The Temple of Music, September 1901

In the late summer of nineteen-oh-one, Buffalo was hosting the most spectacular event in its history. The Pan-American Exposition had opened in May on three hundred fifty acres north of the city, a world's fair celebrating the Americas and the age of electricity. Nearly a quarter of a million incandescent bulbs outlined every building. At night, power from Niagara Falls twenty-five miles away turned the grounds into a spectacle of colored light that newspapers called the Rainbow City. Eight million people came to see it.

President William McKinley arrived on September fifth to a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands. He toured the grounds and gave a speech in which he praised the spirit of international commerce and cooperation. The following day, September sixth, he was scheduled to hold a public reception at the Temple of Music, one of the exposition's grandest buildings, a concert hall modeled in Italian Renaissance style with seating for two thousand and a fifty-two-rank pipe organ.

The reception line was long. McKinley greeted visitor after visitor. A twenty-eight-year-old named Leon Czolgosz stood in the line with a revolver concealed beneath a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand. Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrants, had lost his factory job in the economic panic of eighteen ninety-three and in the years since had moved through socialist and anarchist circles. He had come to Buffalo with a stated political purpose.

When Czolgosz reached the president, he fired two shots at close range. McKinley was struck. He was taken to a medical facility on the exposition grounds and then to a private home nearby. Surgeons operated. For several days, the president appeared to be improving. On September fourteenth, eight days after the shooting, he died of gangrene from the wounds.

Theodore Roosevelt, who had been hiking in the Adirondacks when word reached him, was sworn in as president in Buffalo, becoming at forty-two the youngest president in American history. Czolgosz was tried in Buffalo within weeks. The proceedings lasted eight hours. After thirty minutes of deliberation, the jury convicted him. He was executed at Auburn Prison on October twenty-ninth, nineteen-oh-one.

The Temple of Music was demolished the following year, along with nearly every other building from the exposition. The neighborhood that replaced it is now called Olmsted Park.