Buffalo’s Fruit Belt neighborhood, also called the Orchard or the Hill, was the city’s longest standing German community. It is so named because of the fruit trees, which filled the yards of its German settlers. The area is currently bounded by Michigan Ave. to the west, Best St. to the north, Jefferson Ave. to the east, and the Kensington Expressway to the south. Its fruit-named streets are Mulberry, Lemon, Orange, Peach, Grape, and at one time Cherry St. was part of the neighborhood. Settlement began in the 1850s and continued into the 1920s.
A large number of the Fruit Belt’s German inhabitants owned their property, which often stayed in the family for generations. When the land was first purchased, settlers built small cottages to live in while their permanent houses were being constructed. Later on, the families’ married young adults may have lived in the cottages before inheriting the main domiciles. The houses built were predominantly in the Worker’s Cottage style, were one to two-and-a-half-stories high, with gabled roofs and porches.
The ethnic makeup of the Fruit Belt began to change in the 1940s when African Americans and Italian Americans moved to the neighborhood. Buffalo’s African American population grew rapidly from 1940 to 1970 during the Second Great Migration when millions of African Americans moved from the South to other areas of the U.S. Urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s in the Ellicott District and Oak St. area displaced numerous African Americans, many who then moved to the nearby Fruit Belt. Furthermore, the construction of the Kensington Expressway cut off the Fruit Belt from the rest of the East Side, demolished hundreds of houses, and caused the closing of businesses, which prompted the neighborhood’s German families to move.
Real estate schemes also caused German flight out of the neighborhood to Buffalo’s suburbs. Real estate agents of this era sometimes practiced blockbusting. This illegal and discriminatory practice used scare tactics to convince white residents to sell their property at low rates due to the influx of black residents. Agents would then resell or rent the property at inflated prices to African Americans. Also, the Federal Housing Administration’s 1930s publication, Underwriting Manual: Underwriting Analysis Under Title II, Section 203 of the National Housing Act, promulgated the idea that property would lose its value if individuals of differing social and racial categories moved into an already established neighborhood.
An organization that aided both the German American and African American communities in the Fruit Belt was the Neighborhood House. The Neighborhood House was part of the social settlement house movement, which occurred in the U.S. in the 1890s. Settlement houses aimed to help immigrants and migrants adjust to their new communities. They offered training and services such as daycare, a kindergarten, and field trips for children; activities for all ages including cooking, sewing, sports, and woodworking; plus, reading materials and English classes. The Neighborhood House merged with another Buffalo East Side settlement organization, the Westminster Community House, in 1981 to form the Buffalo Federation of Neighborhood Centers, an organization that still exists today.
Sanborn map featuring the Fruitbelt Neighborhood. The streets were named for the orchards planted by early settlers.
Buffalo Times article dated December 7, 1938 nostalgically describes the Fruit Belt neighborhood as it was in the 1890's.