“The beginning of a new era in athletics dawned yesterday with the opening of the Buffalo Athletic Field. No city in the country can boast a better one. The track is perfection. The infield, which is as level as care and liberal work can make it, is one of the best football and all around athletic fields imaginable. Taken as a whole, the place is ideal. The grand stand is not only roomy, cool, and strong, but beautiful, and adds grace and symmetry to the picture.” –Buffalo Daily Courier, July 12, 1896

The Buffalo Athletic Field, at Main Street, Jefferson Avenue, and East Delavan Avenue, was Buffalo’s sporting capital during its short life from 1896 to 1904. This photograph, taken by W. H. Lyman sometime in the late 1890s, shows racers Earl Keiser, Eddie “Cannon” Bald, Jon Cooper, and Frank Butler, from left to right. Amos Batchelder, the sports editor for the Buffalo Daily Courier, is one of the men standing behind them. Bald in particular was one of the great racers of the era, called by the Buffalo Evening News the “master of them all and the swiftest thing that ever rode down the pike.” Buffalo was a major cycle racing center, and bicycling center generally, in the 1890s. “Buffalo, the Greatest Wheel City in the World,” claimed The American Wheelman, the local cyclists newsweekly, in 1892. After 1904, the Buffalo Athletic Field was replaced with the Carnival Court amusement park, and later by a Sears department store. The former department store is now part of the Canisius College campus.