo, is sent by a temp agency to a short-term job “on the loading docks of a frozen food plant.” Feinberg is likely referencing the Freezer Queen Plant, and the labor struggles faced by Jess could well be inspired by the strikes mentioned above. Buffalo’s unions, however, were segregated along racial and gender lines, hindering effective organizing against management. White male workers were hesitant to organize alongside butches, and a racist reluctance on the part of white workers of all genders hindered coalition-building with those of color. Jess befriends Duffy, a charismatic organizer who begins to see things her way, though collaboration across identity lines within the labor movement is never fully realized in the novel.

Route 5, Lackawanna, New York

Partially Demolished

The Bethlehem Steel plant located in the City of Lackawanna, New York saw its origins in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In 1883, the Scranton brothers—whom the town was later named after—founded the Scranton Steel Company, which was consolidated with the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company in 1891. The business was then operated under the name Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company. 

The company outgrew the facilities in Scranton and relocated in 1899 to the suburbs of Buffalo, to a site that was then part of West Seneca, to reduce labor costs and gain the ability to ship materials via the Great Lakes. The steel mill was constructed in 1900 and the Beaux Arts style administration building, designed by architect Lansing C. Holden, in 1901. The building, with its copper-trimmed entablature, dormer windows, and decorative pediments, reposed on manicured grounds offset from the mills and visually demonstrated the difference in status between management and workers. In 1902, the business became the Lackawanna Steel Company, and the mill began operations in 1903. The City of Lackawanna grew around the plant and took its name from the company. 

The Bethlehem Steel Company bought out Lackawanna in 1922 and enacted a series of updates to the plant, spending a total of 40 million dollars over a ten-year period. At its height, the plant was the world’s largest steel factory, and its development charts the story of Buffalo’s industrial rise and decline. Due to overseas advancements in steel production, the plant became obsolete during the 1970s and 1980s. Bethlehem was also disenchanted with New York State’s tax rates and environmental regulations. The company built a new facility in Burns Harbor, Indiana, and ceased operations at the Lackawanna plant on October 15, 1982 following waves of successive layoffs. Over ten thousand employees lost their jobs as a result of the closure.

Bethlehem declared bankruptcy in 2003. The administration building was demolished in 2013 following a drawn-out battle between preservation advocates and the city. From 2014 to 2016, three small-scale fires damaged the former steel works. On November 9, 2016, a mammoth fire beset the plant, resulting in significant destruction. Burning wreckage rained down upon Lackawanna and the town of Hamburg, but by the morning of November 10th, the fire was contained, and emergency demolition of the affected structures was carried out.

The history of the Lackawanna and Bethlehem Steel companies is also marked by numerous union struggles and a 1970 court case, United States v. Bethlehem Steel Corp., in which a federally-appointed panel of labor experts found that Bethlehem engaged “in a pattern or practice of racial discrimination in their employment practices at Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s Lackawanna Plant.” As a result, the company agreed to set hiring, promotion, and training quotas for African Americans. Around this time, Bethlehem established a similar hiring quota for women, as depicted in Stone Butch Blues. Initially, the butches leap at the chance to work a union job in a big plant:

"When I called Grant, she had big news. 'The steel plant has to hire fifty women,' she told me. 'They’re accepting applications Wednesday morning. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be camping out on the line Tuesday night. By late that night the line will stretch from Lackawanna to Tonawanda.' It was a slight exaggeration, but her point was well taken."

Once on the job, however, Jess and her friend and mentor, Jan, quickly learn the plant intends to give the newly hired women hell until they quit. Rather than be humiliated, Jan and Jess quit voluntarily. 

885 Niagara Street, Buffalo, New York

The Buffalo Milk Company consolidated on July 1, 1902. Their building, a large modernized milk depot located at 885 Niagara Street, was designed by architect Sidney Woodruff in the Renaissance Revival style and was primarily constructed between 1903 and 1905. Buffalo Milk was the first large-scale milk company in the city to pasteurize and distribute milk and helped to popularize the practice of pasteurization with customers. 

In 1908, the company was the subject of a scandal when it was discovered they were mixing skim milk with fresh milk before the pasteurization process, resulting in a 500-dollar fine from New York State. As a result, the Buffalo Milk Company reconsolidated in 1909 and merged with Queen City Milk Company. The new business operated under the name Queen City Dairy Company. A new president, Smith C. Shedrick, was brought in from Chicago to run the company. Queen City Dairy advertised milk delivery within 12 hours of milk arriving at the building for processing—the fastest rate, and therefore the freshest milk, in Buffalo. 

During its time as a milk processing facility (1903-1914), the Buffalo Milk Company/Queen City Dairy building exemplified what architectural historian Betsy Hunter Bradley refers to as a “consolidated works”: a type of purpose-built industrial facility that emerged in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The works at 885 Niagara Street included distinct spaces for the receiving, pasteurizing, bottling, and shipping of milk. 

In 1914, Queen City Dairy sold the building to businessman Alfred Maguire, who kept the facility close to its original purpose and opened Maguire’s Real Ice Cream. Maguire owned the building until 1930. Since that time, it has housed a variety of other businesses including a mattress company during the 1950s.

Jess Goldberg references a dairy on Niagara Street where she finds employment. Though Queen City Dairy was closed during the period the novel takes place, Feinberg likely used the historic dairy that once operated on Niagara Street as inspiration for one of Jess’s temp jobs.

108 Winspear Avenue, Buffalo, New York

University Heights–Summit Park–Berkshire Terrace Historic District

The Women’s Studies College House is an American Foursquare residence located at 108 Winspear Avenue near the University at Buffalo’s South Campus. The American Foursquare style was popular in the United States from the 1890s to the 1930s, and the Women’s Studies College House demonstrates the expansion of what came to be known as the University Heights district during the early twentieth century.

The genesis for the University at Buffalo’s Women’s Studies Program came in 1969 when Elizabeth “Liz” Lapovsky Kennedy, a junior faculty member in American Studies trained as a social anthropologist, was asked to be the faculty sponsor of a graduate student-led course called Women in Contemporary Society. The course, and the energy and creativity within the university toward addressing women’s experiences and gender oppression, went on to transform the institution. The emerging feminist consciousness among students and faculty led to the creation of the Women’s Studies Program, one of the first in the country. It first developed as a component of the American Studies department. Kennedy further explains the program’s development:

"An easy path for institutionalization was available to us. As a result of the student movements of the 1960s, this was an open and radical moment in higher education, particularly at SUNY Buffalo. The University was building a division of experimental and interdisciplinary programs, called the Collegiate System, composed of small colleges, some of which were residential, designed to group faculty and students around thematic foci. In 1971 we decided to become the Women's Studies College. The Collegiate System had a far-sighted dean, Konrad Von Moltke, who was truly interested in educational change and welcomed the women’s studies proposal, giving us a building and a small startup budget with which to hire graduate student and community instructors. Becoming the Women’s Studies College did not interfere with developing the women’s studies component of American Studies. The former was the locus for undergraduate education, and the latter for graduate education. Together they formed the Women’s Studies Program." 

In 1972, Lillian Robinson and Ellen DuBois were hired as full-time faculty with partial appointments in Women’s Studies. 108 Winspear Avenue was the building given to the program, and it remained the center of Women’s Studies at the university until the early 1980s. Due to the influx of students from the baby boom generation, the university rapidly expanded, and the programs within the Collegiate System were often relegated to off-campus buildings owned by the university, such as the Women’s Studies College House, while an expanded North Campus was constructed in Amherst.

The Women’s Studies Program offered courses in areas including feminist theory, fieldwork, and skills, such as auto mechanics. The program, notably, adopted an antiracist framework that examined issues of gender, race, and class as interconnected. In contrast to contemporary women’s, gender, and sexuality studies programs, many of the courses were taught by community members, graduate students, or advanced undergraduates, as many faculty at the time lacked professional training in feminist approaches and methodologies. One such example was Women’s Studies College 265: Lesbianism, first taught in the fall of 1972 by Madeline Davis, a librarian and community activist, and Margaret Small, a graduate student working with Liz Kennedy. The course, which examined the history and experiences of contemporary lesbians, was the first of its kind taught at a major university in the United States.

The energy and innovative nature of the program, however, caused uneasiness within the university administration, who adopted an increasingly hostile stance toward it as the 1970s progressed. Fearing co-optation, some women questioned whether the program should break away from the university and become independent. The Women’s Studies Program ultimately chose to remain in an attempt to change the university from within. As Kennedy notes:

"Although the founding of Women’s Studies at SUNY Buffalo is a story of tremendous success, it is also a story of loss, of conflict, of harassment, and of compromise. The founders’ dreams of social justice have yet to be fully realized. Despite this hostility, the Women’s Studies Program at SUNY Buffalo has continued to grow and influence the university." 

Women’s Studies, and the changes it brought to Buffalo, feature prominently in Stone Butch Blues. With the arrival of women’s liberation, younger, radical women often regarded working-class butches and femmes with suspicion. In her unpublished autobiography, Femme Finale, Madeline Davis recounts the experience of attending a Buffalo Radicalesbians meeting in 1971 with her butch lover, Terry Marone, and friend, Bobbi Prebis:

"As a butch-femme couple, it was especially challenging and interesting when Terry and I attended a meeting of the new lesbian-feminist organization. We had heard that a Radicalesbians group had formed at the University. We were curious. We had both been active in Mattachine and wondered how the new lesbian-feminism differed from gay and lesbian rights. Were these college women the lavender herrings that straight feminists of the Women’s Movement had been afraid of? Were they the lesbians who were going to “spoil” the movement by being too obvious? Within the upper echelons of the Women’s Movement, lesbians were not welcome if they were out. The young lesbians were angry and their answer was to form a movement of their own. We older dykes wanted to hear what these young lesbians had to say. So in the early winter of 1971, Terry, our friend Bobbi, and I, decided to attend a meeting of Buffalo Radicalesbians. When we arrived, there were about ten young women at the meeting. They were very welcoming. I think they were excited that we were bringing with us our experience with working-class bar life. Their world was different from ours. Most of these women spent their time on campus. Our social life was in the bars… Soon, the inevitable discussion came up about butch-femme. Even though these women all wore wrinkled jeans (we ironed ours), flannel shirts and work boots, we could easily tell who was which. But if we pointed it out, they were quick to state that being in roles was simply mirroring the patriarchy and we no longer had to do that. We were counseled to break out of our patterns and just be women-loving-women. It all sounded so progressive. Liberty, Equality, Sorority. Hear us roar. I found their criticism of butch-femme disconcerting. Our personal lives, our sex lives, our community lives, were quite fulfilling. We felt strong and determined. We were there to explain how we had survived. They were there to explain a new way of thinking."

Theresa, Jess’s femme, tells Jess about a new women’s group at the university (likely based on Buffalo Radicalesbians, who met in an apartment on the second story of 3234 Main Street). Similar to Davis’s experience, the women outwardly ridicule Theresa for conforming to what they see as patriarchal gender roles. Jess, as a butch, also feels ostracized within the post-Stonewall gay liberation and women’s movements.

South Campus, University at Buffalo

3435 Main Street, Buffalo, New York

Hayes Hall, a long-time landmark on the South Campus of the University at Buffalo (UB), was built as part of the Erie County Almshouse, which previously occupied the site where the campus now stands. The main portion of the building was constructed in 1874 of Onondaga limestone in the Second Empire style to a design by architect George Metzger. The south wing was added in 1877 and the north in 1879. 

The university acquired the building in 1909 and rehabilitated it for academic use. Hayes Hall took its name from Edmund B. Hayes, a businessman and engineer who financed the building’s conversion. A bell tower was added in 1927 and a clock and Westminster chimes in 1928. The clock and chimes were a gift of Kate Robinson Butler, a local social and civic leader and wife of Edward H. Butler, Jr., the president of The Buffalo News. Hayes Hall was further rehabilitated during the 1950s by architect Jesse Porter, and its style changed from Second Empire to Georgian Revival. A final rehabilitation was completed in 2016 by Bergmann Associates. The historic exterior was preserved, while the interior was entirely modernized.

UB began as a small private college and became part of the state university system in 1962. In 1966, Governor Nelson Rockefeller recruited Martin Meyerson, then the acting chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, to be president. Meyerson boldly sought to make UB into a large public research university of international renown—a “Berkeley of the East”—that could accommodate the baby-boom generation. His plans, however, met resistance from the community and the Board of Trustees. Both thought the university should reflect the more conservative, blue-collar values of Buffalo instead of Meyerson’s progressive agenda.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hayes Hall became the focal point of student protests, particularly against the Vietnam War. The first occupation of the building occurred on March 19, 1969 when approximately 300 student demonstrators, responding to the harsh sentencing of Buffalo Nine draft resister Bruce L. Beyer, took over the building. The Nine were a group of Vietnam War protestors who had been arrested at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, where they sought sanctuary, in August of 1968. As part of the occupation, students also demanded that work crews on the new Amherst (North) Campus be racially integrated, that the university open admission to children of working and poor families (especially those who were Black or Vietnam veterans), and that the university establish of a worker’s college controlled by students and open to working-class people. During the occupation, student protestors climbed Hayes Hall’s bell tower and repeatedly rang the chimes. The administration, however, did not capitulate to the students’ demands.

On March 5, 1970, students again occupied the building to protest multiple issues, including the on-campus presence of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, UB Defense Department experiments, and the war. Students were additionally angered by a State Supreme Court-issued restraining order that prevented engagement in certain disruptive tactics on campus. Hayes Hall was targeted and viewed as an “enemy” building because it housed the administration. Twenty students were suspended following this second occupation.

Meyerson was on leave during the spring of 1970, and acting president Peter F. Regan welcomed the presence of Buffalo police officers on campus in an attempt to quell student unrest. On March 15th of that year, a group of 45 faculty members staged a peaceful sit-in in the president’s office in Hayes Hall in protest of the police presence. The group, who came to be known as the “Hayes Hall 45,” were all arrested and charged with second-degree criminal trespass. 

Jess Goldberg’s femme, Theresa, is a secretary at the university in Stone Butch Blues (a fictionalized version of UB). Theresa’s connection to the campus expands Jess’s consciousness, and she is able to learn about emerging social movements and resistance beyond the bars: 

"It was Theresa’s job as a secretary at the university that opened a window, allowing me to feel the hurricane force of change. She brought home leaflets, pamphlets, and underground newspapers. I read about Black Power and Women’s Liberation. I began to understand that outrage against the war was much deeper and more organized than I’d realized. 'There’s campus rallies and protests almost every day now,' she told me, 'not just against the war, but to open up the schools to everybody.'"

70 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York

Demolished

In the fall of 1969, Jim Garrow closed the Tiki Restaurant at 330 Franklin Street and rented a run-down, three-story building located at 70 Delaware Avenue, just off Niagara Square across from the Buffalo Athletic Club and next to the County Court building. 70 Delaware was the former home of The Avenue Grill, a restaurant and bar, which closed in August of 1963 after then-owner Frank B. Oddo pleaded no contest to State Liquor Authority charges of service during prohibited hours. According to Madeline Davis, "the Tiki club was located in an old building that had a bar on the first floor, including a few large back rooms where people danced and fund-raising dinners were held. On the upper floors were more private rooms, including rooms Jim Garrow used to live in."

Garrow planned for 70 Delaware to be an expansion of the original Tiki and for it to circumvent the Buffalo Bureau of Vice Enforcement (BVE) crackdown on gay establishments. On December 10, 1969, Garrow filed an application for a restaurant license under “The Tiki Room.” In the meantime, he devised an ingenious, though ultimately unsuccessful, idea. 70 Delaware Avenue was technically Garrow’s private residence. Therefore, he opened the ground floor as a private club for gays and lesbians who wanted a place to socialize and cut loose. Garrow either charged a cover or made visitors pay for coffee or drinks. 

As Mernie Kern recalled:

"[Jim] bought the Tiki downtown… and it was a great location because you could make a bunch of noise. That was the thing with our gay bars in Buffalo: if you made too much noise the neighbors would complain and then the cops would give you a hard time. T&T on Niagara was great because there are no houses. So when you got to the new Tiki or the Tiki 2, the only thing going was the Buffalo Athletic Club across the street. [Jim] just kept talking about all the old closeted queens… who hang out at the Buffalo Athletic Club who are jealous that they couldn’t come over and party with us–so they complained about noise and told the cops to check in on that place and whatnot. He considered this his private residence, he lived upstairs."

Whether one of the old, closeted queens from the BAC tattled remains unclear, but someone did, and the BVE placed 70 Delaware Avenue under surveillance. Garrow, recognizing more drastic measures were necessary, brought in noted homophile activist Frank Kameny—whom he read about in Time magazine—to help organize the local gay community.

70 Delaware Avenue was in close proximity to City Hall and the county holding center, which meant the BVE could easily conduct a raid if Captain Kenneth P. Kennedy learned of their activities. This came to pass during the early morning hours of Sunday, January 4, 1970. Under Kennedy’s direction, the premises were raided after a detective paid a 50-cent entry fee and was served an alcoholic beverage. Officers further claimed they saw patrons bringing in liquor in paper bags and then seating themselves at tables to drink. In a testament to the popularity of Garrow’s idea, more than 100 people were present at 70 Delaware that night. 

Three people were arrested, including Garrow himself, who was charged with operating a criminal nuisance and allowing persons to consume alcohol in a public place without a liquor license. Garrow told reporters from The Advocate —a gay community newsletter —that, immediately after he rented the premises, Captain Kennedy paid him a visit. The vice captain, allegedly, dropped in while Garrow was cleaning up before opening. “I’m going to see that you never get any licenses,” he informed Garrow. Kennedy, perhaps fearing accusations of persecution, painted a different picture for the local press following the January 4th raid. “I want to make it clear that it is not our intention to harass this organization,” he told the Buffalo Courier-Express on January 5th. “Our surveillance revealed violations of the law. Our unit will raid any premises wherever the law is violated.”

70 Delaware — which bore the window sign “Mattachine Society of WNY” — was again raided on April 4th. The BVE knew of the community’s attempts to organize and as a result, the raid was particularly brutal. Ten officers, led by Lieutenant John J. Breen, entered the bar at 2 AM, arrested 11 persons, and evicted 94 others from the bar and backroom after their names and addresses were taken. Two lesbians, Anita Cabrera and Patricia Nigro, were charged with harassment and resisting arrest after they fought back against the raiders. Shirley Thomas suffered a seizure after being beaten by BVE officers, who were slow to give assistance because they thought her illness was fabricated. Thomas was later treated at Meyer Memorial Hospital before being booked. Jim Garrow was not present during the raid, but later turned himself in to the police. He was charged with unlawful operation of a bottle club, maintaining a public nuisance, and conspiracy. 

On April 7th, the Buffalo Courier-Express reported that, on the previous day, seven young men briefly picketed City Hall, a 32-story Art Deco style building designed by architects Dietel, Wade, and Jones in 1931 and located at 65 Niagara Square. In response to the second raid of the Mattachine Club, they carried signs that bore the phrases: “Civil Rights For Homosexuals” and “End Police Harassment.” The picket was the first public protest for gay rights in Buffalo. The story, however, got one important detail wrong. The picketers were actually six young men and one young woman: Mernie Kern. Reporters assumed Kern, dressed in a butch style, was a young homosexual man.

Years later, Kern remembered the courage it took to protest outside City Hall at the time:

"I felt like I had to do something, and I was pissed that the cops were closing our bars and the raid and all that kinda shit. So, I was pretty pissed, and I was the only girl with 7 or 8 guys — I didn’t know who they were. And it was like, oh gee, we were expecting the cops to give us a hard time. I don’t think you had to have a permit for that. So we figured we would be out there walking around for a little while and they would show up in a paddy wagon and take us away. So I was taking a chance on that, and then it was like, what if the news people come down and take pictures of us and we were on TV? — people from my small town are gonna see me, people I work with are gonna see me, my parents are gonna see me. That was scary."

Feinberg was certainly aware of this saga, and the Tiki 2/Mattachine Club served as her basis for a bar in Stone Butch Blues that opens following Stonewall:

The police really stepped up their harassment after the birth of gay pride. Cops scribbled down our license plate numbers and photographed us as we entered the bars. We held regular dances at a new gay bar, using police radios to alert everyone when the cops were about to raid us.

Other similarities exist between the Tiki 2/Mattachine Club raids and aspects of the novel. When the fictional bar described above is raided, it is similarly the women who stand up to the police. Lieutenant Mulroney, the bane of the gay community in the novel, can be read as a fictionalized version of Captain Kenneth P. Kennedy. Further, Feinberg makes clear that her characters fight back against the police because of conditions in Buffalo, not due to Stonewall. In her unpublished autobiography, Femme Finale, Madeline Davis similarly observes:

"Although ‘Stonewall’ made front page downstate news, in Buffalo it was hardly a blip on the radar screen. Buffalo, unlike New York City, is a large, middle American small town. A gay riot 450 miles away was of note to a few, but didn’t engender political exuberance. For most of us, what was happening in New York City was happening in another world."

70 Delaware Avenue was demolished in 1974 and replaced with the Frank A. Sedita City Court, a 10-story Brutalist style building designed by architect I.M. Pei and his firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and sited at 45 Delaware Avenue.

250 or 765 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York

Elmwood Historic District

The Loblaws supermarket chain was founded in Ontario, Canada by Theodore Pringle (T.P.) Loblaw and John Milton Cork in 1919. Loblaws grew throughout Ontario during the 1920s and also launched divisions in Buffalo and Chicago. The chain distinguished itself through its introduction of self-service to the grocery industry. Pre-packaged, -measured, and -priced items allowed food to be sold at lower prices to consumers. Loblaws also pioneered the concept of pre-wrapped meats sold in a refrigerated case and water sprays to keep produce fresh.

By the 1930s, the company had fifty stores in New York State. At the height of the chain’s popularity, there were approximately twelve locations in the City of Buffalo and more in the suburbs. The most prominent downtown stores were the Elmwood Avenue and Amherst Street location, which opened in 1959, and the Elmwood Avenue and Summer Street location, which opened in 1961. Business declined during the 1970s, however, as other competitive supermarket chains emerged. By mid-decade, all U.S. Loblaws stores were sold to Bells Markets.

In Stone Butch Blues, Jess Goldberg visits one of the Elmwood Avenue Loblaws locations noted above. Loblaws is referenced in the novel as a symbol of Buffalo’s broader economic downturn.

219 Bryant Street, Buffalo, New York

Elmwood Historic District

The Children’s Hospital of Buffalo was founded by a group of Buffalo women who were concerned with Buffalo General Hospital’s lack of facilities for children. The hospital opened in May of 1892 in a renovated two-story brick residence on Bryant Street in what is today the Elmwood Village Historic District. Additions were made in 1908. The hospital eventually grew to seven interconnected buildings, constructed between 1917 and 1995, with the most significant growth occurring during the 1950s. In its early years, Children’s Hospital had an all-female board of trustees.

In the 1970s, the hospital was home to one of the first gender identity clinics in the country, which served transsexual and intersex patients. The clinic, known as the Gender Identity Unit, was housed within the hospital’s Psychoendocrinology (the study of how hormones affect human behavior) Center, founded in 1972 by a husband-wife team of psychologists, Drs. Anke Ehrhardt and Heino Meyer-Bahlburg. 

Originally from Hamburg, Germany, the pair studied with Dr. John Money, then a leading sexologist, at Johns Hopkins University before coming to Buffalo as research assistant professors at the University at Buffalo Medical School in pediatrics and psychiatry. They specialized in the treatment of children with hormonal imbalances, but also provided transition-related care to trans patients, including support groups.

Ehrhardt served on the advisory board of the Erickson Educational Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in 1964 by trans man and philanthropist Reed Erickson. The goals of the EEF were “to provide assistance and support in areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental or social conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial or imaginative to receive traditionally oriented support.” 

A significant part of its mission was to provide support, education, and referral services to transgender people, thus establishing an early model of trans healthcare. The Children’s Hospital Gender Identity Unit was funded, in part, by the EEF, and the foundation’s financial contributions allowed Ehrhardt to conduct and publish early research on transsexualism. Ehrhardt lectured publicly on transsexualism and often included trans patients in her talks to better educate fellow medical professionals. 

The Psychoendocrinology Center closed and Children’s Hospital stopped accepting new trans patients in 1976, when Ehrhardt and Meyer-Bahlburg accepted positions at Columbia University in New York. The EEF also suspended operations that year, which resulted in a lack of funding for the center. Later in her career, Ehrhardt came under fire from intersex activists for her recommendation of so-called “normalizing” operations for children born with sex differences.

The Children’s Hospital of Buffalo existed on Bryant Street until 2017, when it relocated to 818 Ellicott Street and was renamed the John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital.

In Stone Butch Blues, Jess Goldberg and her friend, Grant, reference the Children’s Hospital Gender Identity Unit and Ehrhardt’s research when contemplating whether they should take hormones and pass as men. Grant says, “It would be a lot easier if we went to the sex-change clinic. They give you hormones for free. The only thing is you have to take all these tests and they interview your family and everything.” Jess and Grant ultimately forgo the “sex-change clinic” and visit Dr. Monroe, a sketchy physician whom they pay for hormones.

Feinberg, in contrast to her character, was a patient of Ehrhardt. In Transgender Warriors, she explains:

"My life changed dramatically when I began working as a man. I was free of the day-in, day-out harassment that pursued me. But I also lived in constant terror as a gender outlaw. What punishments would I face when I was discovered? The fear moved me to make a complex decision: I decided to begin taking male hormones, prescribed to me by a local sex-reassignment program. Through this program, I also located a surgeon who would do a breast reduction. Shaping my body was something I had long wanted to do and I’ve never had any regrets. But I started taking hormones in order to pass. A year after beginning hormone shots, I sprouted a full, colorful beard that provided me with a greater sense of safety—on the job and off. With these changes, I explored yet another facet of my trans identity."

Through the Children’s Hospital Gender Identity Unit, Feinberg also met local trans activist Peggie Ames, who was a member of the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier. Feinberg and Ames coordinated to organize an informational panel on transsexualism for Buffalo’s Gay Pride Week in 1975.

1020 Humboldt Parkway, Buffalo, New York

Olmsted Parks & Parkway Historic District

The Buffalo Museum of Science saw its origins in the Young Men’s Association (YMA), founded in the city of Buffalo in 1836. The YMA organized its cultural activities in the city around three areas: the public library, literature and art, and science. Over time, the science committee of the organization acquired specimens and began collecting, which led to the establishment of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences on December 5, 1861. The original home of the society’s collection was on the third story of the Jewett Building, located at 323 Washington Street. 

In 1925, the City of Buffalo issued approximately half a million dollars in bonds for the construction of a natural science museum. A site for the facility was identified on Buffalo’s East Side at the end of Humboldt Parkway on the northwest corner of The Parade (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Park), part of Olmsted’s parks and parkways system. 

The cornerstone for the building was laid in October of 1926, and the Buffalo Museum of Science formally opened on January 19, 1929. The museum, designed by architects Esenwein and Johnson, is a three-story Art Deco building with classical influence. At the time of its opening, the museum was one of the most outstanding institutions of natural science in the United States. The building has since undergone several renovations, including the addition of the multi-story Dr. Charles R. Drew Science Magnet Elementary School in 1990 and a restoration of the rooftop Kellogg Observatory in July of 2018.

In Stone Butch Blues, Jess Goldberg visits the Buffalo Museum of Science to find gifts for her friend Gloria’s children, Kim and Scotty:

"I wanted to see if the Science Museum had a souvenir shop that sold rocks and crystals. I’d never been to the Museum before. A giant stuffed buffalo stared at me as I walked in. The space felt still and quiet inside the building. I found exactly what I was looking for at the gift counter. I picked out a fist-sized rock for Scotty. It was cut in half. Inside was a small cave studded with purple and milky white crystals. It was a rock you could get lost in if you wanted to. I figured he would. Kim’s gift wasn’t hard to choose: a flat green polished stone the size of my hand, swirled with white, like currents in a fast-moving river."

The museum also reminds Jess how the built environment and public spaces shape our understanding of gender. Instead of agonizing over which bathroom to use—male or female—and facing potential scrutiny over her choice, Jess cuts her visit to the Buffalo Museum of Science short and retreats to the privacy of Gloria’s home. 

1700 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York

Houk Manufacturing Company Complex

The Gioia Macaroni Company, Inc. was founded in 1910 in Fredonia, New York, by Sicilian immigrant Antonio Gioia. Gioia’s homemade pasta was so popular with neighbors and friends he decided to manufacture it for sale. In 1919, he moved the business to Rochester, New York, then, in 1948, relocated to a 75,000 square foot plant at 1700 Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo. The company offices and factory were located across from the former Pierce Arrow automobile manufacturing complex (1906-1938), and today, the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Houk Manufacturing Company Complex.

Gioia produced spaghetti, macaroni, noodles, and sauce, and at its height, the company employed approximately 175 people, including both factory workers and management. By the 1970s, the company produced 52 different shapes of macaroni. In 1981, the plant underwent an 11.4 million dollar expansion, including the installation of an automated macaroni mixer, press, and dryer, then the largest machine of its kind in the country.  In 1986, Gioia was purchased by Borden Inc., then the largest pasta producer in the United States. By April of 1995, however, Borden closed the Gioia plant and eliminated 165 jobs. Gioia products continued to be produced in more efficient factories in Massachusetts and Missouri. The closure saw an end to 47 years of pasta-making at 1700 Elmwood Avenue.

Stone Butch Blues portrays the struggle of butches like Jess Goldberg and her friends to find consistent and well-paying factory jobs as Buffalo de-industrialized during the 1970s. In response, Jess chooses to take testosterone, have “top surgery” (breast removal) to masculinize her appearance, and “pass” as a man—Jesse—to both lessen the ostracism she faces in the lesbian community as a butch and better her chances for employment. “Passing” allows Jess to find work at a macaroni plant, but changes the way others see her and, by extension, how she sees herself. She explains:

"I remember the morning I left work at the macaroni plant just before dawn. I was walking up Elmwood toward my bike. A woman on the sidewalk ahead of me looked over her shoulder nervously. I slowed my pace as she crossed the street and hurried away. She was afraid of me. That’s when I began to understand that passing changed almost everything."

The macaroni plant Feinberg references in this scene is undoubtedly the Gioia Macaroni Company factory, given both the location of Elmwood Avenue and the fact that Gioia was the only pasta manufacturing company in the Western New York area.

101 East Avenue, North Tonawanda, New York

Ray Confer, founder of the Confer Plastics Company, was born in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, in 1922. Following his service in World War II, he took a position with Norton Laboratories in Lockport, New York, where he began to dabble in plastics chemistry and product design. By the 1960s, he was able to purchase his own plastics molding equipment and with his business partner, Pete Schurman, found a small company called Air Mold, which allowed him to further develop his knowledge of blow molding technologies. Several years later, he opened a larger firm at 580 Fillmore Avenue in Tonawanda, New York, called Air Lock Plastics, with several other business associates. In 1973 Confer opened his own firm with his son, Confer Plastics, Inc. 

From 1973 to 1986, Confer was housed within the Roblin Steel Complex at 101 East Avenue near Oliver Street in North Tonawanda, New York. Roblin opened in May of 1967, and their one-million-square-foot steel works occupied the former location of the Buffalo Bolt Company, which had closed in 1959. Roblin’s history, like that of Bethlehem Steel, is marked by multiple union battles over pay, hours, and working conditions. The company’s production declined throughout the 1970s along with the American steel industry as a whole, and in 1986 the East Avenue complex formally closed.

With Roblin out of business, Confer Plastics moved to a new manufacturing facility at 97 Witmer Road in North Tonawanda. Confer became known for their innovative blow molding machines, which were among the largest in the world. Ray Confer died in 1999. The company that bears his name continues to operate at the Witmer Road complex. 

Jess, passing as a man, takes a job at a plastics factory in Tonawanda where no one knows her, yet contemplates leaving due to the brutal conditions of the factory:

"I felt light-headed and dizzy. My stomach clenched. I was about to heave my guts up. The worst part of it was I knew I couldn’t leave the injection-mold machine I was working on. If I switched it off, the plastic would harden throughout the machine. The machines ran continuously—the repetitive sounds were the music we worked to in the molding department… I wanted to stay at this plant. No one knew me out here in Tonawanda, on the outskirts of Buffalo. But working that machine was making me sick. Maybe it was worth taking a risk and bidding for this job."

Given the time period, location, and description of a blow molding machine, Feinberg is most likely referencing the Confer Plastics plant. While Ray Confer saw the founding of his company as evidence of the “American Dream,” Feinberg’s focus on workers, like Jess, versus management reveals the sacrifice of laboring in a plastics factory (one’s health for a steady paycheck).

3354 Delaware Avenue, Tonawanda, New York

Milton J. Brounshidle American Legion Post No. 205 (also known as Memorial Hall) is located at 3354 Delaware Avenue in the Town of Tonawanda, New York, just north of the City of Buffalo. The American Legion Post was founded in the village of Kenmore, New York, on August 8, 1919. By 1925, the post had outgrown its previous meeting locations at the Kenmore Village Hall and the Odd Fellow’s Temple/Machinists Hall. 

A new meeting hall, designed by architect James R. White, was constructed between 1926 and 1927 in early twentieth-century Classical Revival style. It was designed as a memorial to seven Tonawanda service members who died during World War I, including Milton J. Brounshidle, the first young man from the town slain during the war, whom the legion post is named after. Brounshidle, a machine gunner, was killed in action in St. Mihiel, France, on September 28, 1918.  

The two-story masonry building contains Classical Revival elements such as stone pilasters, a continuous entablature that surmounts the building, and a pediment with cast stone detailing. The interior includes a lobby and a main meeting room consisting of a large open space with a wood floor, plaster walls, and a decorative plaster ceiling with a sunburst motif.

Workers at the plastics plant where Jess Goldberg is employed (likely a fictionalized version of Confer Plastics) seek to form a union and organize for better conditions following a string of serious accidents. They hold a meeting at a “VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] post down the road” from the plant in North Tonawanda, probably based on Memorial Hall (also known as VFW Post No. 205). There, Jess encounters her old friend Duffy, a communist and organizer for a textile workers union. After Duffy accidentally outs Jess, who was passing as a man, by referring to her as “she,” Jess has no choice but to give up a job she hoped to keep. Through this scene, Feinberg emphasizes the point that if workers were better willing to organize across differences such as gender, unions would ultimately be stronger. 

300 Parkside Avenue, Buffalo, New York

Olmsted Parks & Parkway Historic District

The Buffalo Zoological Gardens, established in 1875, is the third oldest institution of its kind in the United States. The zoo saw its origins in 1870 when Jacob E. Bergtold, a local furrier, donated a pair of deer to the city that were housed in the northeast corner of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Delaware Park (the centerpiece of Olmsted’s larger parks and parkways system). 

By 1875, other local donations of animals led the deer park to expand into a formal zoo, then known as the Buffalo Zoological Gardens. The Shelter House, the oldest building on the grounds, functioned as a rest stop for visitors of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. The zoo transformed alongside the City of Buffalo and developed rapidly between 1875 and 1930. The Zoological Society of Buffalo, founded in 1931, oversaw the growing institution. 

Between 1938 and 1942, the Zoological Gardens underwent a rehabilitation funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), who recruited architects and artists from across the country to build new public works projects. The Main Animal Building and the Reptile House were constructed during this period. Several years prior, in 1935, John E. Brent, Buffalo’s first African American architect, had been hired by the Buffalo Parks Department as a Junior Landscape Architect. One of Brent’s most significant contributions to Buffalo’s architectural heritage was a redesigned Entrance Court for the Buffalo Zoological Gardens, which became the focal point of the grounds. Brent’s design was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. 

The city turned operation of the zoo over to the Zoological Society of Buffalo in 1973. Since then, the Buffalo Zoo, as it is now commonly known, has shifted in focus from a site of amusement and entertainment to one of education and zoological conservation. Its buildings and landscape also embody the growth of Buffalo as a city.

When Jess Goldberg takes Scotty and Kim, the children of her friend Gloria, to the Buffalo Zoo, she is met with hostility when purchasing refreshments at the concession stand. The man behind the counter glares at Jess in open disgust and sarcastically refers to her as “sir.” In Stone Butch Blues, the Buffalo Zoo functions as a symbol of the ways queer and gender nonconforming people, like Jess, do not have equal access to public spaces within cities. It also represents Jess’s butch identity. She, like the animals, feels caged and on display.

1239 Niagara Street, Buffalo, New York

Upper Black Rock Certified Local Historic District

1239 Niagara Street, located in the Upper Black Rock Historic District, has been home to two gay bars over the course of its history: T&T Western Paradise and M.C. Compton’s. Both are represented in Stone Butch Blues. Before the Tiki Restaurant, Feinberg frequented the T&T. T&T was first opened as a country western bar by husband and wife team Tony and Tanya (T&T) Pyszka. The bar “went gay” around the late 1960s, as the Pyszkas sought to capitalize on the lack of social spaces for gay Buffalonians. But increased scrutiny, coupled with financial and marital difficulties, caused the T&T to go out of business. The bar likely inspired the fictional Abba’s in Feinberg’s novel.

Following the closure of the T&T, the space became home to an Italian restaurant called DeSalvo’s. In 1980, Sherrill Cooper, a former English teacher and stockbroker, purchased and remodeled the building into a lesbian bar named M.C. Compton’s. The name was inspired by Cooper’s grandmother, Myrtle Cooper Compton, who performed at the London Palladium. Cooper was eager to embark on a new venture, and she felt gay women in Buffalo needed a place where they felt welcome. However, 13 days before M.C. Compton’s was set to open, 1239 Niagara Street was the victim of arson. It took another year for the bar to be rehabilitated, but Compton’s finally opened in 1981 and remained in business until 2001 when Cooper felt it was time to move on.

Over its 20-year lifespan, the bar underwent several name changes in order to remain exciting and relevant. For a time, the bar adopted a country western theme and was known as “The Round Up.” Other names included “Images” and “Compton’s After Dark,” though most community members knew the bar simply as “Compton’s.” Cooper notes that Compton’s had a “special spirit” where patrons felt safe and protected and could enjoy themselves. By this time, the bar had little trouble with the Buffalo police. Compton’s was primarily a lesbian bar, but everyone was welcome. Cooper also sought to use Compton’s as a space for advocacy and community fundraising, particularly around HIV/AIDS.

One such fundraiser, organized by community member Terence Fregoe in support of ACT UP Western New York, was called Passing Fancy. Held on April 10, 1992, the event featured a lecture by Leslie Feinberg on “passing women” (people assigned female at birth who lived socially and/or identified as men) throughout history entitled “In Our Own Voice.” The research presented formed the basis of Feinberg’s second book, Transgender Warriors. The talk was followed by a women’s drag show—a first for Buffalo. The evening capped off with discussion, food, and dancing, and members of ACT UP Western New York and Workers World were present to distribute informational literature.

Jess Goldberg, like the “passing women” featured in Feinberg’s talk, takes testosterone and lives for a time as a man. Although “passing” as a man allows Jess to be seen as a whole person and betters her chances for employment, it also erases the complexity of her history. “Believe me… you’re not alone in feeling that you’re not a man or a woman,” Edna, one of Jess’s femme lovers, tells her. “You’re more than just neither, honey. There’s other ways to be than either-or. It’s not so simple. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many people who don’t fit.”

Jess flees Buffalo for New York City, hoping to find acceptance and community. But New York is gritty and difficult and has its own challenges. In the 1980s, Jess returns to Buffalo to make peace with her past and find her mentor, Butch Al. Jess and her friends, all former butches from the 1950s and 1960s bar scene, visit “a working-class bar on the outskirts of Buffalo.” 

Given the time period and the bar’s description, Feinberg certainly drew inspiration from M.C. Compton’s. Compton’s, unlike other gay bars at the time, was located outside Buffalo’s downtown in a mixed commercial and industrial area (the Black Rock neighborhood). Feinberg further describes the bar’s layout as a front room with a dance floor in back and as having a crowd of mixed genders and ages (like M.C. Compton’s). The Lavender Door, an old-timey lesbian bar located at 32 Tonawanda Street (demolished), was another well-known establishment, but its typically older crowd does not match Feinberg’s depiction.

400 Forest Avenue, Buffalo, New York

Buffalo State Hospital Historic District

The cornerstone of the former “Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane” was laid on September 15, 1872, but construction was not completed until 1880 due to problems obtaining funds from the State Legislature. The opening of the asylum, the fifth such institution in New York State, meant Western New Yorkers need not travel elsewhere for mental health care. The formidable 400,000 square foot complex of buildings, constructed of brown brick and brown sandstone sourced from quarries in Orleans County, was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. Richardson is often considered America’s first great architect and influenced successors Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. With the Buffalo State Asylum, he created the first example of what became a distinctive and much imitated architectural style, known today as Richardsonian Romanesque and characterized by rusticated masonry, round arches, and square towers.

Richardson’s design, comprised of eleven interconnected buildings, represented the latest thinking regarding the care of the mentally ill. Different types of patients were housed in separate buildings, wards included 210-foot-long walkways where residents could move about, and large, southern-facing windows created sun-filled rooms that brought the outdoors in. Common areas were also constructed without doors to encourage patients to mingle. Women were housed on the western half of the complex and men on the east. The grounds were designed by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Buffalo’s parks and parkways system, and Calvert Vaux. Late nineteenth-century theories of mental health, such as those espoused by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, dictated that patients needed light and movement, and the grounds included parks, farmland, and greenhouses worked by residents.

The asylum, later renamed the Buffalo State Hospital and then the Buffalo Psychiatric Center, reached peak population in 1957 with 3,664 residents. Mid-twentieth-century developments in pharmaceutical treatments and a philosophy that emphasized outpatient care caused the patient population to decline. By 1974, many of Richardson’s original buildings were no longer needed, and patients were moved to a new facility within the complex. By the early 1980s, plans were underway to rehabilitate the former asylum into an apartment complex, although this never came to fruition. 

The asylum was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986. Today, the buildings are collectively known as the Richardson Olmsted Complex, and in 2006, the Richardson Center Corporation formed to revive the former asylum through a state appropriation. The administration and flanking buildings were rehabilitated to function as a boutique hotel and also house the Lipsey Architecture Center, Buffalo. The remaining buildings have been stabilized and are also under redevelopment.

The Buffalo State Asylum appears twice in Stone Butch Blues. When eleven-year-old Jess Goldberg is caught dressed in her father’s clothes, imagining who she will grow up to be, her parents briefly institutionalize her. Jess is discharged for good behavior, but is newly aware of the ways society oppresses those who are gender-different:

"I had learned a lot in three weeks. I realized that the world could do more than just judge me, it wielded tremendous power over me. I didn’t care anymore if my parents didn’t love me. I had accepted that fact in the three weeks I’d survived alone in this hospital. But now I didn’t care. I hated them. And I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust anyone. My mind was focused on escape. I wanted to get out of this place and run away from home."

After Jess moves to New York City in the late 1970s, she returns to Buffalo to make peace with her past and find her mentor, Butch Al. Jess’s old gang, after much prodding, informs her Al is in the asylum on Elmwood Avenue (the Richardson Olmsted Complex is at the intersection of Forest and Elmwood Avenues). Jess, posing as Al’s nephew, pays her a visit:

"I felt connected to the Triumph [motorcycle] as I turned sharply into the curves of the expressway. An old power flowed through me. That exhilaration drained the moment I cut the engine in the parking lot of the asylum. I took off my helmet and looked up at the medieval building. Every window was latticed with iron bars. A cold shiver ran through me. But I wanted to see Al more than I wanted to run away."

Al, who has retreated inside herself due to the world’s cruelty, experiences a moment of lucidity, and Jess is able to thank her for the care and wisdom she imparted.

Feinberg's novel describes two distinct reasons queer people were historically institutionalized: gender and sexual nonconformity and mental health issues resulting from oppression. Jess, unlike Butch Al, survives mostly intact and is able to tell her story to future generations. That story is Stone Butch Blues.

143 East State Street (141 The Commons), Ithaca, New York

Ithaca Downtown Historic District

The Firebrand Books building is located at 143 East State Street on The Commons, a pedestrian mall in downtown Ithaca, New York. The building was constructed in 1872 for the prominent local publishing and bookselling firm Andrus, McChain, & Lyons (later Andrus & Church) and was designed by architect Alfred B. (A. B.) Dale. It is a four-story commercial brick row building with Italianate influence. 

In 1929, Andrus & Church relocated to the adjacent Sprague Block, and the building was occupied by the Home Dairy Company, a chain of cafeteria-style restaurants and bakeries that specialized in “old-fashioned” home cooked foods. Home Dairy was founded by Frank E. Allen, a businessman from Pittsford, New York. By the mid-twentieth century, Allen owned 28 Home Dairy locations throughout Upstate New York and one in Pennsylvania. 

The Ithaca Home Dairy, which opened on August 26, 1929, was co-owned by Allen and brothers Emery and Leigh Howell. At this time, the original cast iron storefront was either replaced or covered with a wood façade of golden oak and a signboard with gilt lettering. Prism glass, a popular feature of early twentieth-century storefronts, was also added to the transom area above the display windows to provide better interior lighting.

The building, and the business, were sold in 1971 to husband and wife Robert and Nancy Avery.  The Averys owned and operated Home Dairy until 2002. During their tenure, the upper three stories of the building functioned as rental space for a host of Ithaca businesses including, from 1984 to 2000, the headquarters of Firebrand Books.

Local activist, editor, and publisher Nancy K. Bereano founded Firebrand Books, a small lesbian and feminist press, in 1984. Bereano began her career in publishing as editor for the Feminist Series at Crossing Press, a small publishing house founded by John and Elaine Gill then located in Trumansburg, New York. She published 17 titles over her four years at Crossing. Despite bringing notoriety to the press, Bereano was fired in 1984. Crossing incorrectly claimed the Feminist Series was not making enough money.

One month later, she founded Firebrand Books in Ithaca with financial support from family and friends, most notably the well-known lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Bereano took up residence on the second floor of 143 East State Street (listed under the address 141 The Commons). The prominent location of The Commons made the building an ideal choice for Bereano who, true to the name of her press, wanted to make her mark on the publishing world.

Firebrand soon became a nationally-recognized leader of the publishing revolution that occurred during the Second Wave Feminist and Women in Print movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The press produced work in a wide variety of genres by ethnically and racially diverse authors such as Dorothy Allison, Alison Bechdel, Leslie Feinberg, Jewelle Gomez, and Audre Lorde. 

Feinberg’s semi-autobiographical novel Stone Butch Blues, published by Firebrand in March of 1993, was one of the first published works of transgender fiction. In her cover letter to Bereano, Feinberg described her novel as follows:

"I grew up in Buffalo. As a working class Jewish lesbian I came of age in and worked at the factories until they closed. Like the other butch women Liz Kennedy’s oral histories document, I had few options. We were unwelcome in the post-Stonewall gay and lesbian movement and beaten, harassed and murdered on the streets. For some of us, the only alternative was to try and pass… My novel is the first to be written by a self-identified passing woman and because of that, I think it will make room for other lesbians who are also struggling to understand and represent their own gender struggles. And these experiences offer rich insight for all women into the ways race, sex and class impact on gender."

Stone Butch Blues became Firebrand’s overall best-selling title. By 1996, 30,000 copies had been sold (a significant number for a small press). “It opened transgender issues to a much wider issue than had existed before,” Bereano observed in a 1997 interview with Lambda Book Report. “God only knows it shook up my life,” she continued. “I think that I was probably on the same political awareness level as a lot of lesbian feminists out there in terms of trans issues.”

Following Stone Butch Blues’s release, Leslie Feinberg and her partner Minnie Bruce Pratt, also a Firebrand author, embarked on a southern tour, which lasted from July 25 to August 10, 1993. The pair visited, and read, at a series of women’s bookstores, including Lammas Bookstore in Washington, D.C., White Rabbit Books in Raleigh, North Carolina, Iris Books in Gainesville Florida, Rubyfruit Books in Tallahassee, Florida, Charis Books in Atlanta, Georgia, and Lodestar Books in Birmingham, Alabama. 

In 1996, Bereano was recognized with the Lambda Literary Publisher’s Service Award for her contributions to LGBTQ and small press publishing. Due to the changing economics of the book trade, Firebrand closed its doors in 2000 after sixteen years in operation. Stephen Landesman, writing about Bereano’s retirement for The Ithaca Journal, described Firebrand Books as a “widely renowned press” and “one of the most prestigious lesbian, gay, and feminist publishers in the world.” On October 5, 2022, the Ithaca Common Council unanimously voted to designate the building at 143 East State Street as a historic landmark.

Feinberg recovered the rights to her novel in 2002, and Alyson Books, a Boston-based publishing house that specialized in LGBTQ fiction and non-fiction, published a new paperback edition of Stone Butch Blues in November of 2003. However, by 2010, Alyson went the way of Firebrand and numerous other small feminist and queer presses and closed. During the fall of 2014, Feinberg, who was critically ill with late-stage lyme disease, released a self-published 20th anniversary author edition of the novel to, in alignment with her Marxist principles, make it free and accessible to all. 

16 Linwood Avenue/67 North Street, Buffalo, New York

Allentown Historic District

The Episcopal Church of the Ascension, which today is home to the non-profit organization Ascension for the Arts, is a contributing resource to the Allentown Historic District. By the 1850s, as the City of Buffalo expanded northward and the Allentown neighborhood developed, an additional Episcopal Church was needed. In 1855, a small wood-frame chapel was constructed on the corner of North Street and Linwood Avenue. The congregation grew, and in 1872, a new building, designed by architect Gordon W. Lloyd, was constructed on the site of the original chapel. The style of the church is Romanesque Revival, and the building features brown Medina sandstone walls, memorial stained-glass windows, and a slate roof. The first service was held in 1873. A parlor addition was added to the main building in 1920. 

From the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, Church of the Ascension hosted “Live and Let Live,” a lesbian/gay Alcoholics Anonymous group, every Friday at 8:30 p.m. In 2008, leaders of Episcopal congregations in Buffalo authored an open letter to LGBTQ people in Western New York apologizing for potential harm the church may have caused and offered support to LGBTQ people in their battles with hatred, bigotry, prejudice, and violence. 

By 2015, the congregation’s membership was in significant decline. The Church of the Ascension closed, and the buildings were vacated. Today, the former church functions as a community theater arts space.

Leslie Feinberg returned to her native Buffalo for the launch of Stone Butch Blues. A book-signing and celebration was held on Saturday, February 20, 1993 in the Ascension Church Hall. The sponsoring committee for the event included ACT UP Western New York, singer-songwriter and activist Madeline Davis, the Buffalo Gay & Lesbian Community Network, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, lesbian activist Marge Maloney, poet Minnie Bruce Pratt (Feinberg’s partner), Pridepath magazine founder and community organizer Carol Speser, and Workers World, among other organizations and individuals.

More than 150 people packed Church of the Ascension to hear Feinberg read from Stone Butch Blues. According to reporting by the Workers World Buffalo, New York Bureau: 

"Those attending demonstrated the heightened awareness of transgender oppression in the Buffalo area. This is due in part to Feinberg’s frequent visits and lectures here. Posters, leaflets, and invitations all over the city had announced the book signing. The Buffalo News had carried a lengthy article about Feinberg and the book. Feinberg appeared on a cable TV show and a radio talk show before the event."

The program began with remarks from local activist Bette Spero, who welcomed Feinberg back to Buffalo. A congratulatory message from Joan Nestle of the Lesbian Herstory Archives was read. Spero then introduced publisher Nancy K. Bereano, “the firebrand behind Firebrand Books.” “Stone Butch Blues made me think and rethink my world,” remarked Bereano. “[The book is] a warm, open, intellectually gifted experience.” 

Feinberg then took the stage: “I am proud to have the first book signing in Buffalo, proud to be a blue-collar child of the industrial working class of this city… I thank you all for sharing what is the happiest night of my life.” 

The program concluded with Feinberg reading two passages from her novel. The celebration lasted for several more hours, and a cake was served that featured the novel’s cover rendered in icing.

Following its release, Stone Butch Blues soon became, in the words of lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, “one of those books that spilled right out of its binding and into the world, changing the landscape irrevocably.”

"[Stone Butch Blues is] one of those books that spilled right out of its binding and into the world, changing the landscape irrevocably.” —Alison Bechdel

681 Main Street, Buffalo, New York

Theater Historic District

Located at 681 Main Street in downtown Buffalo in what is today the Theater Historic District, the Sidney B. Pfeifer Theatre was constructed circa 1932. The building housed the Town Casino, opened in 1948 as a nightclub and concert venue, and was then the Center Theatre. The Town was owned by Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theatre from 1965 to 1978 and was leased by the University at Buffalo (UB) from 1978 to 1985. At that time the UB Foundation purchased the Center Theatre from Studio Arena Theatre, and the venue was renamed the Sidney B. Pfeifer Theatre. Pfeifer was a UB-educated lawyer and native Buffalonian who did work for various theatrical enterprises. The theatre was primarily used by the University’s Department of Theatre and Dance, but was also available for use by local community groups. UB sold 681 Main Street in 2000. The venue was renovated and has been known as the Town Ballroom since 2005.

A staged reading of excerpts from Stone Butch Blues was performed as part of Dykes Do Drag, a series of lesbian variety shows produced by theater director Margaret Smith, at the Pfeifer Theatre on May 6, 1995. Dykes Do Drag was founded out of the success of the 1992 Passing Fancy women’s drag show at M. C. Compton’s. The popularity of the series then led to the founding of HAG Theatre, a Buffalo-based lesbian theatre company “dedicated to presenting the lesbian voice on stage,” in 1994. Selections from Feinberg’s novel were performed by company members Robbie Butler and Kate Elliott during the prologue to Act I. HAG Theatre’s dramatization of portions of Stone Butch Blues embodies the book’s magnitude to Buffalo’s queer, and in particular lesbian, community.

The windows are dark and dusty.

The sign on the door says “open.”

No lights are on; no one is there.

It’s been 35 years

since the lights were on.

Handsome women in white shirts;

pretty women in flowered dresses

danced and laughed and flirted.

They are gone now.

They are mostly dead and hardly anyone remembers.

Mostly, they are dead, but these pages remember

… and I remember and I miss them and the world they built and the strength and

the anger and the love that was at the center.

—Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold 25th Anniversary Edition (2018)

Leslie Feinberg's Buffalo was created to coincide with, and celebrate, the 30th anniversary of the publication of Stone Butch Blues (Firebrand Books, 1993) and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Routledge, 1993).

Thank you to Leslie, Madeline, and Liz for leading the way.

Leslie Feinberg's Buffalo was made possible with funding from the Kermit C. & Janice I. Parsons Scholarship from Cornell University's Department of City and Regional Planning.

Curator and Exhibit Designer: Jeff Iovannone.

Editor and Proofreader: Tabitha O'Connell.

Thank you to the following individuals who provided guidance, support, or research assistance: Nancy K. Bereano (Firebrand Books publisher and editor), Tom Bolze (Yale University), Dan DiLandro (SUNY Buffalo State, Archives & Special Collections), Hope Dunbar (SUNY Buffalo State, Archives & Special Collections), Donna Eschenbrenner (The History Center in Tompkins County), Christiana Limniatis (Preservation Buffalo Niagara), Ken Lustbader (Co-Director, NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project), Brenda Marston (Curator, Human Sexuality Collection, Cornell University), Tabitha O'Connell (Preservation Buffalo Niagara), Carol Speser (community organizer), Cynthia Van Ness (Buffalo History Museum Research Library), Stephen Vider (Cornell University), and Sara Warner (Cornell University).

Stephen Vider deserves a special thank you for his mentorship. Leslie Feinberg's Buffalo began to take shape as a project for his Making Public Queer History course, taught at Cornell University, fall 2021.

Exhibit text copyright © Jeff Iovannone, 2023.

Images from this exhibit should not be copied, shared, or reproduced without the express permission of the organizations or individuals to whom they belong. All images have been used with permission or are available for public use.

1. The Buffalo History Museum, Research Library.
2. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.
3. The History Center in Tompkins County, Research Library & Archives.
4. Human Sexuality Collection, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Libraries.
5. Lesbian Herstory Archives, Audio/Visual Collections, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold Audio Recordings, 1977-1990.

1. Anthony "Tony" Zanetta with Jeff Iovannone, November 28, 2021.
2. Camille S. Hopkins with Jeff Iovannone, September 14, 2018.
3. Carol Speser with Jeff Iovannone, October 5, 2018.
4. Dr. Elizabeth McCauley with Jeff Iovannone, December 21, 2020.
5. Madeline Davis with Jeff Iovannone, September 6, 2019.
6. Margaret Smith with Jeff Iovannone, October 14, 2021.
7. Marge Maloney with Jeff Iovannone, October 21 & 28, 2020.
8. Marilyn "Mernie" Kern with Jeff Iovannone, December 17, 2019.
9. Nancy K. Bereano with Jeff Iovannone, September 27, 2019.
10. Rick Landman with Jeff Iovannone, July 6, 2019.
11. Sherrill Cooper with Jeff Iovannone, October 16, 2021.

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33. Smith, Richard Norton. On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller. New York: Random House, 2014.
34. Taylor, Henry Lewis. African Americans and the Rise of Buffalo's Post-Industrial City, 1940 to Present. Buffalo: Buffalo Urban League, 1990.
35. Williams, Lillian. Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999.

1. Bobbi Prebis oral history transcripts. The Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project, circa 1982. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.
2. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary edition. Self-published by author, 2014.
3. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.
4. “Liquor License Revoked by SLA.” Buffalo Courier-Express, February 10, 1964.

1. “24 Warrants Issued for Unionists After Bell Riots.” The Albany Times Union, September 9, 1949.
2. DeCroix, Douglas W. “Poking Through Jello: Bell Aircraft and the Quest to Break the Sound Barrier.” Western New York Heritage, Fall 2022.
3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary edition. Self-published by author, 2014.
4. Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.
5. Leuthner, Stuart. “Larry Bell: Portrait of an Aviation Pioneer.” Western New York Heritage, Spring 2006.

1. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary edition. Self-published by author, 2014.
2. “The History of Bennett High School, Buffalo, New York, 1923-2020,” Bennett High Alumni Association, 2020. https://www.bennettalumni.com/bennett-high-school/about-bennnett-high-school/.
3. McDonough, Kevin J. “Bennett High School.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, August 18, 1984.
4. Pratt, Minnie Bruce. “Transgender Pioneer and Stone Butch Blues Author Leslie Feinberg Has Died.” The Advocate, November 17, 2014.

1. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary edition. Self-published by author, 2014.
2. Goldman, Mary Kunz and Elizabeth Barr. "Stardust Memories Surrounded by Priceless Mementoes of His Unusual, Glittering Life in Burlesque, Tangarra, Recognized as Buffalo's First Female Impersonator, Looks Back at a Past That No Longer Exists." Buffalo News, March 11, 2001.
3. Higgs, Norma. “The ‘Golden Days’ of Music in Niagara Falls.” Niagara Gazette, July 29, 2019.
4. “Ninfa DiRocco Advertisement.” Niagara Falls Gazette, May 17, 1954.
5. “Restaurant Owner Here Dies at 81.” Niagara Falls Gazette, May 7, 1969.
6. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1914, updated to 1950. Library of Congress.
7. “SLA License of Ninfa’s is Revoked.” Niagara Falls Gazette, April 14, 1971. 
8. Tangarra Photo Album, 2016. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.

Including Leslie Feinberg's Apartment Building 

1. “400 Elmwood Avenue.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, May 22, 1979.
2. “Building Permits.” Buffalo Evening News, March 10, 1922. 
3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary edition. Self-published by author, 2014.
4. Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.
5. Feinberg, Leslie. “While a Hostile Relative Re-writes My Life.” Lambda Literary, January 19, 2011.
6. Feinberg, Leslie and Minnie Bruce Pratt. “Self,” 2014. https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/self/.
7. Iovannone, Jeffry J. "510 Tacoma Avenue." Preservation Buffalo Niagara Gay Places Initiative, 2020. https://preservationbuffaloniagara.org/blog-post/gay-places-with-dr-jeff-510-tacoma-ave/.
8. Iovannone, Jeffry J. “Leslie Feinberg: Transgender Warrior.” Queer History For the People, June 23, 2018. https://medium.com/queer-history-for-the-people/leslie-feinberg-transgender-warrior-fcb1bcaf15b2.
9. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.
10. “Local ‘Mrs.’ Winners Named.” Buffalo Courier-Express, March 30, 1958.
11. “New AM&A Head Named.” Olean Times Herald, January 29, 1979.
12. Pratt, Minnie Bruce. “Transgender Pioneer and Stone Butch Blues Author Leslie Feinberg Has Died.” The Advocate, November 17, 2014.
13. Smith, Rita. “‘58 Mrs. Buffalo Writes Two Books.” Buffalo Courier-Express, July 19, 1959.
14. Smith, Rita. “Buffalo Housewife Author 2nd Time.” Buffalo Courier-Express, May 1, 1960.
15. Smith, Rita. “Contest Entries to Speak Out.” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 2, 1958.
16. Stein, Gregory P. “‘Buffalo Doubles’: Industrial Vernacular Style.” Buffalo as an Architectural Museum. https://buffaloah.com/a/archsty/indver/stein/.
17. Taussig, Ellen. “Young Mother Starts Writing Career.” Buffalo Evening News, March 12, 1957.
18. Wartenberg, Carol. “Bennett Student Aims At Career in Theater.” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 15, 1967.
19. “Weddings and Engagements: Feinberg-Hyde.” Buffalo Courier-Express, May 29, 1948.

Including Benjy's Lounge & Restaurant, Laughlin's, Coffee Encores, the Eagle Inn, & Club Ki-Yo 

1. “2 Charged In Raid On Restaurant.” Buffalo Courier-Express, March 11, 1968.
2. “341-343 Franklin Street Application for Landmark/Landmark Site.” Buffalo Preservation Board, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, 2017. 
3. Barnette, Ken. “Where Art Appreciation, Criticism Are Brewing.” Buffalo Evening News Magazine, August 29, 1959.
4. Damron, Bob. Bob Damron’s Address Book ‘68. San Francisco: Damron, 1968.
5. Davis, Madeline. Femme Finale, 2021. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/lgbtq_publications/4.
6. “Federal Style Architecture in Buffalo, NY, 1790-1830.” Buffalo as an Architectural Museum. https://buffaloah.com/a/DCTNRY/f/fed.html.
7. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
8. Iovannone, Jeffry J. "330 Franklin Street." Preservation Buffalo Niagara Gay Places Initiative, 2020. https://preservationbuffaloniagara.org/blog-post/gay-places-with-dr-jeff-330-franklin-street/.
9. Iovannone, Jeffry J. “Beyond Stonewall: The Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier and Gay Liberation.” Digital Commons @ Buffalo State, 2019. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/lgbtq_publications/1.
10. “James Francis Garrow Obituary.” The Tampa Tribune, October 9, 1984.
11. “Kenneth P. Kennedy Obituary.” Buffalo News, January 31, 1994.
12. “Looking Backward: Franklin & Tupper, 1948.” The Public, January 5, 2016.
13. Mattice, Debra A. “343 Franklin Street.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, June 1, 1988.
14. “Tiki Restaurant Advertisement.” Buffalo Courier-Express, December 6th, 1968.

1. “496 Michigan, Little Harlem Hotel.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, March 13, 1980.
2. Baldwin, Richard E. “Migration from South, Jobs Lure Negroes to Buffalo.” Buffalo Courier-Express, February 14, 1968.
3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
4. Fraser, Alison. “Little Harlem Club Collection Report, Rare Books Room, Buffalo/Erie County Public Library,” 2013. https://www.buffalolib.org/sites/default/files/special-collections/rare-books/LHC%20Report.pdf.
5. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.
6. Locke, Henry D., Jr. “Humble and Mighty Share a Table With Nostalgia at Little Harlem Club.” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 8, 1977.
7. Locke, Henry D., Jr. “Mrs. A.M. Woodson Dies; Hotel Owner.” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 12, 1978.
8. Locke, Henry D., Jr. “Mrs. Anna M. Woodson Dies; Noted Hotel Owner.” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 12, 1978.
9. McNeil, Harold. “Fire Destroys Landmark Club for Black Stars: Little Harlem Hotel Lost.” The Buffalo News, February 13, 1993.
10. Trammell, Brent. “Historical Narrative: Little Harlem.” Trammell Associates, 1991.
11. Williams, Lillian. Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999.

Including Kleinhans Music Hall 

1. Banham, Reyner, Charles Beveridge, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Buffalo Architecture: A Guide. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.
2. Clark, Austin R. and Mark D. Donnelly. A City Built by Giants: The Architectural Masters that Shaped Buffalo, New York. Buffalo: RPSS Publishing, 2020.
3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
4. “Heart Failure Suddenly Ends Kleinhans’ Life.” Buffalo Courier-Express, May 22, 1903
5. “His Love of Music Led to a Generous Gift.” Buffalo Evening News, June 9, 1934.
6. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.
7. “Kleinhans Music Hall.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, January 23, 1979. 
8. “Mrs. Kleinhans is Dead After Brief Illness.” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 30, 1934.
9. Smith, Katherine H. “Building Here Honors Brisbane Family.” Buffalo Courier-Express, February 12, 1956.

Including Ralph Martin's Grill & the Genesee Hotel

1. “8 Arrested Under Stiffer Vice Law.” Buffalo Courier-Express, September 30, 1978.
2. “308 Pearl Street.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, July 10, 1979.
3. “1931, A Landslide to Deco!” Buffalo Evening News, January 18, 1932.
4. Bray, D. John. “Oasis in the Night: Remembering Deco and Buffalo’s ‘Best Cup of Coffee.’” The Buffalo News, November 27, 1994.
5. Damron, Bob. Bob Damron’s Address Book '79. San Francisco: Damron, 1979.
6. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
7. “The Freshness of Deco Coffee.” Buffalo Courier-Express, October 30, 1933.
8. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.
9. Mapping the Gay Guides, 2019. https://www.mappingthegayguides.org/.
10. “Police Arrest 7 Men Dressed as Women.” Buffalo Evening News, June 1, 1948.
11. Ross, Claire L. “Joseph Ellicott Historic District Certification Report.” New York State Cultural Resource Information System, 2004.
12. “YMCA Building, 304 Pearl Street.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, April 1, 1980.

1. Callahan, William F. “Freezer Queen Leases Space in Warehouse.” Buffalo Courier-Express, November 19, 1967.
2. Callahan, William F. “Freezer Queen Goes ‘King-Size.’” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 13, 1968.
3. “Employees End Strike.” Buffalo Courier-Express, October 6, 1973.
4. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
5. “Freezer Queen Foods, Inc.” Historic Resource Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, January 14, 2005.
6. “Freezer Queen Pact Vote Set.” Buffalo Courier-Express, October 4, 1973.
7. “Freezer Queen Strike Is Set.” Buffalo Courier-Express, October 1, 1973.
8. “Freezer Queen to Hire 120 Workers in 30 Days.” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 3, 1976.
9. “Planning Board Approves Freezer Queen Proposal.” WGRZ, May 31, 2016.
10. "Striking Employees Picket Freezer Queen Foods at the Fuhrmann Blvd. Facility," Buffalo Courier-Express, October 2, 1976.

1. Christopher, Matthew. “Bethlehem Steel Lackawanna Plant.” Abandoned America, December 10, 2019. https://www.abandonedamerica.us/lackawanna-steel.
2. Delaney, Paul. “Panel Asserts Bethlehem Steel Discriminates Against Blacks.” New York Times, January 6, 1971.
3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
4. Frisch, Michael and Milton Rogovin. Portraits in Steel. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
5. A History of the City of Buffalo: Its Men and Institutions. Buffalo: The Buffalo Evening News, 1908.

1. Bradley, Betsy H. The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
2. “Buffalo Milk Company Fined, Found Guilty of Mixing Skim Milk and Fresh Milk. Buffalo Courier-Express, February 23, 1908.
3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
4. King, Derek, Matthew Shoen, Kelsie Hoke, and Caitlin Moriarty. “Buffalo Milk Company Building.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, June 26, 2016.
5. “Milk Companies Consolidated.” The Buffalo Commercial, March 22, 1909.
6. Palmer, Robert M. Palmer's Views of Buffalo. New York: 1911. Library of Congress.
7. “The Queen City Dairy Company.” The Buffalo Commercial, April 3, 1909.

Including the Buffalo Radicalesbians Apartment Building

1. Davis, Madeline. Femme Finale, 2021. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/lgbtq_publications/4.
2. DuBois, Ellen. “Women’s Studies in the Thicket of Academe in the 1970s: Liz Kennedy in Buffalo.” Feminist Formations, Vol. 24 No. 3 (Winter 2012): 79-83.
3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
4. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky. “Dreams of Social Justice: Building Women’s Studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo.” In The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from 30 Founding Mothers, edited by Florence Howe, 243-263. New York: The Feminist Press at the City of New York, 2000.
5. Maloney, Patricia A. “Presidential Leadership, Change, and Community: SUNY Buffalo from 1966 to 1981.” In SUNY at Sixty: The Promise of the State University of New York, edited by John B. Clark, W. Leslie Bruce, and Kenneth P. O’Brien, 144-158. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010.
6. “Women’s Studies College Offers Variety of Courses.” Tonawanda News, September 26, 1981.

1. Armao, Jo-Ann. “Hayes Hall-More Than Just a Building.” Buffalo Courier-Express, August 21, 1977.
2. “45 Arrested at UB Arraigned on Second Misdemeanor Count.” Buffalo Courier-Express, March 20, 1970.
3. “45 of UB Faculty Arrested in Sit-In.” Buffalo Courier-Express, March 16, 1970.
4. “300 Students Abandon Building Seized in Protest at State U.” Union-Sun Journal, March 20, 1969.
5. “Edmund B. Hayes Hall.” University at Buffalo, University Archives. https://library.buffalo.edu/archives/campuses/detail.html?ID=25.
6. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
7. Flurry, Sean, Daniel Crowther, and Kerry Traynor. “Edmund B. Hayes Hall.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, January 7, 2016.
8. Frisch, Michael. “Faculty 45 Scrapbook,” circa 1975. Personal collection of Michael Frisch.
9. Haynie, Aeron and Timothy S. Miller, editors. A Memoir of the New Left: The Political Autobiography of Charles A. Haynie. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009.
10. “Legal Points Argued in Case of ‘45.’” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 14, 1970.
11. Maloney, Patricia A. “Presidential Leadership, Change, and Community: SUNY Buffalo from 1966 to 1981.” In SUNY at Sixty: The Promise of the State University of New York, edited by John B. Clark, W. Leslie Bruce, and Kenneth P. O’Brien, 144-158. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010.
12. “UB Radicals Change Tactics.” Buffalo Courier-Express, March 4, 1970.
13. “UB Suspends 20 in Building Takeover.” Buffalo Courier-Express, March 6, 1970.

Including Buffalo City Hall 

1. Davis, Madeline. Femme Finale, 2021. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/lgbtq_publications/4.
2. Davis, Madeline. “Mattachine: The Early Days & The Women.” Box 5, Folder 1. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.
3. “3 Persons Seized In Downtown Raid.” Buffalo Courier-Express, January 5, 1970.
4. “Buffalo Throws City’s Weight Against Infant Mattachine.” The Advocate, April 29, 1970.
5. Crain, Caleb. “Frank Kameny’s Orderly, Square Gay-Rights Activism. The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.
6. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
7. Iovannone, Jeffry J. "330 Franklin Street." Preservation Buffalo Niagara Gay Places Initiative, 2020. https://preservationbuffaloniagara.org/blog-post/gay-places-with-dr-jeff-330-franklin-street/.
8. Iovannone, Jeffry J. “Beyond Stonewall: The Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier and Gay Liberation.” Digital Commons @ Buffalo State, 2019. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/lgbtq_publications/1.
9. “James Francis Garrow Obituary.” The Tampa Tribune, October 9, 1984.
10. “Kenneth P. Kennedy Obituary.” Buffalo News, January 31, 1994.
11. “Moonshine, Wine Center Smashed, Man Arrested.” Buffalo Courier-Express, October 19, 1970.
12. “Pickets Ask Rights For Homosexuals.” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 7, 1970.
13. Preservation Buffalo Niagara. Buffalo City Hall: Americanesque Masterpiece. Buffalo: Preservation Buffalo Niagara, 2021.
14. “Raiders Arrest 11, Evict 94 From Mattachine Club.” Buffalo Evening News, April 4, 1970.
15. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1899. Library of Congress.
16. “Six Summonses Issued in Probe of Clubrooms.” Buffalo Courier-Express, January 6, 1970.
17. “Vice Unit Seizes Three in Raid on Delaware Ave.” Buffalo Evening News, January 5, 1970.

1. Bradburn, Jamie. “How a radical idea turned Loblaws into a supermarket empire,” TVO Today, January 15, 2019. https://www.tvo.org/article/how-a-radical-idea-turned-loblaws-into-a-supermarket-empire.
2. “Buffalo Chain Grocery/Supermarket Locations, 1925-2005,” February 18, 2017. https://www.groceteria.com/place/new-york/buffalo/buffalo-chain-grocerysupermarket-locations-1925-1955/.
3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
4. “Oct. 20, 1959: Loblaws Opens Store at Elmwood and Amherst.” The Buffalo News, October 20, 2014.

1. "12-16 circa: Peggie Ames and Transsexualism, May 1973." Stonewall Nation Radio Program. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/stonewallnation/54.
2. Erickson Educational Foundation Publications. Digital Transgender Archive. https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/col/x059c745c.
3. Feinberg, Diane Leslie. Journal of a Transsexual. New York: World View Publishers, 1980.
4. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
5. Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.
6. Iovannone, Jeffry J. "9500 Clarence Center Road." Preservation Buffalo Niagara Gay Places Initiative, 2020. https://preservationbuffaloniagara.org/blog-post/gay-places-with-dr-jeff-9500-clarence-center-road/.
7. Iovannone, Jeffry. “Erickson Educational Foundation New York Office.” NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, July 2022. https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/erickson-educational-foundation-new-york-office/.
8. Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
9. Neth, David. “Women-Led and World-Renowned: The Children’s Hospital of Buffalo.” Western New York Heritage, Summer 2018.
10. Smith, Katherine H. “Doctor, Mate Help Establish Center.” Buffalo Courier-Express, July 23, 1973.

1. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
2. “History.” Buffalo Museum of Science, 2023. https://www.sciencebuff.org/about-us/.
3. Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier. “Buffalo Museum of Science.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, September 12, 1980.

1. “Borden Purchases Buffalo’s Gioia.” Tonawanda News, November 28, 1986.
2. Dearlove, Ray. “Firm Enjoys Sweet Bend of Success.” Buffalo Courier-Express, June 27, 1971.
3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
4. Wachadlo, Martin and Francis R. Kowsky. “Houk Manufacturing Company.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, December 23, 2013.
5. Gioia, Richard F. and Richard E. Gioia. “Our Family Story.” Gioia Capital. https://gioiacapital.com/story.html.
6. Madore, James T. et al. “Borden Inc. Plans to Close Gioia Plant in Buffalo.” Buffalo News, January 7, 1995.
7. Raeke, Carolyn et al. “Another Part of Buffalo Sold at Gioia Auction.” Buffalo News, August 30, 1995.

Including Air Lock Plastics 

1. “Confer Plastics and the American Dream.” Confer Plastics, Inc. https://www.conferplastics.com/confer-plastics-and-the-american-dream.
2. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
3. Hausle, Daniel G. “5 Arrested in Picket-line Flare-up At Roblin Steel; Tech Stoppage Ends.” Buffalo Courier-Express, October 27, 1979.
4. Hoy, Claire. “Roblin Magic Touch Brings Steel Mill to Life, Next Month is Target For Opening.” Tonawanda News, April 8, 1967.
5. Neal, Donna Zellner. “Guest View: On Buffalo Bolt Co. and Oliver Street,” Niagara Gazette, March 16, 2015. https://www.niagara-gazette.com/opinion/guest-view-on-buffalo-bolt-co-and-oliver-street/article_c1de7c48-d25e-54e6-a7b4-e1a8b0afdb72.html.
6. Wilbur, W.R. History of the Bolt and Nut Industry of America. Cleveland: Ward & Shaw, 1905.

1. “Brounshidle Post Marks 50th Anniversary Today.” Tonawanda News, August 8, 1969.
2. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
3. “Milton J. Brounshidle Post No. 205: Post History.” The American Legion. http://kentonpost205.org/index.php?id=2.
4. Walkowski, Jennifer. “Milton J. Brounshidle Post No. 205/Memorial Hall Resource Evaluation.” New York State Cultural Resource Information System, March 2, 2021.

1. “Buffalo Zoo History Hiding in Plain Sight.” WGRZ, July 20, 2015. https://www.wgrz.com/article/life/buffalo-zoo-history-hiding-in-plain-sight/71-313674380.
2. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
3. Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier. “Main Zoo Building, Delaware.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, September 12, 1980.
4. Ott, Betty J. “Zoo’s Visitor Center to Open With a Roar Saturday Morning.” Buffalo Courier-Express, June 5, 1980.
5. Parker, Christine. “John E. Brent: Buffalo’s First African American Architect.” Western New York Heritage, Fall 2015.
6. Parker, Christine and Preservation Buffalo Niagara. “Out of the Shadows: The Legacy of Buffalo’s First African American Architect: Project Summary Report.” Preservation Buffalo Niagara, November 2017. https://preservationbuffaloniagara.org/wp-content/uploads/Brent-Summary-Report-FINAL.pdf.
7. “A Zoo With a Long History.” Buffalo Zoo. https://buffalozoo.org/about/.

Including The Lavender Door 

1. “3 Tavern Licenses Suspended by SLA.” Buffalo Courier-Express, February 25, 1968.
2. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
3. “M.C. Compton’s: 1239 Niagara St.” Fifth Freedom, December 1981.
4. Passing Fancy Program, April 10, 1992. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.
5. Smith, Margaret. “Buffalo Guide.” Erie Gay Community Newsletter, November 1994. 
6. “T&T Western Paradise Advertisement.” Niagara Falls Gazette, January 7, 1955.

1. Banham, Reyner, Charles Beveridge, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Buffalo Architecture: A Guide. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.
2. “Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane (State Lunatic Hospital).” National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, June 24, 1986.
3. Clark, Austin R. and Mark D. Donnelly. A City Built by Giants: The Architectural Masters that Shaped Buffalo, New York. Buffalo: RPSS Publishing, 2020.
4. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary ed. Self-published by author, 2014.
5. Roth, Richard J. “Apartment Plan for State Asylum to be Presented.” Buffalo Courier-Express, April 9, 1981.

1. “Andrus Will Filed: Estate Worth $90,000.” Ithaca Journal, January 9, 1918.
2. "Bereano Founds Firebrand." Motheroot Journal, vol. 5, no. 3-4 (Winter 1984): 4.
3. “Centennial of Pioneer Store is Celebrated.” Ithaca Journal-News, August 12, 1924.
4. Donohue, Mary. “143 East State Street.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, May 1979.
5. Enszer, Julie R. “The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives: Lesbian-Feminist Print Culture From 1969 Through 1989.” PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2013.
6. “F.E. Allen Dies at 78; Home Dairy Founder.” Democrat and Chronicle, March 16, 1958.
7. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 1st edition. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1993.
8. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues, 20th anniversary edition. Self-published by author, 2014.
9. "Firebrand Books Win Literary Prizes." Womyn's Words (1989): 17.
10. “Firebrand Interviewed." New Directions for Women (July-August 1985): 15-16.
11. Gomez, Jewelle. “Poetry in Motion.” The Advocate, September 21, 1993.
12. Hinson, Mark. “Poet, novelist read at Rubyfruit.” Tallahassee Democrat, July 30, 1993.
13. Hoetzlein, Nanci A. “Giving voice to women’s words.” Ithaca Journal, April 28, 1990.
14. “Home Dairy at ‘home’ for 50 years.” Ithaca Journal, August 25, 1979.
15. “Ithaca Architect Dies in Geneva.” Elmira Star-Gazette, July 20, 1910.
16. “Ithaca Printer is in Business For Sixty Years.” Ithaca Daily Journal, March 15, 1912.
17. Jaffe, Jody. “Nancy Bereano: Publishing Firebrand.” Out, Jan 01, 2000.
18. Kauka, Kanani. “A Life’s Work: An Interview With Firebrand Books Publisher Nancy Bereano.” Lambda Book Report, May 1997.
19. Klauda, Ann. “A Dyke to Watch Out For: Cartoonist Alison Bechdel Catches the Lighter Side of Lesbian Life.” The Advocate, September 13, 1988.
20. Kurtz, D. Morris. Ithaca and Its Resources. Ithaca: Journal Association Book and Job Print, 1883.
21. "Lambda Literary Awards." Erie Gay Community News, July 1996.
22. Landesman, Stephen. “Firebrand Founder Speaks Up: Gay publishing industry has changed, Ithacan says.” Ithaca Journal, May 9, 2001.
23. “Lease Andrus, Church Store to Dairy Co.” Ithaca Journal-News, February 22, 1929.
24. “Miss Florence Andrus Partner in Century Old Ithaca Business.” Ithaca Journal-News, August 13, 1924.
25. Mitchell, Pam. “Controversy & Dialogue at Women in Print.” Gay Community News, June 22, 1985.
26. Mundell, Helen. “Home Diary at ‘home’ for 50 years.” Ithaca Journal, August 23, 1979.
27. Pollak, Alec. “Rural Poetics: Part 2 with Nancy Bereano.” The Humanities Pod, Cornell University Society for the Humanities, July 28, 2021. https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/news/rural-poetics-part-2-nancy-bereano.
28. Robertson, William E. “History of Ithaca Commons,” The History Center in Tompkins County, 1988. 
29. Snodderly, Daniel R. Ithaca and Its Past: The History and Architecture of Downtown. Ithaca: DeWitt Historical Society of Tompkins County, 1982.
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34. “William Andrus Rounds Out 65 Years of Business Activity in this City.” Ithaca Journal, March 15, 1917.
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1. 3rd Annual Historic Allentown House & Building Tour. Buffalo: Allentown Association, Inc., 1987.
2. Ascension for the Arts. “History of the Building,” 2018. https://aftawny.com/the-building.
3. Buffalo Landmark & Preservation Board. “Church of Ascension.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, March 19, 1979.
4. Continelli, Louisa. “Challenging Gender Order: Two New Books On the Boundary.” Buffalo News, January 22, 1993.
5. “Buffalo Churches Apologize & Welcome Gay People.” Erie Gay News, March 2008.
6. “Gay Directory of Buffalo.” Fifth Freedom, February 1983.
7. Napora, James. Houses of Worship: A Guide to the Religious Architecture of Buffalo, New York, Master of Architecture Thesis, December 5, 1995. https://buffaloah.com/how/tc.html.
8. Workers World Buffalo, NY Bureau, “Buffalo Debut for ‘Stone Butch Blues.’” Workers World, March 4, 1993.

1. Davis, Madeline. Femme Finale, 2021. Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York, Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State. https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/lgbtq_publications/4.
2. Cardinale, Anthony and Tom Buckham. “The Final Curtain Falls for UB’s Pfeifer’s Theatre.” Buffalo News, January 11, 2001.
3. Davis, Henry L. and Tom Buckham. “After 14 Years, UB Will Sell Pfeifer Theatre.” Buffalo News, August 10, 2000.
4. Ross, Claire L. “SUNY at Buffalo Pfeifer Theatre.” Building Structure Inventory Form, New York State Cultural Resource Information System, May 23, 1990.
5. “Sidney B. Pfeifer Theatre.” University at Buffalo, University Archives. https://library.buffalo.edu/archives/campuses/detail.html?ID=114.