NORTH TONAWANDA —
The post-Erie Canal boom experienced in Western New York offers a wealth of stories about the region’s flourishing founders, namesakes and seminal businesses.
While promising to shed light on such stories, a new book focused on that era offers frustratingly little information on this region’s best days.
“Western New York and the Gilded Age” is a collection of stories, tidbits and photographs pertaining to the late-1800s and early-1900s, a time during which anything seemed possible to locals.
The book offers information on the region’s White House connections, biggest businessmen and major events. Interspersed are photographs, narratives and several era-specific postcard messages that were sent by turn-of-the-century residents (including a series of notes exchanged cross-country by family members during World War I).
There might be something of meaning in this book to newcomers to the region or people who don’t live here.
But any book that offers only five paragraphs — repeat, five — on the Pan-Am Exposition and assassination of William McKinley gives the reader nothing. To condense the biggest event ever to happen in Western New York to barely more than a page is a disservice to those in pursuit of real knowledge about the area’s history.
Indeed, while the book touches upon the key names from the time period — Millard Fillmore, Roswell Park, William Farge, Frank Lloyd Wright — it offers nothing new and no insight or depth into these people or places. A Wikipedia search would yield more useful information than the test in “Gilded Age.”
A book like this begs for more than a simple declaration that times were golden 120 or so years ago. But that’s all that’s offered by the authors (all local residents), as if their pronouncement alone makes it so. The verbal evidence that’s given, as well as it’s written, offers little to support the thesis.
At 158 pages — more than half of which are consumed by photographs — this book could have been twice as large and still only scratched the surface of the source material.
But the extensive collection of photographs at least gives the book redemption on some level. From early Niagara Falls daredevils to 1920s flappers and a bustling Delaware Park (I mean overflowing, like could never be seen today), the photographs offer a meaningful look at when Western New York prospered.
For the photographs alone, the book merits purchase by local history-lovers. Just don’t expect to do much learning after the fascination with the images fades.
IF YOU READ
• WHAT: “Western New York and the Gilded Age”
• BY: Julianna Fiddler-Woite, Mary Beth Paulin Scumaci and Peter C. Scumaci
• DETAILS: Published by History Press, 158 pages
• GRADE: C+
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