In the 1840s and 1850s, many of Buffalo’s well-to-do built homes between Niagara Square and Chippewa. Buffalo’s first mayor, Ebenezer Johnson, lived just north of Chippewa at the corner of what is now Delaware and Johnson Park — but for decades, beyond that was still rather rural.

When Mark Twain lived at the corner of Delaware and Virginia in 1870, there was still a cemetery at the corner of Delaware and North (where Walgreens is today). Twain also would have had a view of the Cornell Lead Works out his front window. The factory, which stood about where the now-faded lion wall looms on the northeast corner of Delaware and Virginia, churned out about 10 tons of lead every day in the form of pipes, lead bars and white lead. The factory remained open until 1889.

By the time of the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, Buffalo’s gilded age was in full swing. In 1900, Buffalo had 350,000 residents and 60 of them were millionaires. That .0002 percent might not seem like much, but as the eighth-biggest city in the country, Buffalo had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation. Many of them were building opulent homes along Delaware Avenue — often tearing down a slightly-less opulent home from a previous generation in the process.