🚨 Book Tour with Guest Post and Author Q&A ➜ If someone could build something this visible… how do they just disappear? Harry Altman: Buffalo’s Master Showman by Susan Fenster

Not every story disappears completely. Sometimes it survives in newspaper clippings, fading advertisements, and the memory of places that no longer exist. Harry Altman: Buffalo’s Master Showman by Susan Fenster follows the reconstruction of a forgotten entertainment empire and the man who stood behind it.

Synopsis:
Harry Altman spent decades building entertainment venues that drew enormous crowds and brought nationally known performers into a rapidly changing nightlife scene. His casinos and performance spaces became gathering points for audiences looking for music, spectacle, and escape.

Yet the success surrounding those nights was never secure. The entertainment business depended on constant reinvention, and the pressures behind the curtain were often as intense as the performances happening on stage. Financial instability, shifting public tastes, and larger industry changes slowly altered the world Altman once dominated.

Rather than focusing only on fame and glamour, this story looks closely at what it meant to build something ambitious in a world where visibility could disappear almost overnight. Using archival fragments, personal histories, and surviving records, Susan Fenster reconstructs an era that was active, crowded, and constantly in motion.

Harry Altman: Buffalo’s Master Showman examines what remains after the lights fade, and why some influential figures are left outside the version of history most people remember.

Amazon: https://bit.ly/4a8Qrsm

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243895850-harry-altman

Excerpt:

CHAPTER 5—SERIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP (1925-1935)

Driven by sheer ambition, Harry Altman was a powerhouse of activity, spending up to 18 hours a day juggling multiple business ventures. 

No sooner had one business contract been finalized than Altman would show up at his lawyer's office with another, proudly waving a document he proclaimed was "The Best Idea Yet!" 

Several of the early enterprises persisted for a few years, but the majority were attempted and subsequently discontinued within months, or even weeks. Old newspaper ads and musty business filings serve as the only evidence of the many projects that ran hot out of the gate before turning to ash. 

Harry's approach to business was that of a serial entrepreneur. If the monthly receipts did not prove financially viable, the business was cast aside or, more likely, recast to suit the needs of the latest trend in entertainment. Altman favored leasing buildings with large, open floor plans that could easily be converted into a dance hall or a roller rink or a restaurant/nightclub—whatever Harry thought would pay the bills and attract the money of business partners who could fill the coffers. 

For much of this era, he would hopscotch along Main Street in downtown Buffalo, leasing different commercial buildings, sometimes for only a year, to accommodate his various business ventures. He had a small group of investors that he mixed and matched according to the scale of the project and the financial risk each investor was willing to take.

In the early 1920s, Harry shifted his focus to ballroom dancing, capitalizing on its popularity as an affordable form of entertainment during Prohibition and the Depression. Patrons eagerly embraced dancing as a cost-effective way to enjoy themselves during these economically challenging times. The music of the era went far beyond staid waltzes to include lively, upbeat rhythms that celebrated the peace and stability following the victory of a brutal world war.

Guest Post:

Shea vs. Altman: How History Chose Who to Remember

History doesn’t remember the busiest man in the room; it remembers the one whose name is etched into the building.

In downtown Buffalo, Michael Shea is still spoken every time the lights go up at Shea's Performing Arts Center. A generation before Harry Altman, Shea anchored the city’s entertainment culture in something permanent: a grand movie palace designed for film but rooted in the vaudeville tradition, where live performance and spectacle shaped a full night out.

Altman followed Shea, whom he admired, and developed that model with keen insight.

Like Shea, he rose through the immigrant experience, reading the crowd and building venues where working- and middle-class audiences could escape for a few hours and feel part of something larger. He shared Shea’s populist sensibility: give people a show, make it accessible, keep it moving. And if the crowd shifted, you shifted with it.

But where Shea created a container, Altman lived inside the content.

Their defining venues still face each other across Main Street. Shea’s name still glows in lights at Shea's Performing Arts Center on every theater night. The Town Casino, now Town Ballroom, has cycled from nightclub to theater to indie music venue under different monikers. The building survived. Altman’s memory did not.

Shea did not just build a theater. He built a following. His audience, and the community that claimed him, kept his name in circulation long after he was gone.

Altman had no such constituency. His legacy was experiential, tied to nights that could not be replicated, the kind where the room was full, the act hit, and everyone knew it mattered while it was happening. His business structures were built to survive financially, not to preserve a legacy. While Altman had stars in his eyes, his feet were always on the ground, trying to make payroll, keep the doors open, and outmaneuver whatever came next.

Shea built something that could survive him.
Altman built something that needed him.

And history made its choice.

Author Q&A:

What’s a detail, theme, or clue in your book that most readers might miss on the first read but you secretly hope someone notices?

One detail I hope readers notice is the pattern in Harry Altman’s early career, and how it abruptly disappears just before his greatest successes.

For more than two decades, Altman tried to build something of his own and kept getting knocked back. Fires. Violence. Sudden disruptions that made it nearly impossible to sustain anything independently. It happens often enough that it begins to feel less like bad luck and more like the conditions of the industry at the time, especially in a border city where nightlife, money, and control were closely intertwined.

Then, after his mid-1930s bankruptcy, the pattern stops.

The disruptions fade. His businesses stabilize, expand, and succeed at a level he had never reached before.

What I hope readers sit with is that shift, and what it must have felt like from his side. He was no less driven before than after. He was working just as hard, taking the same risks. But something changed. The environment around him shifted, and the resistance he had been pushing against for years was suddenly gone.

The book doesn’t claim more than the record supports. But the contrast is hard to ignore.

It suggests that success in that world was not just about ambition or talent, but about whether you are willing to operate within the system that governs it.

When did this story or idea “click” into place for you—was there a single moment you knew you had to write it?

It clicked during the research, when I began to see the pattern. Harry was a serial entrepreneur, building and rebuilding over and over, and each time something knocked him back. After a while, it stopped looking like bad luck. I realized he wasn’t failing for lack of effort; he was hitting the limits of the business environment he was operating in.

Then comes the public failure in the mid-1930s—his bankruptcy—and after that he’s forced to make changes. He realized that personal effort alone wasn’t enough.

He doesn’t lose his drive; he stops trying to succeed on his own terms and starts playing by rules set by those who controlled the nightlife economy, rules no one wrote down but no one dared ignore. That’s when his success takes off.

What stayed with me was what that must have felt like. After years of believing that hard work would be enough, he realized that it wasn’t, and he had to adapt to rules that weren’t always visible but were clearly enforced.

That’s when I knew I had the story.

Which character or real-life person surprised you the most while writing this book, and why?

Harry Altman surprised me. At first, I only saw the glitz and the glamour of the Town and Glen Casinos. I assumed I would find a straightforward rise. But the deeper I went into the research,, the more I realized he was anything but an overnight success.

He spends decades getting knocked back, building and rebuilding, trying to make it on his own and failing to sustain it. Then, after his most public failure, bankruptcy, something shifts.

The pattern changes. The resistance he had been pushing against for years begins to ease. His businesses stabilize, expand, and succeed at a level he had never reached before.

But even that is not enough.

Over time, the world changes. Music changes. Television changes everything.

And this time, there is no rebuilding. His business model is gone, as is Harry and his legacy.

If your book had a soundtrack, what three songs would be on it and what scenes or moments would they pair with?

If the book had a soundtrack, it would follow his arc from struggle, to success, to disappearance.

First, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” by Bing Crosby. I hear that over the early chapters, when Harry is doing whatever it takes to survive. There’s a moment where he’s literally shifting his venue back and forth between a ballroom and a skating rink on a daily basis, trying to get people through the door. It captures that constant improvisation—effort without stability.

Second, “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra. That’s the peak—the Town and Glen Casino years—when the rooms are full, the acts are strong, and he has finally figured out how to operate successfully in that world.

And then, for the final note, “Gloomy Sunday” by Billie Holiday. I think of a moment near the end when he’s still putting shows on at the Glen Casino, but the rooms that once held 800 people three times a night are nearly empty. He’s relying on the legacy of the place more than the power of what’s on stage.

The show goes on—but no one’s there to see it.

What’s one belief, question, or emotional truth you hope readers carry with them long after they finish your book?

You can build a meaningful life, be celebrated in your time—and still be forgotten.

Tell us about a moment during the writing process when the story (or message) took an unexpected turn.

I thought I was writing a straightforward success story.

I began with the high points—the Town and Glen Casinos—and assumed I was tracing a rise. But as I dug into the earlier years, that narrative fell apart. The pattern was instability, not momentum.

Then, in the mid-1930s, the disruptions ease. The businesses stabilize. And that shift forced me to rethink the entire story.

It stopped being about how one man succeeded and became a question of what he was willing to compromise in order to succeed.

If your protagonist (or central figure) could give the reader one piece of advice, what would it be?

You can fight the system for years. Or you can learn how to live with it. Just know the cost either way.

What real-world place, object, or memory helped shape a key element in your book?

There’s a moment in the book, in 1936, when Harry Altman is developing the Glen Casino while still operating a ballroom on the edge of the city. Within six months, both venues burned to the ground, along with the instruments of the same orchestra that played them. It becomes a turning point, the moment when everything begins to change.

His reaction? “I’m just going to need to start building them (the buildings) in iron.” The black humor says everything.

What’s something you had to research, learn, or experience to write this book that genuinely surprised you?

What surprised me most was how unforgiving the business actually was.

The book details what Harry Altman and other impresarios of the era dealt with behind the scenes. No-shows. Lost wardrobes and props. Difficult talent. Last-minute cancellations. Union disputes that could shut a night down entirely.

What looked glamorous from the outside was, in reality, relentless. One bad night could cost you everything, and there was always another one waiting.

If your book were invited to join a shelf with three other titles, which ones would make you happiest—and what would that shelf say about your story?

I’d be happiest to see it alongside Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro.

Those books stay with you because they are not just about what people achieve, but about what shapes them, what constrains them, and what ultimately outlasts them. They show lives in motion, full of effort and intention, but also shaped by forces that are larger and often invisible.

If my book belongs on that shelf, it says that this is not just the story of a man’s success, but of a life shaped by its moment, and of how even a meaningful life can slip quietly out of memory.

PS - If my book is even in the same library as Robert A. Caro’s, I’d be overjoyed.

Author bio: 

Susan Fenster is a nonfiction author and historian whose work focuses on New York State and the evolving cultural life of the region.

With degrees in history and journalism from Buffalo State University, she brings together long-form research and narrative storytelling to examine how people, businesses, and communities shaped their time. Her work draws extensively from archival sources, including newspapers, business records, and local collections.

She has spent more than 30 years writing about the region and lives in Williamsville, New York. Visit Susan at her website.

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