The idea of a children’s hospital, or even a children’s ward, was unheard of prior to the 19th century. Before the modernization of hospitals, the well-being of children was thought to be in the hands of the mother. Even after medical treatment became more professional, sick and injured kids were hospitalized alongside sick and dying adults, typically with lasting physical and psychological effects.

The case was no different in Buffalo. When Buffalo General Hospital opened in 1858, it only admitted men and boys. It wasn’t until the Ladies Hospital Association was organized that women and girls were admitted as well. Fourteen years later in 1883, the Ladies Hospital Association urged the Boards of Trustees to provide a separate ward at the hospital exclusively for children. After Mayor Jonathan Scoville provided his own financial support, the two-room children’s ward at Buffalo General was opened on May 13, 1884 with ten beds in each room. However, since the children’s ward was located over a hot and noisy boiler room, it was less than ideal. Tents were set up on the lawn each summer in order to allow the hospitalized children to escape the heat from the boiler room. By the 1890s, a group of women were fed up with the conditions of the ward and complained to Buffalo General’s Board of Trustees. They suggested that a new separate building be constructed for the children’s ward. The trustees rejected the idea.

Around this time, Dr. Mahlon Bainbridge Folwell, a physician at Buffalo General Hospital, believed that mixing kids and adults in hospitals was counterproductive to a child’s healthcare and recovery. He thought that if kids were treated in a separate facility from adults, they would recuperate more quickly and more completely. In 1891, Dr. Folwell discussed this theory with Harriet Williams and her daughter, Martha Tenney Williams, who felt so passionate about the idea that they purchased a vacant home at 219 Bryant Street for a new children’s hospital. Although women had gained economic and legal independence 30 years earlier, it was still relatively rare for women to exercise these rights in public at the end of the 19th century, thus making the creation of the new hospital a bold new step for women.

On May 23, 1892, a group of 19 people, most of whom were women, signed the articles of incorporation for the Children’s Hospital of Buffalo. When the two-story brick hospital opened on September 6, 1892 it became the first free-standing pediatric hospital in New York State and had a permanent staff of seven: one nurse, four nursing assistants, one housekeeper and one cook. The new hospital had three attending physicians who also worked at Buffalo General: Dr. Folwell was the attending physician; Dr. John Parmenter (who later gained national attention for assisting in President McKinley’s surgery in 1901) was the first attending surgeon; and Dr. Bernard Bartow was the first attending orthopedic surgeon. The hospital had the capacity for 12 patients at a cost of only a dollar per day for treatment. Some of the gifts donated in the first year consisted of five dozen eggs, a lawn mower, a large can of cocoa and various articles of clothing. There were a total of 55 inpatients treated in the first year and many more had to be turned away due to lack of space.

In 1893, only a year after opening, Mrs. Williams and her daughter purchased and converted additional properties near the original “little brown house” and increased the hospital’s capacity to 40 patients. After her mother’s death that year, Martha Tenney Williams continued to own and maintain the properties. By 1906, she felt confident that Children’s had gained a solid footing that would be continued by others, so she transferred ownership of the buildings to the hospital. Until her death in 1919, Miss Williams continued to be an active member of the Board of Managers, which was made up completely of women until the 1970s.

With a strong leadership of women in the hospital’s early years, it’s no surprise that many of the hospital’s expansions in its first 50 years were thanks to the efforts of women. As the hospital became a more established force in the medical world, Mrs. Lester Wheeler, the president of Children’s Hospital caught the attention of the wife of the president of Buffalo General Hospital, Mrs. Charles Pardee. Mrs. Wheeler served as the president of Children’s for 18 years and her strong leadership prompted Mrs. Pardee to donate $160,000 for the Children’s Hospital’s next expansion. The new addition opened on October 20, 1908 on adjoining property previously purchased by the hospital and contained girls’ and boys’ wards, new kitchens, a large dining room, a new operating room with a separate room for administering anesthetics, a babies’ ward with an incubator room and five private rooms. The newly-expanded hospital now had a capacity of 50-60 patients.

Despite the added space, the hospital quickly outgrew its capacity. By the 1920s, the nurses’ home, which was first built a decade earlier, now housed twice as many people than what it was designed for. The hospital also needed room for the maternity department, as well as a building for the outpatient department. The Children’s Hospital launched a fundraising campaign to raise $1 million for a number of improvements to its growing facility and by 1927, the successful campaign paid for yet more additions.

While the hospital continued to grow physically, its medical services also maintained a steady growth. The dental clinic was established in 1931, which was the first for a Buffalo hospital. In 1938, service for premature babies began and the creation of the occupational therapy department came the following year. The Children’s Hospital of Buffalo became the first in New York State to establish a hospital-based cerebral palsy clinic in 1942. Seven years later, in 1949, Children’s reached yet another milestone when it became the first hospital in the U.S. outside of New York City to establish a Pediatric Psychosomatic Medicine Clinic. The hospital also gained recognition for its treatment of Polio during the 1944 and 1952 epidemics.

By the 1950s, the hospital once again required more space. This time with a nine-story building at 219 Bryant Street that replaced the old main building and cost $5 million. It would later be named the Tanner Building in honor of Moir P. Tanner, who was the director of Children’s for 30 years. A little more than a decade later, Children’s Hospital launched yet another fundraising campaign for its 75th anniversary in 1967. This time for a 10-story addition to the Tanner Building. The new Variety Tower, which was completed in 1972, not only expanded the space and updated the equipment, but also enabled Children’s to become a teaching hospital affiliated with SUNY Buffalo, which was about to open its Amherst campus. The major reason for the campaign, which sought $7 million from the public, was to expand the Outpatient Department and Clinical Research & Training facilities. The project also added laboratories for research, expanded the Intensive Care Unit and updated its equipment, expanded the Emergency Department and added space for surgical units such as neurosurgery, urology, ophthalmology, orthopedics and others. However, the cost of the 10-story addition, among other mounting factors, caused the hospital to face financial difficulties in the following decade that nearly resulted in its closure.

The Children’s Hospital had a deficit of $750,000 in 1975 and $313,000 the following year. The financial difficulties that the Children’s Hospital faced were the result of a number of issues that had been building for nearly a decade and rumors began to spread that the hospital would close on April 1, 1977. The closure of the hospital would not only have been a huge loss for Buffalo, but the Western New York region as well. 

The operating costs of any children’s hospital is higher than hospitals for adults. Children require closer attention and more care, resulting in the need for more staff. Likewise, many medical professionals try to treat children through outpatient care to avoid hospitalizations that can be traumatic for kids, which means the occupancy rate for children’s hospitals tends to be lower than adult hospitals. When the Children’s Hospital of Buffalo was rumored to close, it had a 75% occupancy rate compared to the 96% of adult hospitals in the area. 

Another factor in the hospital’s challenges in the 70s was the cost of its latest expansion. When the Variety Tower was first built, its costs were supposed to be offset with rental income from New York State for the use of Children’s as a teaching hospital for UB medical students. However by 1977, after the state hadn’t paid the hospital its dues, more than half of the new tower was still unfinished. Fortunately, the threat of closure was enough to negotiate a deal with the state, whose payment came at almost half of what the original rental rate was set at. 

The near-closure also sparked merger discussions with other hospitals who were facing similar challenges. The initial announcement that a merger between Children’s, Deaconess, Buffalo General and the new Erie County Hospitals (ECMC) was met with opposition from medical staff and city residents. Buffalo General professionals feared that a four-hospital merger would mean a downgrade in its own services. 

Prior to any official merger plan announcement, a citizens’ committee grew out of a public meeting held at the Hotel Statler where it was feared that the proposed merger could mean the demise of Children’s Hospital. That fear was realized when the official proposal for the merger was released in July 1977 and called for the child care and maternity services offered at Children’s to be “phased out” to transfer care to ECMC. The proposal also called for drastic changes such as changing Buffalo General into a large outpatient clinic center and closing the nursing schools at Buffalo General and Meyer Hospital. 

The citizens’ committee launched a petition drive to keep Children’s Hospital and received over 200,000 signatures. By 1977, Children’s had been operating in the black after it made staff layoffs and received reimbursements from the state and Blue Cross. On August 4th of that year, the Board of Managers at Children’s Hospital voted unanimously to withdraw from the proposed merger in favor of maintaining a separate roof from other Buffalo hospitals. However, they kept the door open to possible mergers in the future.

Although the Children’s Hospital survived near-closure in the 1970s, by the 1990s it was once again feeling the financial strain of being an independent hospital in a region that was suffering serious economic decline. The idea for a merger arose again and in the late 90s, Children’s joined Buffalo General Hospital, Millard Fillmore Hospital and other smaller medical entities to form Kaleida Health. The new health system helped alleviate the expenses taken on by each institution and allowed them to continue serving the region.

In an effort to stop the financial hemorrhaging of the newly-formed health system, Kaleida executives aimed to reorganize services and consolidate hospitals downtown to an area they hoped to develop into a medical campus. Relocating the Children’s Hospital downtown was among the changes proposed in 1999. Although Children’s was generally in good shape, specifically the Variety Tower and the pediatric intensive care unit, the hospital’s other facilities were aging and lacked modern amenities. The numerous additions through the years also created a confusing layout that effected efficiency, which Kaleida hoped to remedy with a new hospital.

The proposal was not received well. Medical professionals did not believe Kaleida had the finances available to build an adequate facility, nor did the proposal include a detailed plan of how to do so. There were also protests, yet again, from residents, specifically in the Elmwood Village, which the Children’s Hospital was an integral part of. Business owners believed that without the hospital, the commercial street would suffer. In 2000, nearly every pediatrician in the Buffalo area signed a petition to keep Children’s in the Elmwood Village until a good architectural plan with their input was proposed. The following year, Kaleida announced that it was postponing the move downtown. However, that postponement didn’t last long.

After losing $53 million the previous year, Kaleida announced a new proposal in 2002 that would relocate the Children’s Hospital into either Buffalo General or Millard Fillmore Hospital and build an attached outpatient center, which was in need of a major upgrade. Once again, the Children’s Hospital was in danger and opposition to this new proposal was fierce. Pediatric specialists threatened to leave while other critics claimed that removing the free-standing children’s hospital, which served as a gem in a declining city, was on par with past mistakes like building the UB campus outside of the city or building the expressway through Delaware Park. That spring, politicians, local celebrities and passionate parents of children who had been treated at Children’s Hospital, gathered in Niagara Square for the “Save Our Children’s Hospital” campaign. 

Immediately overwhelmed by the rally, Kaleida once again decided to hold off on the move until the doctors and staff of the hospital were on board. They offered to collaborate and create a plan with the hospital staff to bring the Bryant Street hospital up to the level of other medical facilities of its kind. However, in the medical field there was a noticeable shift away from long hospitalizations and so a new outpatient center at Children’s was needed to accommodate that. Working with the staff at the Bryant Street hospital, Kaleida officials drew up plans to build one on Hodge Street across from Children’s. 

By time the proposal for the outpatient center was revealed in 2007, nearby homeowners of the medical facility – renamed Women and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo (WCHOB) in 2003 – filed lawsuits to stop the construction of the center claiming it would damage the character of the neighborhood. With the new outpatient center still a necessity, a physicians’ committee was formed to select a new location, and in 2010 the committee suggested that Kaleida locate it in the new medical office building, Conventus, which was a part of the growing medical campus. This was the first step in WCHOB moving downtown as well. 

As Kaleida Health continued to work with doctors and staff on the needs of its facilities, the finances of the health system improved and when the Gates Vascular Institute was completed in 2012, Kaleida proved that it could take on big projects. That, coupled with UB’s decision to build a new Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences building on the Buffalo Niagara Medical campus, helped lead the way for the new $270 million John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital to open in 2017 downtown.

The new hospital is actually smaller than the Bryant Street facility and has fewer beds for patients, but its more efficient floorplan and location on the medical campus near other medical services helps the hospital maintain its high level of medical care to the children of Western New York. It’s proof that the hospital has come a long way since it was founded in the little brown house in the Elmwood Village by a group of well-intentioned and determined women. Through many expansions, medical advancements, financial difficulties and continued support from the region, the hospital has cemented its place in Buffalo for years to come. 

As the Children’s Hospital was growing on Bryant Street in its early years, the children’s ward at Buffalo General Hospital needed more room. Before Buffalo General surgeon Dr. Devillo Harrington passed away in 1905, he asked the hospital to open a separate building on its campus for a children’s hospital. The Harrington Hospital for Children was officially dedicated on May 27, 1909 at 100 Goodrich Street. 

The two-story structure featured marble floors, wainscoting and the most modern appliances that were available at that time. The wards and private rooms both had balconies that allowed patients to enjoy the open air. The first floor was for older children, the second floor for mothers with nursing infants and the basement accommodated those under observation with certain diseases as well as two well-equipped operating rooms.

The board of trustees opted to remodel the Harrington in 1911 and two years later it was filled to capacity. However, the Harrington Hospital still only contained four wards with 12 beds each, so it was only able to accommodate a few more patients than the children’s ward did when it first opened in Buffalo General in 1884. The Children’s Hospital of Buffalo on Bryant Street continued to grow and had the capacity for more patients. It also was able to maintain the trust and respect it had gained from parents in the area, which the children’s hospital on Goodrich could not compete with. In 1952, the Harrington Hospital eventually closed.