100-Year-Old Evelyn Pullo Berates Reporter

Evelyn Pullo in front of the Evelyn Apartments. Pullo says the Reporter did not accurately report her side of the story.

This man, Woodrow Wilson, was president when Pullo was eight years old.

Evelyn Pullo, who was born when Woodrow Wilson was president, saw WWI, Woman's Suffrage, the beginning and ending of Prohibition, the Great Depression and 17 presidencies, feels that an article appearing in the Niagara Falls Reporter entitled “Memorial Acted Appropriately In Demolishing ‘Historic' Site” (3/19/13), was practically a “defamation of character.”

Pullo is 100 years old, as of May 22, 1913, and was born only days after President William Howard Taft left office.

“The only thing that was correct [in the Reporter article] was that the building was taken down… Where the heck did you get that information?" said Pullo.

The original article — which was about a four-unit apartment building she once owned on 10th Street that was demolished to be added to the Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center campus — stated that according to City Code Enforcement Inspector Michael Gonzalez, the building was a prime candidate for the wrecking ball because of extensive water damage to the walls and weakened floors, “You could barely walk on the floors,” he said.

According to Pullo, the 97-year-old building was not dilapidated. Indeed, tenants were still living there, and had been for six months prior to being asked to move.

Thus, she says, the evaluation that was made available to the Reporter stating that the building was out of code compliance, was functionally obsolete, and could not be restored to rentable condition, was incorrect.

In addition, the article stated: “As the neighborhood surrounding Memorial fell into rack and ruin, Pullo, then 96 years old, and trying to maintain the half-vacant and rapidly deteriorating, aging property, was able to persuade the Niagara Falls Commission on Historic Properties to designate it as a local landmark in 2009. Perhaps she thought they, or the designation, would help her in some way with funding. It did not.

Evelyn would like for it to be known that the historical designation was not done in an attempt to help her with funding.

“The truth is the truth," Pullo said. "The property was built like two forts. They don’t build like that anymore and as for the part of me being a poor, old lady needing help, let me make it clear, I never asked for help."

Pullo then went on to describe in detail the history of her property, and with it, some of her life, of how her parents met and were married and how they worked hard — her father was a “first class" barber — and how they made a down payment on the property and built it and maintained it through the years with pride and dignity, as they lived their lives that way.

"I felt the article made me seem like some senile, old lady," Pullo said, "but my computer is still working.”