Henry Nowak, longtime Buffalo congressman, has died

The news was announced on the social media site X – formerly Twitter – by Erie County Democratic Chairman Jeremy Zellner.

“Congressman Nowak’s legacy lives on through his tireless work in bringing home resources from Washington to help build and shape the community we have today,” Zellner said.

Over 18 years in Congress from 1975 to 1992, Nowak became, as The Buffalo News said at the time, “Buffalo’s billion dollar man.”

A low-key, self-effacing lawmaker who rose in seniority on the little-notified Public Works Committee, Nowak brought nearly $1 billion in federal infrastructure aid to the Buffalo area during his tenure. He won Buffalo its first grants to begin revitalizing the Outer Harbor, along with the funding that helped build Interstate 990 and a four-lane Route 219.

Widely out of the public eye in recent decades, Nowak is the father of State Supreme Court Justice Henry Nowak Jr., who has served on the court since 2011.

The elder Nowak served in Congress in a far different time than today. Elected as part of the huge class of “Watergate” Democrats after the resignation of scandal-plagued President Richard Nixon in 1974, Nowak joined a House delegation that included 37 representatives from New York, compared to only 26 today.

Early in his time in Congress, Nowak decided to focus on what he could do for Buffalo, rather than how far he could rise in Washington.

“When I got down here, I decided that getting on the Public Works Committee would be a good way of interfacing our problems with the federal government,” he told The Buffalo News in 1991.

By “interfacing,” Nowak meant, in part, cashing in on the huge amount of “earmarks” that members of the Public Works Committee were entitled to bring back to their districts at a time. Derided by budget hawks as unnecessary “pork-barrel” spending, Nowak saw earmarks as a key way to boost a metropolitan region reeling from the loss of its base of heavy industry, culminating in the closure of the Bethlehem Steel facility in Lackawanna in 1983.

“I sought to match local needs with federal opportunities to help ameliorate these impacts and sustain our quality of life in Western New York,” he said upon announcing his retirement from Congress in 1992. “This has been the most gratifying part of my representation. “

Given that he had won tens of millions of federal dollars for Buffalo’s downtown pedestrian mall and countless local highway projects, Nowak’s retirement was met with collective disappointment not just in Buffalo, but also in Albany.

“Nowak has been very valuable to our state generally, specifically on public works, where he might have been chairman of the Public Works Committee next year,” then-Gov. Mario M. Cuomo said in 1992. “So he is a particularly severe loss.”

Born in Buffalo, Nowak followed a fairly typical path into Buffalo politics in that he earned his first headlines not in politics but in sports.

After graduating from Riverside High School, Nowak went to Canisius College. There, he became a basketball star, graduating in 1957 as the school’s all-time scoring leader. And even though he was drafted by the St. Louis Hawks of the National Basketball Association that year, Nowak instead joined the US Army and, amid two stints in the military, earned a law degree from the University of Buffalo in 1961.

Admitted to the New York bar in 1963, he became an assistant Erie County district attorney a year later. That same year, he became Erie County comptroller, a post he held for a decade before his 1974 election to Congress.

Nowak retired from Congress 18 years later, saying that heavy turnover in Congress in 1992 left him fearing that if he stayed, his eventual successor would be at a huge disadvantage in amassing seniority.

Largely healthy throughout his life except for a bad back, Nowak suffered a fall that preceded his death and that resulted in his hospitalization.

Nowak avoided the limelight both during his years in Congress and afterwards. He explained his unconventional political style in an interview with The Buffalo News in 1991.

“You have to be sort of self-effacing, and concentrate on working for the Western New York community which, after all, gave us the opportunity to do this,” Nowak said.