Ellsworth Milton Statler arrived in Buffalo in 1896 from Wheeling, West Virginia, brimming with confidence and ideas. He saw a booming city with the same attitudes as he and decided to grow with the Queen City. Like most Buffalonians of the time, he was an outsider but by 1923 he was acclaimed "Buffalo's First Citizen." Before he died, he was nationally recognized as the "father of the American hotel industry." Everyone knows the Statler Hotel in Niagara Square where we are holding our 7th Annual Wines of the World fundraiser on March 2. Few know that he built two other hotels in Buffalo, a ground-breaking restaurant, and a grand estate on Soldier's Place. Between 1896 and 1925, both E. M. Statler and his adopted city achieved breathtaking expansion and prosperity.
Our speaker, Susan Eck, is a native Western New Yorker. After a career in teaching, she was an administrator at UB. It was there she became technologically literate and, since retiring, she has applied those skills to illuminating local history on the web. Now in her third career, she was guest curator of the Niagara Square Exhibit at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society and creates virtual exhibits for BECHS. For the last ten years, she has researched and published biweekly historical pictorials on the Western New York Heritage Press web. And she is a Pan-American scholar, with her own web on Buffalo's 1901 Exposition (panam1901.org).
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