The Erie County Almshouse, Main Street and Bailey Avenue, ca. 1830. House medical staff, Buffalo City Hospital, 1927-1928. Photo courtesy Joann Wolf. First class to complete the Buffalo City Hospital Nurse Training program, 1922. Right, Following a fire at the Erie County Almshouse at Main and Bailey, patients are being comforted by doctors and nurses before being transferred to Buffalo City Hospital, 1918. Courtesy of the Buffalo History Museum, used by permission. 18 The hospital opens and disaster strikes. On March 19, 1918, the new Buffalo City Hospital at 462 Grider Street was opened as a public general hospital with 415 beds and the resources to provide special care for tuberculosis patients and those with acute communicable diseases. The largest proportion of its facilities were devoted to the poor citizens of the city who could not afford the rates of private hospitals. Some of the patients in the Municipal Hospital and the Wende Hospital, and all of the patients at the Erie County Almshouse & Infirmary located at what is now Hayes Hall on the South campus of the University at Buffalo, were transferred to the new hospital although Municipal and Wende continued to serve as annexes to City Hospital. 1918 is also infamous as the year of the devastating influenza pandemic and the new hospital was soon crowded with flu patients. It was a harrowing time for Dr. Walter S. Goodale, the superintendent of the hospital, since so many of the city’s health care providers had left for Europe to assist in the care of the wounded in World War I. Because so few people had access to private transportation, a transit workers’ strike added to the woes of those needing to get to doctors and hospitals. Physicians and nurses were also dying from the rapidly spreading disease. In October of that year, the sophomore, junior, and senior classes of the UB Medical School were conscripted for duty at City Hospital by the health commissioner. Buffalo mayor George S. Buck ordered a three-week quarantine that shut down schools and closed churches, movie houses, theaters, pool halls, saloons, ice cream parlors, and soda fountains. On the day he gave the order, 1,700 new flu cases were reported and an emergency hospital was created downtown at Central High School. In all, more than 28,000 cases of influenza were reported and over 2,500 people in Buffalo died from influenza and pneumonia in 1918. In the nation, influenza was far deadlier than war. World War I killed 116,516 Americans, but 550,000 died from influenza.