Teddy Roosevelt’s Inaugural Home and Buffalo Wings

This past weekend Molly and I visited Buffalo, New York, primarily to attend one of our friend’s weddings. While in Buffalo, we enjoyed the hospitality of Rich and Susan Bring Tobe. Rich and Susan know the deep culture of Buffalo, New York, and they showed us a variety of historic architecture and landscape architecture (including homes by Frank Lloyd Wright, and parks designed by Frederick L. Olmsted). In addition to this, they also pointed out the home where Theodore Roosevelt was sworn into office, this after William McKinley died from an assassin’s bullet in Buffalo. Before Molly and I departed yesterday, we stopped to take some photos of the home. I thought I’d upload and share one here (the house is on the National Register of Historic Places, the site narrative linked to here).

This also got me to thinking how altered the monopolistic trust-busting might have been had Teddy not become president through this awful tragedy (that’s kind of the way with life, though: redemption can result from tragedy, at least in this case). Of course, had McKinley survived, we would not even know how things would have been otherwise. But that’s another discussion entirely (arguably presented much more intelligibly by Doc in Back to the Future).

While in Buffalo, I also got to thinking about just how many chicken wings Teddy could have inhaled at the Anchor Bar, the birthplace of the “Buffalo” wing (in Buffalo, they just call Buffalo wings “wings” much in the same way that the French refer to French onion soup as “onion soup.”).