Before each home game during his time with the American Football League’s Buffalo Bills, Jack Kemp would have seen the neighborhoods surrounding the city’s football stadium on the drive in and understood that something had gone wrong.
Buffalo’s War Memorial Stadium, a WPA project described by Sports Illustrated in 1969 as “an arena that looked as if whatever war it was a memorial to had been fought within its confines,” was located on Best Street, where Grape and Peach streets terminated—evocative names that dated to the 1800s, when German immigrants on the city’s East Side “Fruit Belt” neighborhood grew orchards and gardens. In the 1950s, an influx of African Americans, many displaced by downtown renewal initiatives, moved in; they were soon followed by a new expressway that sliced through the Fruit Belt, along with other East Side neighborhoods.
