East Side

Understand

In the East Side, the reality is a bit more complex than the unfair caricature locals smear it with. While it certainly has its problems, the East Side is actually a diverse mishmash of communities, thriving independently while intermingling with each other in a vibrant tapestry. The different neighborhoods each have their own character and history.

African-Americans predominate, making up 73% of the district's population as of the 2010 census. There are indeed some poor and blighted areas that live up to the East Side's unfortunate reputation, such as Delavan-Grider, Genesee-Moselle, Delavan-Bailey (you'll notice a trend of neighborhoods named after their primary intersection) and, increasingly, Highland Park and Schiller Park. But closer in to Main Street and downtown, you'll also find a number of nicer areas — the new "infill" houses of the Near East Side, populated with upwardly mobile middle-class black families, are (for better and worse) a taste of suburbia a stone's throw from downtown; the Ellicott District boasts more of the same plus a small middle-class Puerto Rican enclave between Swan and Seneca Streets, and the tree-lined streets of historic Hamlin Park are home to students of Canisius College, friendly families with kids, and a growing collection of young, upwardly mobile urban pioneers busy restoring many of the handsome turn-of-the-century homes to their original luster. These same urban pioneers have also begun to colonize the blocks of Cold Spring and Masten Park closest to Main Street — a newly gentrifying area real-estate types have dubbed Midtown — and are poised to do the same to the old red-brick Victorians of the Fruit Belt, just east of the massive economic dynamo that is the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

Meanwhile, on the far eastern fringe of the city you'll find some enclaves of blue-collar white ethnics that are real slices of old Buffalo: the tenacious old Polish community of Broadway-Fillmore is still hanging on, though it's much diminished in size from its turn-of-the-century glory days; Kaisertown is a friendly off-the-beaten-path neighborhood that, despite its name, is far more Polish than German these days, and Lovejoy is populated by a mix of Italians, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians. Also, the vitality of the Kensington-Bailey neighborhood in the northeast corner of the city is maintained by the robust and diverse student body of the University at Buffalo's nearby South Campus — cheap student-oriented eateries and other shops line the business district of Bailey Avenue, while the residential streets sandwiched between Bailey and Main Street (an area sometimes differentiated from the rest of the neighborhood as Kensington Heights) are a mix of college students and lower-middle-class African-Americans.

Finally, while they are not as visible or as well-known as their West Side counterparts, the East Side boasts thriving communities of immigrants that have given new life to formerly derelict neighborhoods and provide visitors with some of the most interesting experiences to be had in the district. A growing contingent of Vietnamese, Burmese, Arabs (including the Yemenis who took a dominant place among the East Side small-business community in the 2010s), and — especially — Bangladeshis rub shoulders with the old-school Poles of Broadway-Fillmore and also extend northward along Fillmore Avenue into Humboldt Park.

In addition to the neighborhoods mentioned above, there are also other place names visitors to the East Side might hear or encounter. Polonia is most often used as a synonym for Broadway-Fillmore, especially when talking about the Broadway Market, St. Stanislaus Church, and other remaining relics of the old Polish presence there; other times, it's used as shorthand for the entire Buffalo-area Polish community regardless of location. In addition, the eastern end of Broadway-Fillmore, stretching along Broadway between the New York Central Railroad tracks and Bailey Avenue, is often referred to as St. John Kanty after the church that dominates the streetscape there. As well, East Buffalo is an alternative name for the whole district that's gaining currency among local boosters who want to avoid the stigma connected with the term "East Side".

History

The story of Buffalo in the 19th century was one of meteoric growth and the arrival of a colorful patchwork of new immigrants from distant lands, and nowhere in the city was that more true than on the East Side. The East Side's history begins about 1830, just a few years after the inauguration of the Erie Canal which transformed the sleepy village of Buffalo almost overnight into America's newest boomtown. In those years, political strife and religious persecution was driving many people in Germany to seek refuge in the United States, and Buffalo soon became home to a mostly Catholic population of Germans from Bavaria, Württemberg, and other parts of southern Germany (as well as Alsace, a neighboring region of France whose culture is heavily influenced by Germany). These Germans were generally well-educated and skilled at a variety of trades, and the flat, fertile meadows on the east edge of Buffalo was where they settled: close enough to town that services were easily accessible, but far enough into the periphery that they could continue some semblance of the agrarian lifestyle they'd enjoyed in their homeland. As it grew, that area became known as the German Village.

Soon the Archdiocese of New York, whose territory then included Buffalo, took notice, and in 1843 a new church was built in the heart of the German Village: St. Mary's, on Batavia Road (now Broadway) just past Michigan Avenue. Overseen by the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, or "Redemptorists", St. Mary's grew into a major force in the neighborhood, running a parochial school as well as an orphanage and hospital, and serving as a beacon attracting still more settlement to the neighborhood. By 1850, there were about 20,000 Germans in Buffalo — over a third of the city's population — living in three main areas: the German Village itself lay between Genesee Street and Broadway; to the south, in what's now called the Ellicott District, were the fashionable townhouses of well-to-do merchants as well as a small, tight-knit Jewish community along William Street; and the isolated Fruit Belt in the city's northeast corner, a quiet, largely Protestant neighborhood on the high ground north of the German Village, named for the fruit trees the residents kept in their yards.

The Germans weren't the only people who settled east of downtown: Buffalo also had a tiny community of a few hundred African-Americans, centered around Vine Alley — the stretch of present-day William Street between Oak Street and Michigan Avenue, just inward from the Jewish quarter. Though they were victims of prejudice and discrimination as in the rest of the country, Buffalo's blacks were comparatively well-off by the standards of the day, with many working in skilled trades such as barbery and carpentry. The hub of their community was the Michigan Street Baptist Church, at the east end of Vine Alley.

After the Civil War, the booming East Side population began to spread out from the German Village: northward along Main Street, swallowing up the once-sleepy hamlet of Cold Spring with the ample wood-frame houses of wealthy businessmen, as well as eastward along Genesee Street into the countryside. By 1870, Germans made up fully half of Buffalo's population, not to mention a huge chunk of the city's elite: in the political realm, there was prominent lawyer-turned-U.S. District Attorney William Dorsheimer, as well as Philip Becker and Solomon Scheu, Buffalo's first and second German-American mayors, elected in 1875 and 1877 respectively (Becker would return to office in 1886). The German business community, for its part, included merchant William Hengerer, brewing magnate Gerhard Lang, prominent architect August Esenwein, and Jacob Schoellkopf, owner of the largest tannery in the United States and later founder of the first hydroelectric company to draw power from Niagara Falls. Buffalo Germans placed a great deal of importance on preserving their native language and culture: German schools, churches, social clubs, newspapers (including the Täglicher Demokrat, notorious for its political radicalism, and the Buffalo Volksfreund, financed by the head priest of St. Mary Redemptorist and widely seen as the mouthpiece of the Catholic Church), and other institutions abounded to such a degree that English was a second language on the East Side. In fact, there were calls for the city to make German an official language alongside English.

In 1868, William Dorsheimer invited his friend, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, to come to town and do for Buffalo what he had done earlier for New York City — design a large central park for the city's denizens to enjoy. Instead, Olmsted went one better and designed an interconnected network of many parks, linked to each other by wide, tree-lined boulevards he called parkways. The eastern extremity of this network was situated on Genesee Street at what was then the edge of the urbanized area of Buffalo, and The Parade, as Olmsted called this park, was designed with the East Side Germans in mind: it was centered on a rustic outdoor beer garden dubbed the Parade House. The park helped attract still more settlers to the outskirts of town — and Humboldt Parkway, the magnificent boulevard that connected it to the rest of the park network, soon became the East Side's most prestigious address: a wide swath of bucolic greenery with rows of large and opulent mansions on each side. Shortly after, the area's outward expansion would get another shot in the arm courtesy of the New York Central Railroad's Belt Line, a 15-mile (24-km) commuter loop that curved through the East Side a little bit outward from Humboldt Parkway, intended to enable residents of the periphery to commute to jobs downtown. Through the 1880s and '90s, the urbanized area advanced eastward all the way to the city line, including what is today Schiller Park, Lovejoy, and Kaisertown.

As the wealthier Germans pushed outward in the late 19th century, fundamental changes came to the areas closer to downtown. The massive wave of German immigration to the U.S. began to subside, and in their place came different nationalities that would add to the increasingly colorful East Side tapestry. By the turn of the century, the old German Village was a Russian Jewish stronghold, and the Ellicott District to the south was a dismal slum populated by a mix of Jews, Italians, and Eastern Europeans. Later on, wealthier Jews moved to Hamlin Park, an attractive neighborhood north of Cold Spring built on the site of the old Buffalo Driving Park. By far the most numerous of the newcomers to the East Side, though, were the Polish immigrants who settled around the corner of Broadway and Fillmore Avenue. Polish immigration to the United States began in earnest about 1850, but at first most of the Poles who arrived in Buffalo stayed only long enough to arrange for travel further west, to well-established Polish communities in places like Chicago and Detroit. That all changed in 1872, when Joseph Bork, a land speculator of Polish descent who owned a large tract southeast of the old German Village, remembered that towns in Poland usually centered around a large church. To entice itinerant Poles to stay in Buffalo, he donated a prime lot to the Catholic diocese for the explicit purpose of establishing a Polish church. The diocese recruited Father Jan Pitass, a Polish-speaking priest from Silesia, and named the church St. Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr. By the time St. Stanislaus opened, Bork had ensured that several hundred new houses were already completed and waiting to be bought; he repeated the same tactic when St. Adalbert was built in 1886, and for every new church in the neighborhood thereafter. By 1890, Broadway-Fillmore was home to 20,000 Poles.

As the 20th century dawned, the East Side was in its glory days: the last bits of empty land in the city were being colonized by new neighborhoods (Kensington-Bailey, also known as "Summit Park" in those days as it was on the highest ground in the city; Delavan-Bailey, an Italian district gathered around St. Gerard Church; and Highland Park, also known as Fillmore-Leroy, on the former site of the Bennett Limestone Quarry), and Broadway-Fillmore had grown to be the second-largest shopping district in the city, with a lineup of discount stores (Neisner's, Eckhardt's, and the granddaddy of them all, Sattler's) to complement the high-end department stores of downtown. But in the background, the seeds of the area's decline were being sown. Beginning around the First World War and continuing through much of the century, the United States saw a Great Migration of African-Americans, who fled segregation and racist violence in the South and were attracted by the easy availability of factory jobs in the urban Northeast and Midwest. Buffalo, too, received its share of these newcomers — and soon the old black neighborhood around Vine Alley was bursting at the seams. African-Americans began to press outward, and while conditions in Buffalo were markedly better than where they came from, the abandonment by white residents of any neighborhood blacks were seen to be moving into (a phenomenon known as white flight) demonstrated the prejudicial attitudes they still had to face. By the Second World War, the Ellicott District and the old German Village were majority-black and had gained a reputation as a bad part of town — a reputation that was made quasi-official due to a practice called redlining, whereby real-estate agents and mortgage lenders conspired to effectively prohibit African-Americans from buying houses or renting apartments west of Main Street (the proverbial "red line"), while at the same time openly encouraging white buyers to avoid the East Side. Though the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made redlining de jure illegal, it continued behind closed doors for years thereafter.

However, these beginnings of the decline of the East Side were just a prelude to the decline that Buffalo as a whole would suffer beginning after the Second World War. The reasons for that decline were varied, but foremost among them was the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, which enabled freight ships to access the ocean directly via the Welland Canal rather than unloading their cargo at Buffalo for shipment further east by railroad. Within ten years, the once-bustling Buffalo Harbor was virtually empty, and though few East Siders worked at the port itself or in the grain elevators, the shockwaves reverberated all over the city. The combined effect of the Seaway and the new Interstate Highway System caused traffic on the railroads to decline sharply, shuttering many of the warehouses and industrial facilities on the Belt Line, putting many railroad workers in Lovejoy and Schiller Park out of work, and leaving the New York Central Terminal in Broadway-Fillmore, which opened in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression and had never been used to its full capacity, virtually derelict (it was abandoned outright in 1978). The Interstate highways also enabled erstwhile city residents who worked downtown to move to the (literal) greener pastures of suburbia; consequently, Buffalo's population plummeted from nearly 600,000 in the mid-1950s to less than 300,000 in 2000. The department stores, food markets, and other businesses followed the residents out of the city as well; one by one, the glitzy shopping destinations along Broadway closed their doors, unable to compete with suburban malls and plazas. To cap it all off, the nationwide groundswell of resentment among blacks that culminated in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s fed into the hostility between Buffalo's African-American community and the remaining East Side whites; though Buffalo never had a full-scale race riot as other U.S. cities did during this period, the palpable tensions drove many of the latter over the city line into the lily-white suburbs.

Worse still was the urban renewal that served as the city's hamfisted response to the decline. "Slum clearance" actually began earlier on the East Side than anywhere else in the city — during World War II, the Willert Park Homes, one of three public housing developments built in anticipation of the flood of American GIs returning from overseas, went up on several blocks of the Near East Side. The other two developments, Kensington Gardens and the Kenfield Homes, were built near the city line in areas that were still considered desirable; those were reserved for whites only, while the nominally integrated but de facto all-black Willert Park served to further concentrate poverty in the city's most blighted district, worsening the problem it intended to solve. As in the rest of Buffalo, the urban renewal campaign accelerated after the war: it was in 1959 when three dozen city blocks of the old Ellicott District (bounded by Michigan Avenue, William Street, Jefferson Avenue, and Swan Street) were completely leveled, with a massive new series of public housing developments promised — but with the exception of the Towne Gardens high-rises, the majority of that land remained vacant for over a decade afterward, a "72-acre wasteland in the heart of the city" according to a particularly scathing editorial in the Buffalo Courier-Express. But the coup de grâce came in 1960, when the tree-lined median of Olmsted's Humboldt Parkway was eviscerated to make way for the Kensington Expressway, a noisy intrusion that tore the heart out of Hamlin Park and Humboldt Park and left the formerly bucolic greenway as little more than a pair of expressway service roads.

Since hitting rock bottom around the year 2000, Buffalo has picked itself up and turned itself around with increasing momentum. However, perhaps because it was the hardest-hit part of the city during the downturn and because of the ongoing stigma regarding what lies east of Main Street, the East Side has struggled to share in that rebirth. Crime, poverty, urban blight, and other associated ills remain severe problems, and there are many areas that are going to continue to deteriorate before they bottom out — but signs of hope have belatedly begun to emerge in some parts of the East Side, especially those closest to downtown and Main Street. While the demolition of abandoned buildings continues to rob the district of its historic character, the newly-built infill housing that has gone up in the Near East Side since the 1990s is at least transforming formerly derelict areas into tracts of taxable, owner-occupied housing. The infill continues to creep eastward, but much to the consternation of preservationists the suburban style of the new builds clashes with the historic character of what remains of the old streetscape. But naysayers can take pride in the status of the Central Terminal as one of the largest-scale, highest-profile, and longest-term historical preservation projects in Buffalo to date, all the more remarkable given its location in blighted Broadway-Fillmore. As well, the shiny new Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus has spurred investment in the adjacent Fruit Belt, where property values have skyrocketed and old Civil War-era cottages are being restored, as well as along Main Street, where a growing number of old warehouses and seedy brownstones in the westernmost blocks of Cold Spring and Masten Park (now rebranded Midtown by real estate promoters) have been reborn as upscale apartment buildings marketed to medical professionals. The young, upwardly-mobile urban pioneers who have transformed the West Side have gotten into the act on the East Side as well, especially in Midtown and Hamlin Park; they've been spurred on by Buffalo's Urban Homestead Program, by which abandoned, city-owned houses in blighted areas are sold for $1 to those who have the financial means to rehabilitate them, and who agree to live in the house themselves for three years. The East Side's traditional identity as a haven for immigrants has come full circle, with new arrivals from Asia and Africa attracted to its ample low-cost housing (and increasingly priced out of the newly trendy Upper West Side, where they had amassed previously). With 2015 shaping up to be a record-breaking year in terms of new redevelopment projects planned for the area, it looks like the East Side may finally be starting to turn the corner along with the rest of the city.

Visitor information

Broadway Fillmore Alive is an online information resource that is for its neighborhood what Buffalo Rising is for the city as a whole: a source for news on business openings, cultural events and other happenings, and historic preservation; tidbits of neighborhood history and profiles of local movers and shakers, all delivered with an upbeat tone intended to help in the struggle to "promote, preserve and revitalize East Buffalo's historic Polonia".

Read

• The Last Fine Time by Verlyn Klinkenborg (ISBN 9780226443355). Set in Broadway-Fillmore between 1920 and 1970, this is the true story of the Wenzek family and the Sycamore Street bar they owned: from its early years as a gin mill slaking the thirsts of working-class Polish immigrants, to its post-World War II rebirth as the swank nightspot George & Eddie's. Most if not all of the people, places and products mentioned in this impeccably well-researched book are real, making for a remarkably true-to-life chronicle of everyday life in old Polonia and the changes the neighborhood went through from its heyday to its decline.
• Strangers in the Land of Paradise: Creation of an African-American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940 by Lillian Serece Williams (ISBN 9780253214089). Chronicling the growth of Buffalo's black community from a tiny enclave to a dominant presence on the East Side during the 20th-century Great Migration, Strangers in the Land of Paradise explores how the migrants' lifestyle, culture, and values evolved over the transition from their former homes in the rural, agricultural South to their new one in the urban, industrial North, and recounts their struggle to get by and be accepted in a community unaccustomed to any African-American presence.

Learn

Buffalo's third-largest institution of postsecondary education and its largest private one, Canisius College's sprawling Main Street premises have, after a vigorous period of expansion over the past two decades, come to dominate the northwest part of Hamlin Park. Founded in 1870 by a group of German Jesuit priests next to St. Michael's Catholic Church downtown, the college's current location began as a satellite campus in the first decade of the 20th century and quickly evolved into its main one. Canisius is a highly-regarded educational institution where some 5,000 students earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in over a hundred different fields.

Stay safe

Despite the fact that Buffalo's crime rate has fallen steadily since the 1990s, it is still higher than the national average for cities its size. The East Side has a notorious reputation among Buffalonians for its high crime rate — a reputation that, while largely accurate, is a good deal more nuanced than local conventional wisdom says.

First off, while tales of murder, assault and other mayhem may make for splashy newspaper headlines, it's important to understand that most of the violent crime on the East Side is committed against locals. There's nothing random about these incidents: as long as you don't suddenly decide to join a street gang or deal drugs, as a visitor to the East Side you are not a target for violent crime, so don't worry too much about that. Theft, vehicle break-ins and property crimes are another matter, but even in those cases a little bit of common sense goes a long way. It pays to lock your car doors, keep valuables out of sight, avoid flashy displays of wealth, and make yourself scarce after dark.

Secondly, it bears remembering that while poverty and urban blight are endemic districtwide, in terms of crime not all East Side neighborhoods are created equal. Just because you're in a neighborhood that's visibly rundown doesn't necessarily mean you're in danger. A lot of it has to do with density: the more businesses in a particular neighborhood or cars parked on a particular stretch of road, the more potential targets there are for the robber. Sadly, this means that the Bailey Avenue corridor north of Broadway — the main drag of the district, and the site of many of its best shops and restaurants — is the highest-crime area in the East Side and indeed the whole city. Other particularly crime-prone areas include Delavan-Bailey, the stretch of Genesee Street along the northern edge of Schiller Park, the Cold Spring business district, Delavan-Grider, and St. John Kanty. By contrast, Kaisertown, the Near East Side, Masten Park, and the western half of Broadway-Fillmore (including the area around St. Stanislaus) have little crime to speak of. The crime rates in other East Side neighborhoods vary, but tend to be in the middle of the pack by Buffalo standards.

Panhandlers generally avoid the East Side, with the exception of Midtown where you'll encounter some particularly persistent ones. "Persistent" doesn't mean "aggressive", though, and as elsewhere in Buffalo, a firm "no" almost always does the trick if you don't want to give.

Go next

• When the East Side's Germans and Poles left for greener pastures in the middle 20th century, many of them ended up in Cheektowaga, one of the oldest, largest, and in many ways the prototypical inner-ring Buffalo suburb. Contrary to what most visitors believe, Cheektowaga is much more than just the site of the Buffalo Niagara International Airport and the Walden Galleria — it's also a place to experience the modern-day version of the blue-collar, unpretentious "old Buffalo" that ruled the day on the East Side in earlier times. Polish culture is especially strong here: Polish-Americans make up almost 30% of the town's population (the largest proportion of any municipality in the United States) and utterly dominate its political and cultural life, earning it the affectionate nickname of "Cheektowarsaw".
• The East Side's history as a haven for newcomers to America continues to play out in the present day, but Ground Zero for the modern-day immigrant experience in Buffalo is the West Side. Along the main drag of Grant Street, a multicultural mix of Asians, Africans, Arabs, and Latinos weave a vibrant tapestry — at the heart of which stands the West Side Bazaar, where you can browse through traditional handicrafts and sample ethnic foods from around the world. There's also a burgeoning artist community to rival Midtown's, and on sweltering summer days in Buffalo the perfect way to beat the heat is in the cool breezes of one of the West Side's many waterfront parks and green spaces.
• If the East Side's grand old churches left you agape, head south of the city line to Lackawanna to see the most magnificent one Western New York has to offer: Our Lady of Victory Basilica, a Baroque Revival masterpiece completed in 1926 that's a testament to the charitable works of Father Nelson Baker. When you're done ooh-ing and aah-ing, stay a while in this old company town long dominated by the Lackawanna Steel Plant to drink in the city's rough-and-tumble blue-collar character, now tempered by a vibrant Yemeni immigrant community.

Get in and around

By car

A combination of light traffic and an extensive highway network makes the East Side the easiest part of Buffalo to get around by car. A downside is the condition of the roads: potholes abound, especially on the side streets.

The Kensington Expressway (NY 33) is the main highway thoroughfare through the East Side, entering the city from Cheektowaga on a due-west course, then turning south at its junction with the Scajaquada Expressway (NY 198) and ending downtown. From east to west, interchanges are at:

• Eggert Road, whose exit is directly on the city line and provides access to the residential side streets of Kensington-Bailey and Delavan-Bailey via Eggert Road northbound and southbound, respectively.
• Suffolk Street, which heads northward into Kensington-Bailey and Kensington Heights. If you're heading to the Bailey Avenue business district from the westbound lanes, get off here, turn right on Suffolk, then left down one of the side streets.
• Bailey Avenue, accessible from the eastbound lanes only. One of the East Side's main surface-level roads (see below), you can take Bailey northward into the heart of the Kensington-Bailey business district or southward into Delavan-Bailey, and (further afield) Schiller Park, Lovejoy, and Kaisertown.
• Olympic Avenue, accessible from the eastbound lanes only. Mostly used by trucks for access to the industrial park along William L. Gaiter Parkway, you can also take this exit to get to the residential streets on the western fringe of Delavan-Bailey and Kensington-Bailey.
• Grider Street, which provides easy access to the Erie County Medical Center and Delavan-Grider to the south, and to Highland Park to the north.
• The Scajaquada Expressway (NY 198), the first exit off of which puts you on Main Street (NY 5), which, in turn, takes you north to Hamlin Park and Highland Park or south to Midtown. Continuing westward on the Scajaquada will take you to Parkside, the Delaware District, the Elmwood Village, and Black Rock.
• Humboldt Parkway, from which you can get to the Cold Spring business district and Masten Park via East Ferry and East Utica Streets. If you're coming from the eastbound lanes, you can also reach East Delavan Avenue from this exit, which takes you east to Delavan-Grider or west to Hamlin Park.
• Best Street. Turn eastward and you're right in front of Martin Luther King, Jr. Park and the Buffalo Museum of Science; turn westward and you're soon in Masten Park.
• Jefferson Avenue, accessible from the westbound lanes only. Another major East Side thoroughfare, Jefferson Avenue leads you northward to the outer edge of the Fruit Belt and, beyond that, the Cold Spring business district. Head south to get to the Near East Side.
• Locust Street, accessible from the westbound lanes only. Get off here and you're in the heart of the Fruit Belt.
• Goodell Street, accessible from the westbound lanes only. Goodell itself takes you into Allentown and downtown, but the East Side is accessible from the first cross-street after the interchange, Michigan Avenue. Head north into the Fruit Belt and the back end of Midtown, or south into the hotbed of Buffalo African-American history that is the Michigan Street Heritage Corridor, and, further afield, the Ellicott District.

Interstate 190 runs mostly through South Buffalo, but it clips the southeast corner of the East Side near the city line. You can get to Lovejoy and Kaisertown easily via Exit 1 (South Ogden Street) and Exit 2 (Clinton Street/Bailey Avenue). Also, although the New York State Thruway (I-90) runs north-to-south beyond the city line in Cheektowaga, Exits 52W (Walden Avenue) and 52A (William Street) provide relatively easy access to Schiller Park and Lovejoy, respectively.

The pattern of surface streets on the East Side is basically a gridiron overlaid with a number of roads that fan outward from downtown like the spokes of a wheel — extensions of Joseph Ellicott's historic radial street plan that dates back to 1804. Clockwise from the northwest, you have: Main Street (NY 5), Kensington Avenue (which doesn't extend to downtown itself, but branches off from Main Street and proceeds northeastward in the same radiating direction), Genesee Street, Sycamore Street (which merges with Walden Avenue at Martin Luther King, Jr. Park), Broadway (NY 130), William Street, Clinton Street (NY 354), and Seneca Street (NY 16). These streets are among the East Side's major thoroughfares, and for travellers without a car at their disposal, they're among the best-served public transit routes in the city: catching a bus or train into downtown or out to suburbia along any of these streets is a cinch, even on weekends.

As for crosstown routes, the north-to-south thoroughfares are some of the East Side's most crowded streets, home to business districts that bustle despite being in marginal areas off the radar screens of most locals. Heading inward toward downtown, there's Bailey Avenue (US 62), the single busiest street in the East Side that links the neighborhoods of the Far East Side: Kensington-Bailey, Delavan-Bailey, Lovejoy, and Kaisertown, followed by Fillmore Avenue, Jefferson Avenue, and Michigan Avenue. The East Side's major east-west crosstown routes are, from north to south: East Amherst Street, East Delavan Avenue, East Ferry Street, East Utica Street, and finally Best Street, which turns into Walden Avenue at its junction with Genesee Street in front of Martin Luther King, Jr. Park.

Realistically, unless there's a special event going on such as Dyngus Day in Broadway-Fillmore, you are virtually never going to have a problem finding a place to park on the East Side. Even if by chance parking on the main thoroughfares is crowded, you'll always find a spot on a side street nearby. And parking is almost invariably free – except for one block of Broadway between Michigan Avenue and downtown, the district does not contain a single parking meter. The only place where you might run into a problem is in the western half of the Fruit Belt, adjacent to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. Here, much to the consternation of neighborhood residents, hospital employees regularly park on-street in order to dodge the high rates at the paid parking lots. The Common Council has considered limiting on-street parking in the Fruit Belt to permit holders (i.e. neighborhood residents) only, but for now no limitations are in effect.

A few East Side business districts do have parking regulations worth mentioning. On Main Street between Hertel Avenue and Best Street — through Highland Park, Hamlin Park and most of Midtown — parking is limited to two hours every day but Sunday between the hours of 7AM and 7PM. Between Humboldt Parkway and East Delavan Avenue in the vicinity of Canisius College (and along Jefferson Avenue from Main to East Delavan) it's prohibited entirely — visitors to campus should ask for a parking permit at the admissions office in Lyons Hall and then park in the lot in front of the building, or else find a spot on a side street. Visitors to Sisters Hospital can park in the lot facing Main Street; rates are $5/day. South of Best Street, it's two-hour parking on weekdays from 8AM to 5PM.

On Bailey Avenue, parking is limited to two hours Mondays through Fridays from 7AM to 7PM between Millicent and Highgate Avenues in the Kensington-Bailey business district. In Delavan-Bailey, Lovejoy, and Kaisertown, parking is one hour everyday from East Delavan Avenue south to Lang Avenue between 10AM and 4PM, and prohibited outright south of Walden Avenue. If you're visiting these areas, East Delavan Avenue, East Lovejoy Street, and Clinton Street are all much better options than Bailey — parking on those streets is easily available and unrestricted at all times. In Broadway-Fillmore, parking along Fillmore Avenue between Stanislaus and Peckham Streets and along Broadway from Strauss Street to Memorial Drive is two hours only, everyday but Sunday from 7AM to 7PM; east of there, along Broadway from Memorial Drive to Gatchell Street, it's one hour only (same days and times). If you're heading to the Broadway Market on a Saturday in the weeks leading up to Easter, on-street parking will be hard to find, but never fear — the Market has a free ramp that, while well-used, rarely fills up completely.

Elsewhere, parking in the Cold Spring business district is limited to one hour on weekdays between 7AM and 7PM along Jefferson Avenue between East Ferry and Riley Streets, and in Delavan-Grider to two hours on weekdays between 7AM and 7PM along Grider Street from the Kensington Expressway ramps to East Ferry Street. If you're visiting the Erie County Medical Center in the middle of the week, either use the pay lot in the front of the hospital ($1/hour up to a maximum of $4/day; free for the first hour and 5PM-5AM) or park on one of the side streets on the other side of Grider, where spaces are generally easy to find.

Rental cars

By public transportation

Public transit in Buffalo and the surrounding area is provided by the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (NFTA). The NFTA Metro system encompasses a single-line light-rail rapid transit (LRRT) system and an extensive network of buses. The fare for a single trip on a bus or train is $2.00 regardless of length (March 2022). No transfers are provided between buses or trains; travelers who will need to make multiple trips per day on public transit should consider purchasing an all-day pass for $5.00. Seniors and children 5-11 pay half fares.

The East Side is better served by public transit than any of Buffalo's other districts, doubtless because East Siders tend to be less well-off and are less likely to own their own vehicle than people from other areas of the city.

By bus

The East Side is served by the following NFTA Metro bus routes:

=To and from downtown=

NFTA Metro Bus #1 — William. Beginning at the AppleTree Business Park in Cheektowaga, Bus #1 enters the East Side on William Street, serving Lovejoy via North Ogden Street, East Lovejoy Street, and Bailey Avenue. Returning to William Street, the route passes through Broadway-Fillmore and the Near East Side before ending on the Lower West Side.

NFTA Metro Bus #2 — Clinton. Beginning at the Bank of America Operations Center in West Seneca, Bus #2 proceeds down Clinton Street through Kaisertown, the southern edge of Broadway-Fillmore, and the Ellicott District. It then turns north from Clinton onto Michigan Avenue and continues back toward downtown via William Street, ending on the Lower West Side. Outbound trips take Clinton Street directly from downtown.

NFTA Metro Bus #4 — Broadway. Beginning at the Thruway Mall Transit Center in Cheektowaga, Bus #4 proceeds down Broadway through Broadway-Fillmore and the Near East Side, with service to the Broadway Market. It ends on the Lower West Side.

NFTA Metro Bus #6 — Sycamore. Beginning at the Walden Galleria in Cheektowaga, Bus #6 serves Schiller Park, Genesee-Moselle, Broadway-Fillmore, and the Near East Side via Walden Avenue and Sycamore Street. It ends its run at the Waterfront Village Apartments downtown.

NFTA Metro Bus #8 — Main. Beginning at the University Metro Rail Station, Bus #8 proceeds down Main Street through Highland Park, Hamlin Park, Cold Spring, and Masten Park, with service to all the East Side's Metro Rail stations. It ends downtown.

NFTA Metro Bus #15 — Seneca. Beginning at the Southgate Plaza in West Seneca, Bus #15 serves a small portion of the Ellicott District via Swan Street, Michigan Avenue, and North Division Street before ending at the Adam's Mark Hotel downtown. Outbound trips take South Division Street to Michigan Avenue.

NFTA Metro Bus #24 — Genesee. Beginning at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport in Cheektowaga, Bus #24 proceeds through the East Side via Genesee Street, passing through the Schiller Park, Genesee-Moselle, Humboldt Park, and Near East Side neighborhoods with service to Schiller Park and Martin Luther King, Jr. Park. The route ends at the Buffalo-Exchange Street Amtrak Station downtown.

=Crosstown routes=

NFTA Metro Bus #12 — Utica. Beginning on the West Side, Bus #12 takes East Utica Street through Cold Spring and Humboldt Park, with service to the Utica Metro Rail Station. Turning right on Fillmore Avenue, the bus meanders its way through Humboldt Park and Genesee-Moselle via French, Kehr, and East Ferry Streets before turning northward, serving Delavan-Bailey and Kensington-Bailey via Bailey Avenue, Langfield Drive, and Eggert Road. From there, the bus turns down Winspear Avenue and passes through Kensington Heights on its way to its terminus at the University Metro Rail Station.

NFTA Metro Bus #13 — Kensington. Beginning at the University Metro Rail Station, Bus #13 proceeds down Bailey Avenue, Kensington Avenue, and Grider Street, passing through Kensington Heights, Kensington-Bailey, and Delavan-Grider with service to the Erie County Medical Center. Turning westward down East Ferry Street and from there southward on Main Street, the route proceeds through Hamlin Park, Cold Spring, and Masten Park before ending at the Utica Metro Rail Station.

NFTA Metro Bus #18 — Jefferson. Beginning at the Delavan-Canisius College Metro Rail Station, Bus #18 passes down Jefferson Avenue through Hamlin Park, Cold Spring, Masten Park, the Fruit Belt, and the Near East Side before ending in the Old First Ward.

NFTA Metro Bus #19 — Bailey. Beginning at the University Metro Rail Station, Bus #19 passes down Bailey Avenue through Kensington Heights, Kensington-Bailey, Delavan-Bailey, Genesee-Moselle, and Lovejoy, before ending in South Buffalo.

NFTA Metro Bus #22 — Porter-Best. Beginning on the West Side, Bus #22 proceeds along Best Street through Masten Park and Humboldt Park, with service to the Summer-Best Metro Rail Station, Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, and the Buffalo Museum of Science. Continuing eastward along Walden Avenue, it passes through Genesee-Moselle and Schiller Park, and ends at the Thruway Mall Transit Center in Cheektowaga.

NFTA Metro Bus #23 — Fillmore-Hertel. Beginning at the Black Rock-Riverside Transit Hub, Bus #23 proceeds through North Buffalo via Hertel Avenue, emerging on Main Street at the East Side's inner boundary and serving the Amherst Street Metro Rail Station before turning onto Fillmore Avenue. Proceeding southward on Fillmore, the bus passes through Highland Park, Humboldt Park, and Broadway-Fillmore, with service to Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, before ending in South Buffalo.

NFTA Metro Bus #26 — Delavan. Beginning on the West Side, Bus #26 proceeds along East Delavan Avenue through Hamlin Park, Delavan-Grider, and Delavan-Bailey, with service to the Delavan-Canisius College Metro Rail Station, ending at the Thruway Mall Transit Center in Cheektowaga.

NFTA Metro Bus #29 — Wohlers. Eastbound trips begin on the Lower West Side and proceed through the Fruit Belt and into Masten Park via High and Johnson Streets. Turning northward, the bus then continues through Cold Spring and Hamlin Park via Wohlers Avenue, Hager Street, and East Delavan Avenue (with service to the Deaconess Center via Riley Street, Humboldt Parkway, and Northampton Street), terminating its run at the Delavan-Canisius College Metro Rail Station. Westbound trips continue further down East Delavan and serve Hamlin Park, Cold Spring, and Masten Park via Humboldt Parkway and Dodge Street before rejoining the above-described route at Wohlers Avenue. Bus #29 does not run Saturdays, Sundays or holidays.

NFTA Metro Bus #32 — Amherst. Beginning at the Black Rock-Riverside Transit Hub, Bus #32 proceeds along Amherst Street through Highland Park, with service to the Amherst Street Metro Rail Station. From there, Kensington-Bailey is served via Berkshire (on westbound trips only), Bailey, and Kensington Avenues. The bus ends its run at the Thruway Mall Transit Center in Cheektowaga.

By Metro Rail

The Metro Rail is an LRRT line that extends along Main Street from the University at Buffalo's South Campus southward to downtown, along the western border of the East Side. The Metro Rail serves as the backbone of Buffalo's public transit system, accessed directly by many bus routes. Like the buses, the fare for the Metro Rail is $2 ($4 round-trip); the $5 all-day passes available on Metro buses are also valid for the Metro Rail (March 2022; seniors and children 5-11 pay half fares).

There are five Metro Rail stations on the East Side. From north to south, they are:

• Amherst Street Station — Main Street at East Amherst Street (Highland Park).
• Humboldt-Hospital Station — Main Street at Humboldt Parkway (Hamlin Park).
• Delavan-Canisius College Station — Main Street at East Delavan Avenue (Hamlin Park).
• Utica Station — Main Street at East Utica Street (Cold Spring).
• Summer-Best Station — Main Street at Best Street (Masten Park).

North of the five listed above, the LaSalle Station is a short distance from the East Side in University Heights, and provides easy access to the Kensington Heights and Kensington-Bailey areas.

By bike

Buffalo has made great strides in accommodating bicycling as a mode of transportation, with recognition from the League of American Bicyclists as a Bronze-Level "Bicycle-Friendly Community" to show for its efforts. The East Side lags behind the rest of Buffalo when it comes to bicycle infrastructure, but it's rapidly catching up.

On each side of Humboldt Parkway, there's one dedicated bike lane from Martin Luther King, Jr. Park north to East Delavan Avenue, but past there only the southwest side has one (the other side has been discontinuous since the Kensington Expressway was routed through here in 1960). To cross the expressway by bike, you can use the footbridge next to Northland Avenue or else take East Delavan, where the bike lane on the abbreviated northeast half of the parkway continues across the overpass to the other side. South of there, still straddling the Kensington, Cherry Street and BFNC Drive each have a dedicated bike lane set up similarly to the ones on Humboldt; beginning at Jefferson Avenue, the latter side ends at Lemon Street while the former extends westward clear to Michigan Avenue. As above, there are two pedestrian bridges that cross over the expressway, one just east of Hickory Street and one between Peach and Grape Streets.

Elsewhere in the district, on Broadway there's a bike lane on each side of the street from Bailey Avenue all the way into downtown, and Fillmore Avenue has a lane on each side from William Street north to Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, with "sharrows" (pavement markings on roads too narrow to accommodate dedicated bike lanes, indicating that drivers should be aware of bicyclists on the road) north from there to East Ferry Street. There's also another connection from Broadway to Martin Luther King Park via sharrows on Herman Street. On the Near East Side, you'll also find parallel bike lanes on William Street between Michigan and Jefferson Avenues, as well as sharrows along Main Street from Humboldt Parkway out to Bailey Avenue. In Kaisertown, South Ogden Street has sharrows between Seward and Griswold Streets, continuing north of there as a pair of parallel bike lanes on each side of the street as far north as Dingens Street. Finally, in the Fruit Belt, High Street sports sharrows extending westward from Jefferson Avenue into the Medical Corridor.

Bike sharing

There are five Reddy Bikeshare racks on the East Side:

• on the campus of Canisius College, on the east side of Main Street between Jefferson and West Delavan Avenues, on the side of Science Hall
• on the north side of Glenwood Avenue at the corner of Fillmore Avenue, on the side of the Alphonso "Rafi" Greene Masten Resource Center
• at Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, on the east side of Humboldt Parkway north of Best Street, at the entrance to the Buffalo Museum of Science
• on the east side of Main Street at the corner of Best Street, in front of the Summer-Best Metro Rail Station
• on the south side of Broadway between Lombard and Gibson Streets, in front of the Broadway Market

On foot

Walking can be a good way to get from place to place within certain particularly pedestrian-friendly East Side neighborhoods, such as Lovejoy, Kaisertown, and to a lesser extent Kensington-Bailey. But, in general, the East Side does not lend itself well to this method of transportation. Aside from the high crime rate in many areas (a danger that's greatly amplified when the sun goes down), the distances between points of interest on the East Side are too long to effectively cover on foot. If you don't have a car or bike at your disposal, you're best off using public transit.