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Riverside, Buffalo — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Tonawanda Street crosses Ontario Street at the center of Riverside, a Buffalo neighborhood of two-family houses ending at the Niagara River bluff.
About Riverside
Where to stay in Riverside
Each area has its own feel; here's who each one suits.
Riverside has no hotel strip of its own, so the practical beds are five miles south in downtown Buffalo or twelve miles north around Niagara Falls. Exit 14 leaves the I-190 at Ontario Street. The neighborhood itself is two-family houses, Riverside Park at its western edge, and the crossroads at Tonawanda Street.
Stay here if you want the Olmsted lawns and the bluff.
About Riverside
What are the main landmarks in Riverside?
Riverside Park is the last park the Olmsted firm drew for Buffalo, laid out in 1898 on 22 acres between Niagara, Crowley, Vulcan, and Tonawanda Streets. The National Register listed it in 1982. A lighthouse monument and a river overlook stand inside it.
All Saints Roman Catholic Church, colonial brick completed in 1938, stands at 127 Chadduck Avenue, and its parish closed in 2024. Public School No. 60 went up at 238 Ontario Street in 1897, Renaissance Revival red brick, and joined the register in 2014.
What is the history of Riverside?
Riverside stayed farmland and a few large estates until the Hertel Avenue Sewer Bill of 1888 opened the ground to building. The North Park Land Company bought 30 acres in 1890 and cut them into lots, and the two-family houses that followed drew German and Irish families out of Black Rock. After the Pan-American Exposition closed in 1901, the Roblin Brothers built hundreds of homes from its dismantled lumber around Ontario Street.
Bishop Charles H. Colton founded the All Saints parish in 1911. Chevrolet raised its Tonawanda Engine plant over the town line in the 1930s. Riverside lost its riverfront to the Thruway.
Where is Riverside?
Between the Town of Tonawanda at Vulcan Street and Black Rock to the south, Riverside faces the Niagara River across the lanes of the I-190.
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Updated September 2026