The Buffalo Courier had its roots in the Western Star, Buffalo’s first daily newspaper, which originated in 1834. Ownership changed over the next few years until 1846, when it evolved into the Buffalo Courier. Legendary Buffalo journalists were affiliated with the paper. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, a succession of newspaper luminaries—Guy H. Salisbury (“The Charles Lamb of Buffalo”), poet-editor David Gray, the notable editor and drama critic Thomas Kean and another poet-editor, Joseph O’Connor—enhanced the paper’s reputation. On May 19, 1897, First Ward boss and shipping tycoon, William J. “Fingy” Conners, bought the Buffalo Courier. Well into the 20th century, Conners’ paper competed with five other English-language daily newspapers in Buffalo: the News, Times, Enquirer, Commercial and Express. The Express was its chief rival since it was the Courier’s only morning competition and since the paper had as storied a history as the Courier.

The Buffalo Morning Express was established in 1846. Twenty years later, in 1866, the Express Printing Company, a lucrative subsidiary, was founded. Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) joined the Express soon after as co-owner and managing editor. From August 1869 to January 1871, Twain not only edited the Express but also contributed over 100 editorials, feature stories and humorous squibs. Not long after Twain’s departure, James N. Matthews took over sole ownership. His son, George E. Matthews, succeeded his father as publisher. Eventually, a third-generation Matthews—Burroughs Matthews—led the Express. The paper gained national recognition for its Sunday Illustrated Express, a pioneer in pictorial journalism.

Despite their being arch competitors, an unlikely emergency “merger” of the two papers occurred in April 1885, when a fire destroyed the Express building at Washington and Exchange streets. The Courier generously offered its rival the use of its printing presses so that the paper would not have to cease production. That temporary joint printing arrangement lasted almost a year, until the Express facility was rebuilt and operational again.

The actual consolidation of the Courier and the Express happened in 1926, when Conners bought his competitor and merged it with his own paper. With this move, Conners became chair of the Buffalo Courier-Express Co., controlled all of the new company’s stock and published the first combined edition on June 14, 1926. His son, William J. Conners Jr., became publisher and president, and Burroughs Matthews was named publisher and editor. Legend has it that, for a while, newsstands folded and piled the papers so that Courier showed on half of the masthead or nameplate, while another pile was folded to show Express on half. Loyal customers would then buy their “favorite.” Another bit of lore holds that shortly after the merger, Express readers sat on one side of the trolley car and Courier readers on the other side. The Conners family owned the Courier-Express until 1979, when it was sold to Minneapolis-based Cowles Media Company.

Conners Sr. soon sought out a new location to build a grand new home for his Courier-Express. He bought property at Main and Goodell streets and the Buffalo Housewrecking Company took 30 days in the fall of 1929 to demolish the old Weyand’s Café, which stood at the site. A year later, the splendid five-story, art deco Courier-Express building was completed (see Tom Yots’ The Courier Express Building in the Summer 2012 Western New York Heritage magazine). On Sunday, November 16, 1930, the Courier-Express moved from its former quarters at 250 Main Street a few blocks northward, to 785 Main at Goodell. 

The elder Conners died several months before the new Courier-Express building opened, but not before approving plans for an exterior façade displaying famous printers and printing processes, as well as for the interior, including the breathtaking lobby whose foyer featured a tiled floor inlaid with historic printer’s marks, bronze paneled elevator doors etched with more printer’s symbols and the majestic mural. Before his death, Conners had commissioned two local artists to paint the mural, which was installed before the November 1930 move and viewed by 5,200 guests at the building’s formal dedication in December.

The mural was imposing. At 20 feet-by-10 ½ feet, it covered much of the east wall of the lobby. Its colorful scenes depicted the merger of the Express and the Courier, as well as the city’s rich past and high hopes for its future.

The first official photograph of the mural was a black-and-white snapshot taken by staff photographer George Ostertag for a special 48-page rotogravure section of the Sunday, December 14, 1930, paper. In the same issue, reporter George W. Foster’s story captured the sweeping visuals of the mural:

The group of three figures at the left center, symbolizes young Buffalo in the guise of a pretty maid of 1850, dividing her attention between the two papers, represented by two young men garbed in the style of that period.

In the foreground is Buffalo of that time with the buildings and harbor in proper relationship.

The dominant grouping in the center of the composition shows Buffalo, Queen City of the Lakes, gazing in rapt attention at a copy of The Courier-Express held in the hands of a sturdy pressman, typical of today’s great metropolitan newspaper. Around their feet is present day Buffalo with its distinguishing buildings.

At the right of the canvas, behind the activity of the city’s busy industrial life, rises, in lofty perspective, the Buffalo of tomorrow.

Emerging from the clouds at the upper left, is a finely painted figure of Mercury, mythological messenger of the gods, who typifies the gathering of news from all quarters of the globe.

The whole mural is rendered in complementary tones of blue, green and golden brown …

A lengthy caption below Ostertag’s full-page rotogravure photograph enhanced Foster’s rhapsodic description:

It also graphically delineates the progress of the City of Buffalo from a tiny village of a few clustered buildings on the banks of Buffalo Creek, to the thriving city of today and gives a prophetic glimpse of its future greatness … Its architectural and historical details are the result of careful research. The painting is the work of Charles Bigelow and his assistant, Ernest Davenport, both artists of this city. The canvas ranks high as an allegorical interpretation.

The mural’s dual themes of the newspaper merger and Buffalo boosterism formed a consistent narrative for the remaining five-plus decades that the mural graced the lobby of the Courier-Express building. However, with each milestone a new interpretive wrinkle or two was offered. A color photograph taken by Edward Gray was published in the Sunday November 13, 1955, pictorial section, marking the mural’s 25th anniversary. It was accompanied by the original 1930 caption, along with an added note observing that thousands of visitors had viewed the mural since the building’s opening.  The mural appeared in black and white photos, with slightly altered captions, in both 1965 and 1970. Finally, at the 50-year anniversary, reporter Harlan C. Abbey’s December 28, 1980, story once again celebrated the iconic nature of the mural, depicting “the growth of the Courier and the Express … along with the progress of Buffalo.” 

Less than two years later, the Courier-Express closed forever, the ultimate casualty in a war between the Buffalo Newspaper Guild and Rupert Murdoch’s News America Publishing Company.

Early in 1930, William J. Conners Sr. hired notable Buffalo artists Charles Bigelow and Ernest Davenport to create the mural for the lobby of his new Courier-Express building. Bigelow was the lead artist on the project. Born in Buffalo in 1891, Bigelow graduated from Lafayette High School in 1909, where he took drawing classes, and then attended Buffalo Normal School (today’s Buffalo State College). His extensive art training continued with studies at the Buffalo Art Students’ League under its headmaster Ernest George Fosbery, a Canadian-born, Paris-trained artist, who later served as president of the Canadian Arts Council. Bigelow was also taught at the College of Fine Arts at Syracuse University from 1910 to 1912, and for the next two years at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. His mentor there was David Urquhart Wilcox, the academy’s esteemed director and an award-winning painter and illustrator. Bigelow also served in World War I, as a corporal in the U.S. Army.

Throughout the 1920s, he contributed illustrations to national magazines such as Scribner’s, Collier’s and Good Housekeeping, among others. He also completed many paintings, several of them portraits. During the 1920s and 1930s, his works exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Arts Club of Buffalo, the Buffalo Society of Artists exhibition and several annual Albright Art Gallery exhibitions by Western New York artists. Bigelow’s most prominent solo exhibition—at the Sisti Galleries on Franklin Street in June of 1961—featured 50 his works. He helped found the former Buffalo Arts Club, serving as president in 1926. Bigelow belonged to the Fine Arts League of Buffalo as well as the Buffalo Society of Artists, which bestowed him with its Bronze Medal in 1954. Six years later, he designed a medallion for the Fine Arts League, which served as its official symbol.

As a young man, Bigelow lived at 477 West Ferry Street and worked in a studio at 35 West Eagle, but for most of his adult life he lived in a studio apartment on the top floor of a building at 437 Rhode Island Street. Bigelow collaborated with artist William C. Francis on a mural for the ceiling of the Fidelity Branch Bank in the Genesee Building. (Francis was one of three artists who, in 1926, completed the murals that still adorn the ceilings of M&T Bank’s Fountain Plaza (gold dome) branch.) In 1930, Bigelow teamed up yet again with another Buffalo artist, Ernest Davenport, to create the mural for the lobby of the Courier-Express building.

Born in England in 1894, Davenport emigrated to Buffalo with his family at the age of 16 and attended the former Technical High School. Like Bigelow, he studied at the Buffalo’s Art Students’ League before being awarded a four-year scholarship to the Philadelphia College of Art. After serving as a second lieutenant in World War I, he followed a career that paralleled Bigelow’s in the commercial and fine arts fields. For most of the 1920s, he was art director at the Remington Advertising Agency of Buffalo (later named Addison Vars). From 1947 to his retirement in 1960, Davenport was art director of Melvin F. Hall Advertising of Buffalo.

After Davenport painted the cover of the souvenir program for the Arts Club of Buffalo’s inaugural Frolic and Costumed Dance at the Statler Hotel Ballroom in 1925, the Buffalo Courier called him “one of Buffalo’s cleverest artists.” Like his colleague Bigelow, Davenport also did illustrations for magazines, including the Toronto Star Weekly, and was an experienced muralist, with one of his commissions being for the Canadian Niagara Power Company in Fort Erie, Ontario. Along with Bigelow, Davenport was a founding faculty member of the Art Institute of Buffalo, a product of the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), in the 1930s. He also helped found the Patteran Society, a progressive group of artists that broke away from the Buffalo Society of Artists in the early 1930s. Davenport’s last work, in 1967, was a life-size painting of Christ, titled Come Unto Me, for his church, St. Bartholomew’s in Tonawanda. The painting exists today at the church’s new site in Tonawanda.

Davenport and Bigelow were both in their late 30s when they teamed up to paint the Courier-Express mural. Following the stock market crash in October 1929, unemployment soared. Within that context, Davenport once told an interviewer that he was grateful for Bigelow’s offer in early 1930 to assist with the mural for the Courier-Express lobby: “Men were standing on the corner selling apples. So, when Big [Charles Bigelow] got the mural job and invited me to join him, I was pleased.”

The mural partners set up shop in a large vacant room in a downtown bank and completed the mural in six months. Their research helped them create visual themes based on Greek mythology, the Courier and Express consolidation, the founding and economic growth of Buffalo and the city’s confidently solid stature in 1930. They also added whimsical touches when speculating about Buffalo’s unlimited potential.

On one hand, Buffalo City Hall, nearly complete in 1930, sits squarely in the middle of the mural, dramatically symbolizing the city’s new seat of power. Yet, the right segment of the mural envisions Buffalo’s tomorrow, with futuristic-looking skyscrapers and a fantastic bridge arching into the heavens. Architectural historian John Conlin has suggested that the mural artists may have been inspired by plans being made in the 1920s for an elevated highway bridge project known then as “the Fuhrmann Boulevard High Level Extension.” The concept became reality 25 years later with the construction of the Skyway, which bears a resemblance to the mural’s visionary soaring structure.

Both artists died in Buffalo’s Veterans Hospital after short illnesses. Bigelow, who died at the age of 71 in 1963, is buried near his parents and his wife, Leona Adeline (Wadsworth), in Springville’s Maplewood Cemetery. Davenport, who outlived his mural partner by 19 years, is buried in Tonawanda’s Elmlawn Cemetery. 

Cowles Media Company continued to own the Courier-Express building for another three years after the newspaper shut down in September 1982. Although the building was vacant, the lobby mural remained intact during that period. 

The following summer, Barry Levinson’s baseball movie, The Natural, was filmed in Buffalo. Levinson memorialized the Courier-Express mural in full cinematic technicolor in a two-second scene, as actor Robert Duvall, playing the role of sports reporter Max Mercy, walks through the Courier-Express lobby, headed for the newspaper’s “morgue” to investigate the background of mysterious baseball star Roy Hobbs (played by Robert Redford). The scene captures almost the entire mural, as Duvall—and his shadow—strides past it. Sadly, the scene is only included in the Director’s Cut edition, airing at 52 minutes, 32 seconds. Later in 1983, a Buffalo News story reported that the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture had entered into discussions with Cowles Media about a possible move from the South Campus to the Courier-Express building. Had that move taken place, the mural would most likely be hanging today. 

But in April 1985, the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo purchased the building for $900,000 and over the next year spent more than $2 million on renovations. The interior remodeling was so extensive that the Diocesan communications director told a Buffalo News reporter in 1986 that former Courier-Express employees hoping for a nostalgic visit might be disappointed: “I don’t think they’d recognize anything, except the lobby.” 

Well, not quite: the mural was gone.

Around that time, John Conlin entered the lobby of the newly renamed Catholic Center. He wanted to revisit the mural, which he had admired as a kid for its striking transportation and bridge visual elements. As a preservationist, Conlin also wanted to urge the Diocese to keep the mural in the lobby. But it was already gone. A local architecture and engineering firm with family ties to the Diocese had been hired to take down the mural. The workmen rolled it tightly, without support, face inward—anathema to conservationists—and carried it to the basement, where the paper’s printing presses used to be. In storage, the heavy roll collapsed under its own unsupported weight and developed pronounced undulations. Conlin soon returned to the Catholic Center with fellow Landmark Society member and chairman Austin Fox to take a look at the mural’s condition. When a Diocesan official offered to unroll it on the basement floor, they declined, “fearing further damage to it.” Conlin and Fox could see the mural was in rough shape.

Conlin acted quickly to save the mural. The Diocese agreed to give it to the Landmark Society, but Conlin had another idea. He thought that Buffalo State College should have the mural as “it was a natural project for the college’s Art Conservation Department.” He contacted the college archivist, Sister Martin Joseph Jones, who readily accepted the offer. Even though the mural was recorded as donated to the Landmark Society, it was never in the society’s possession. So it was that in 1988 Sister Martin asked her art conservation colleagues for help. This unique program had just moved to Buffalo State from Oneonta State College in the summer of 1987. Conlin’s hunch that the Courier-Express mural belonged at Buffalo State had additional merit as well. In 1985, the college had hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of the Buffalo Courier-Express library collection, donated to the college and the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society (today’s Buffalo History Museum) by Cowles Media Company. The collection, valued at $500,000, encompassed every issue of the newspaper and its antecedents dating back to 1834, and included more than 100,000 photographs, about 1 million original news clippings and many other artifacts. The collection was housed in E. H. Butler Library under the direction of Sister Martin. The idea was to restore the mural and install it in Butler Library in connection with the Courier-Express library archives.

During the summer of 1988, the Diocese staff unrolled the mural onto a smooth concrete former printing press bed, not to be disturbed by basement traffic.  Shortly thereafter, Buffalo State art conservation professors Dan Kushel and James Hamm visited the Catholic Center basement to inspect the newly acquired mural. The first glimpse was not a pretty sight. Kushel remembers seeing “incredible damage.” The huge canvas had originally been adhered to the plaster of the lobby wall in 1930 with a lead white adhesive. According to Kushel, the bulk of the damage was done to the top corners when the mural’s canvas was inexpertly torn from the wall, taking big pieces of plaster, lots of lead white adhesive, paint chips and “just chunks of stuff” with it. The mural, still laid out in the Catholic Center basement, was allowed to flatten for a period of time; the undulations diminished on their own, revealing only a few remaining minor distortions. The removal had caused extensive paint loss and creasing mostly to the upper half of the mural. Otherwise, Kushel and Hamm’s examination found “little apparent age cracking or other substantive structural deterioration of the paint film.”

In 1989, the two embarked on a multi-stage plan to prepare the mural for transfer to the college. First, they meticulously cleared its surface of the loose plaster, chips, and paste debris. Next, they “faced it” with a solution brushed on through pieces of tissue, meant to hold the painting together. Then they slowly rolled the mural, face out, onto a custom-designed metal cylindrical carrier about 20 feet long and two feet in diameter, padding it as they went with large sheets of protective cushioning. Finally, the rolled mural was wrapped in a layer of synthetic polymer.

The last challenge was to get the mural out of the basement and safely to Buffalo State. The Catholic Center freight elevator proved to be a tight fit, but the Buffalo State maintenance crew managed to carefully load it onto a college truck. Its campus destination, Caudell Hall, involved even trickier maneuvering by the college moving crew through narrow doorways, around corners and passages and down to the basement. Once there, the Art Conservation Department expected to unroll it and perform a thorough technical inspection. This examination would include a first look at the entire reverse of the canvas, with all the adhesive and plaster residue still clinging to its back. At some point after the appraisal, it was hoped, faculty and students would treat the canvas and the college would permanently exhibit the restored masterpiece. But these initiatives were not pursued. Instead, the mural remained in storage in the Caudell Hall basement, like a mummy waiting for its next life, for 25 years. Sister Martin Joseph retired in 1995 and Dan Kushel in 2012. Momentum, and with it institutional memory, seemed to fade. Until 2014.

That year, New York State announced a $27 million capital project to extensively renovate Caudell Hall. Major updates to the 52-year-old building would include a gutting of the interior. This meant the Courier-Express mural would have to leave the basement one way or the other: to be relocated or disposed of. In early spring 2014, James Hamm of the Art Conservation Department advocated saving the mural. He recommended transporting it to an off-campus site with ample space (approximately 2,000 square feet) to vacuum remaining debris from the face and reverse; to remove the plaster and white lead, adhering to EPA regulations for hazardous waste and to engage in a variety of surface repairs. Hamm estimated the cost at $200,000. However, the only action involved Cook Moving Systems of Cheektowaga which, for a fee of $2,466.40, professionally extricated the mural from Caudell Hall’s basement on June 11, 2014. It was then taken around the corner to the Buffalo History Museum’s Resource Center on Forest Avenue, where it has been stored for the last six years.

Lately, renewed interest in the status of this historic mural has been rippling at Buffalo State. It is on the radar of Patrick Ravines, associate professor and director of the Patricia H. and Richard E. Garman Art Conservation Department, and Daniel M. DiLandro, head of archives and special collections at the E. H. Butler Library. There is talk of seeking a modest start-up grant to support an intensive examination of the mural, then perhaps looking for a source of significant funds for its restoration. After that, a permanent exhibition space would need to be found.

Sara Solovitch wasn’t the only journalist to cite the mural in the Courier-Express’s final edition of September 19, 1982. Staff artist Tom Toles contributed a parting editorial cartoon to that closing issue. Toles, who became an editorial cartoonist at the Buffalo News and Washington Post (where he won a Pulitzer Prize), sketched a wistful look back at his time with the Courier-Express. The cartoon’s third frame shows a mini-version of the mural along with this commentary: “The Lobby. I’ll remember the strange old mural depicting the merger of the Buffalo Courier and the Buffalo Express.” Toles’ cartoon was the last black-and white-rendering of the grand mural to be printed.

With its colorful visual interpretation of a moment in Buffalo’s newspaper history and its vision of the city’s past and future, the mural deserves to be preserved and exhibited for upcoming generations of Buffalonians. As John Conlin put it, “It’s a great image, and it’s worth making it public.”

Will the mural’s fate be as bright as the hopes were for the city, as depicted in the mural?

For now, its destiny is uncertain.