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north. My first recollections of the canal involve very busy traffic in canal boats hauled by horses and often, many canal boats tied up in the basin between Salina and Clinton Streets. There were frequent interruptions of traffic on Salina Street as the bridge over the canal was lifted to allow the canal boats to pass, and they didn't pass very fast. Fortunately for us, the Warren Street bridge, which carried our car line, was the "high" type which cleared the boats. Many books have been written about the Erie Canal but two of the most charming are Walter D. Edmonds' historical novels "Rome Haul” and "Erie Water," the latter with a number of references to Joshua Forman.

I can still name most of the stores and eateries of any note that were downtown at this time but there seems little point in it. So I'll stick to the ones which had particular meaning to us. If Mother and I were downtown at lunchtime, we'd usually eat at Blodgett's on Clinton Street near Fayette, where the food was extra-special and where they made their own ice creams and baked goods which were simply delicious. It seems to me that creamed chicken was a specialty which I enjoyed there. It was an old-fashioned restaurant with the bakery counter up front and the eating facilities in the rear. I remember always being intrigued by the fact that the kitchen was in the basement and all the food came up by dumbwaiter to be taken by the waitresses and served in the dining room. One nice thing about Blodgett's was its odor -— it just had a nice clean, tantalizing smell of good food in an immaculate setting albeit quite old-fashioned. My father ate lunch downtown but his favorite place was O'Connor & Wittner, a well-known restaurant upstairs on Fayette which catered to business and professional people; I never had the pleasure of eating there or even seeing the inside of the place. It was usually referred to as O'Connor's and I think the food was probably excellent. AS for Blodgett's, one specialty of the house was macaroons, lady fingers, and kisses, the most delicious I've ever eaten ever anywhere. Other eating places were Huylers and Schraffts and for big eating, the Onondaga and the Yates the latter still running a fine restaurant despite having fallen from No.1 hotel with the advent of the ONONDAGA. Some place, I think it was the Yates, had the most fantastically good cream potatoes I've ever eaten. My father belonged to the Citizens Club which occupied the top floor of the University Block and he took me in there occasionally but my recollection is that although they had a bar, they didn‘t serve food up there. My early memories also include the old Vanderbilt Hotel which was No.1 before the Yates, standing on the corner of Washington and Warren Streets a three or four-story red—brick hostelry that dated back to the Civil War or close to it, opening in 1868, and Charles Dickens being its first guest. The lobby of the hotel was on Warren St. where the guests and hangers-on would sit in big easy chairs and gaze out upon the Warren Street activity passing by the big plate glass windows. Of course, drinking was wide open in those days