Within These Walls: WNY’s iconic venues

By Robert J. McLennan
(Image above: Photo by Peter Sloane)

First a little history: Black Rock, N.Y., was founded in 1792 and burned to the ground twice by the British during the War of 1812. 

It was a separate town, battling Buffalo to be the terminus of the Erie Canal in the 1820s.  They lost to the city with the bigger harbor and the town was incorporated into the city of Buffalo in 1853.  There were Underground Railroad stops in Black Rock in the 1850s and during the Civil War.  In the 1870s, the International Railway Bridge connected Canada and the United States at Black Rock, an engineering marvel at the time.  However, Black Rock remained a primarily rural area through the mid-1800s.  But in 1883, a railway was completed that helped bring industry and people into Black Rock. 

Then, in 1890, a new building went up at 326 Amherst Street.  And now that building is owned and operated by the Hall family: Dwane and Denise and their three sons, Jason, Jeffrey and James. They’ll be celebrating their 40th anniversary at the location this weekend (Aug. 30).

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Let’s set the scene, 135 years later.  I’ll call it a summer night.  You park along Amherst Street or in the lot across the street and you can hear some music playing and it gets louder as you approach the tavern.  A soft summer breeze is blowing while you look up and see music fans congregating on the balcony enjoying both the music and the night air. 

Over the years there have been changes, but now you go in the front door, and you’re greeted by Larry Musser, the friendly doorman, and you pay your way.  You look around and you immediately see people you know and feel a sense of camaraderie.  The lighting is warm and inviting, creating a cozy atmosphere, the air conditioning is keeping it comfortable and the sound, that Sportsmen’s sound, grabs your attention. 

Whatever band is playing, Tony Coniglio or the other sound guys have set the dials just right; it is the best sounding room in the Buffalo area.  A lot of places have good sound, but the sound system at the Sportsmen’s is phenomenal.  Some nights it feels almost too good to be true, like you’re listening to a studio recording.

And then, as you find a place to settle in, you exchange greetings with friends and acquaintances all over the place, both downstairs near the band and upstairs where the second bar is located.  You check out the beautiful array of framed posters and artwork and new show announcements.  And then you look toward the bar and nod to one of the Halls tending bar, and then another from the Hall family walks through the tavern on a mission and you talk a little bit, and then you turn around and there are more friends to engage with, and often it’s the boss, Dwane Hall.

See, that’s the thing about the Sportsmen’s Tavern.  It’s owned and operated by the Hall family, and they’ve developed it over many decades into Buffalo’s premier live music venue, but it has retained its friendly, family atmosphere.  As oldest son Jason Hall told me, “This is our home to share with people, and we treat you that way, and we expect the same coming back to us.”

When the lights from inside the tavern are blazing on a dark Black Rock night, and the music is playing, and people are gathering outside and coming and going, the tavern shines like a beacon in the center of the Grant/Amherst neighborhood in the enclave of Black Rock in the city of Buffalo.  There is no place else like it.

If these walls could talk … they’ve seen a lot of action over the years.  This same building that has become so important to so many people in WNY, the welcoming and inviting “Cheers”-like tavern in one of Buffalo’s oldest neighborhoods, has been there in the center of the neighborhood for well over a century. 

It was a brand-new building at a heady time in Buffalo, then the eighth largest city in the country. 

After the introduction of the Belt Line Railway, completed in 1883, which circled the city of Buffalo, movement among residents and material became much more common.  The Tonawanda and Amherst Street station became highly utilized.  By 1900 Black Rock became heavily industrialized and many immigrants, primarily Polish, Ukrainian and Hungarians, moved to the area for work, including many Polish that had been living on the East Side of the city.  And then the Niagara Steet Streetcar Line began operating in the 1890s, making it much easier to move around within the city.

The Pan-American Exposition in 1901 brought business into Grant-Amherst since the Exposition was just down Amherst Street at Elmwood Avenue.  The Alcazar Hotel was located on Amherst Street, across from the Pan-American Exposition grounds (on the Elmwood Avenue side).  An advertisement card from 1901 for the Alcazar Hotel confirms its location at the “West Amherst Gate to the Pan-Am.”  The hotel had 500 rooms and offered lodging for $1 per night during the Exposition. Its unique design, which included being built on the western lot line of the Hotel Elmwood, contributed to its architectural, historical and cultural significance. 

During and beyond the Exposition business was booming at the turn of the 20^th century in Grant-Amherst and Black Rock with bakeries and delis, groceries, butchers, barber shops, Kittinger Furniture, Pierce Arrow Autos … and Spolka Men’s Clothing at 436 Amherst St., a satellite of the main store in the Broadway-Fillmore area.  The address where The Cave now stands, 71 Military Rd., which is also part of the Hall family’s music complex, has a connection to the Pan-Am Exposition.  Dwane told me, “There used to be a blacksmith there who made the horseshoes for the horses in the Pan-American Exposition.”

And there were many taverns around the area of Amherst and Military and Kail streets, near the current Hot Mama’s.  According to Dwane, “There used to be six taverns between the Sportsmen’s and Grant Street: Karpies, the Shindig, the Peanut House, Rock Inn and Eddie Mays.”

The building at 326 Amherst Street was right in the middle of this bustling neighborhood.  Very early in the 1900s it became the Sportsmen’s Club.  In fact, the Halls still have the license the Sportsmen’s Club obtained in 1915, which cost $5, to allow the Club to add a pool table and a bowling alley.  There have been a series of apartments in the back of the building but the building has always been primarily the Sportsmen’s Club or Tavern.

The building has been owned since the beginning by only a few families.  It appears it was originally owned by John Schneggenburger, who ran it as a grocery store and saloon.  Then sometime in the first decade of the 1900s, Theodore Lipinski bought the tavern and it stayed in his extended family for many years.  In the 1950s Thaddeus Nadratowski operated the place.  In 1983, it was purchased by Pat and Marilyn Gott, but then just two years later in 1985 Dwane and Denise Hall bought the tavern. 

Dwane and Denise, being from Black Rock, were well-aware of the Sportsmen’s before they purchased it.  From the time he was 6 years old, Dwane Hall had lived in a house near the corner of Grant and Amherst, the second house right across the street from the empty lot in the picture below of Grant-Amherst.  The empty lot is where the Polish Cadets building, which was built in 1913, now stands. The first house had burned down by that time and Dwane and his family used to sell Christmas trees in that lot in the early 1960s.  Dwane did a stint in the Marines in the mid ‘70s and afterward settled again in Black Rock.

And in the late ‘60s when she was a teenager, Denise can remember going to the tavern with her father.  She lived right behind the bar on Military Road a couple doors down from where The Cave now stands.  Jason Hall said, “My grandfather used to take me to the Sportsmen’s when I was 6 or 7 years old when Teddy (Thaddeus) still owned it, and we’d take what we wanted from behind the bar and pay into a box with the honor system.”  That would be about 1980.  All three of the Hall boys, Jason, Jeffrey and James, were raised in Black Rock and spent their entire childhoods in the neighborhood.  Even James, the youngest, remembers going there with Grandpa before the family owned it.

The Sportsmen’s Tavern was just a local neighborhood shot-and-a-beer hangout when the Halls bought it, still with a pool table and a shuffleboard table.   Dwane Hall added the mural of race car driver Dale Earnhardt behind the bar.  In fact, in the early 1990s Dwane drove in stock car racing and then worked for NASCAR in 2002-2003.

But Dwane Hall is first and foremost a musician and performer.  There is a whole other story about the band Dwane was in, Stone Country, and their last attempt to hit the big time.  This was in February of 1993; Stone Country had worked for a couple years to get ready for a big feature show in Nashville but a once in a hundred years snowstorm happened in a city not used to that kind of weather.  The show got cancelled the morning of the event, and the momentum never quite picked up again after that.

Dwane had always stayed active in the music scene, even putting out 20,000 copies per month of the North Country Review, a music publication, while working day jobs in the late 1970s.  When asked what led him to purchase the tavern, Dwane said, “I had to feed my family and support my music habit.” 

So, in the first few years of the Hall ownership, ’85-’90, Dwane’s band Stone Country and some of his friends’ bands all started to play at the tavern.  No cover charge, nothing too formal, but it started to be recognized as a place to hear good music.  From the beginning, having great sound was always important to Dwane: “I played too many other places with shit sound, I didn’t want that in my place,” he said.

Dwane recalled that in the ‘90s, Bill Kirchen and Dale Watson appeared at the tavern and later visits by bands such as the Bottle Rockets followed, and the music credibility went way up and a national reputation started to develop, and more local bands wanted to play there.  

Dwane said, “It was due to the goodwill of Bill Kirchen, from Commander Cody’s band, and Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel that the national attention started coming.  They told their agents to look at the Sportsmen’s Tavern for booking their acts, that it was a cool place.”  Dwane’s long-time friend, the late Ken Biringer, took over the booking and the calls started coming in hot and heavy.

The first recording studio was built next door in ’95.  A small stage was built across from the bar in ’97 and the booking of national touring bands increased.  The Sportsmen’s, around the turn into the 21^st century, was now recognized as a big player on the local music scene.  Country, roots music, rockabilly, folk and Americana were the calling cards of the Sportsmen’s Tavern.

In the decade of the 2010s, the front stage was built, and then made bigger.  The tavern size grew significantly when the upstairs was opened into a beautifully expanded room with a balcony and extra front row seating.  Popular lunchtime concerts were added to the weekday schedule.  Dwane said, “Ron Davis (Buffalo singer and keyboardist) should get credit for the idea of having matinees.”

In 2013, Dwane put together a group of dedicated music lovers and patrons of the Sportsmen’s Tavern to create the nonprofit Sportsmen’s Americana Music Foundation organization.  (Full disclosure-this writer was the president of the Foundation for about five years prior to Covid). 

The SAM Foundation became another peg in the growing national reputation of the tavern. Kirchen became the SAMF’s national spokesman.  Dwane said, “It was Bill Kirchen and Dale Watson who started referring to Buffalo as North Austin,” and the tavern and the foundation both ran with that description, calling Black Rock the Austin of the North.   In 2018, the Sportsmen’s Tavern won the Ameripolitan Music Award, which recognized the tavern as the best honky-tonk in the country. 

Sportsmen’s Park opened in 2018. The Cave’s first show was in 2019.  And then in 2024, the big expansion happened that made the whole place bigger and drastically improved the sightlines all over the tavern.  The Sportsmen’s complex, which consists of the tavern, The Cave and Sportsmen’s Park, has become a serious music destination in Western New York with a national reputation.  It has broadened the variety of music offered to include different styles of jazz, big bands and rock ‘n’ roll, and just about any genre will work and attract a following at the Sportsmen’s.  The Halls, originating with Dwane and Denise, want Buffalo to be thought of as Music Town.  When I asked Jason about competition from other venues, he said that doesn’t worry them, “We just want to be a part of a very vibrant music scene in our city.”

The Sportsmen’s is a family operation.  Dwane and Denise have turned over many of the responsibilities to their three sons for the day-to-day operation and booking.  Denise is still in charge of the finances and paperwork in running the business. 

And now Dwane’s grandson/Jason’s son Eric is also working with the family.   Eric is 23 years old and the Sportsmen’s Tavern has always been a presence in his life.  “When I was a kid, I thought it was so cool seeing my Grandpa up there on the stage; I wanted to be a rock star,”  Eric said. As he has spent more time at the tavern and become more involved with the operation, Eric has been exposed to a wider range of music than the average 23 year old and he’s been surprised sometimes how much he likes what he hears.

“I’m really blown away by the blues singer/guitarist Danielle Nicole,” he said.  And he was also another Hall who expressed his admiration for Dave Alvin.   Eric added, “I wouldn’t trade working with my family for the world; it’s really cool to work together to get things done.  But we’re nothing without our customers, we’re all like a family inside the tavern.”

It can be a challenge at times running a business that can really have its ups and downs. 

“The only way we keep things going sometimes is by just doing what has to be done, there are a lot of unbillable hours for all of us,” Jason said.  That happens when you run an entertainment business that still puts on close to 900 shows per year.  After spending a year in New York City as a theatre major in the early ‘90s, Jason returned to Black Rock and has been involved with the family business since. 

Denise commented, “As difficult as it is running a tavern, we’re just thankful that people walk through those doors and support us.”  James Hall added, “One of the things that always surprises me is the compliments and gratitude we get from bands and customers, like when a touring musician on stage says something like, ‘You have no idea how lucky you are to have a place like this in your city.’ And for me it’s just home.”  James started working part time at the tavern when he was a kid but after working other jobs, he came back to the tavern full time after the big expansion opened the upstairs balcony. Now he says, “Being behind the bar and at Ralph Wilson Stadium are my two happy places.”

Jeff Hall was off on his own working another job when the first big expansion happened but, like James, he came back to the Sportsmen’s. “I knew my family needed me,” Jeff said.  Ironically, Jeff wasn’t really into music, especially live music, but since coming back, “Sportsmen’s opened me up to a lot of music that I now appreciate.” 

Jeff didn’t necessarily plan to stay but, “When I saw people taking pictures, including selfies, in front of the tavern I realized something special was going on, it wasn’t just a corner bar any longer.” 

Now he’s here for the duration, “I’m here to provide the best entertainment experience we can provide to our customers.”  Like the rest of the family, Jeff emphasized, “We wouldn’t be where we are without our customers.  I love it when I see people dancing on the patio, or an older couple dancing to a weeknight jazz show; I know we’re doing what we do for the right reasons.”

The Halls have purchased several more properties along Amherst Street, making plans to further expand.  “How far can we go?”  Jason said that’s always at the top of his mind.  Both Dwane and Jason commented that, “Our business model is that if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”  Dwane added, “Every day we try to make it better, maybe new carpets or lights, or new pictures on the walls.” 

When I sat down to talk to Dwane, he reflected back on all the work they’ve done.  “I couldn’t be happier that I built something for my kids,”  he said. Thinking back on the decades of working with musicians, he said, “I have the respect of the musicians in town for being one of them … in the 70s I even tried to start a separate musicians union” 

Echoing Jason’s comment about the tavern being like a home they share with their friends and customers, Dwane was proud of the fact that “We created a safe vibe for people who have gray hair, and women coming into the tavern by themselves; we’ll even walk them to their cars if they’d like us to.”  Denise added, “If it wasn’t for Dwane Hall, we would not have been a success.”

Off the top of his head Dwane told me that some of the highlights over the years, in addition to Bill Kirchen and Dale Watson, were Commander Cody, Maria Muldaur, Asleep at the Wheel and Rodney Crowell, and he remembered a night when he had a long talk with the rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson.   “She said that she and Elvis Presley were talking about getting married but they decided their dual careers meant it just wouldn’t work out.”

Jason Hall mentioned some of the same people as his father, emphasizing the Rodney Crowell show, but he added Dave and Phil Alvin (a reuniting of the brothers) as a very big deal along with the night Buddy Guy hung out in the tavern, Albert Lee, the Les Dudek shows, and the recent Ricky Scaggs outdoor show in the park.

But the question is not really a fair one; there have been so many fantastic shows and good times in the past 40 years from both national and WNY artists that it would be a project in itself to try to remember them all.  Especially since 2007 when Dave Alvin made his first appearance at the Sportsmen’s on a cold February night (the “King of California” told me, “One thing I learned that day was that cowboy boots don’t go too well with 2 inches of ice on the sidewalk”) there have been so many magical nights at 326 Amherst Street that any regular patron could come up with their own list of highlights.

Let’s go back to my scenario at the beginning of this lengthy narrative.  I left it with the music playing and the tavern shining like a beacon.  Let’s jump to the end, the band just finished their encore and the room is full of joy and gratitude and happiness.  Now it’s the final act for the evening.  While some customers who are maybe there for the first or second time might head for the door, there is always a contingent of friends and acquaintances who hang out just a little bit more to replay the events of the night and revel in the shared experience of the very communal act of enjoying live music.  And nobody presents that experience better than the Sportsmen’s Tavern, the Honkiest Tonkiest Beer Joint in Music Town.

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