Longtime Buffalo Congressman Henry Nowak Dies

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

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

During his 18 years in Congress, from 1975 to 1992, Nowak became, as the Buffalo News put it at the time, “Buffalo’s billionaire man.”

A quiet, self-effacing lawmaker who rose to prominence on the little-known Public Works Committee, Nowak delivered nearly $1 billion in federal infrastructure aid to the Buffalo region during his tenure. He helped Buffalo secure its first grants to begin revitalizing the Outer Harbor, as well as the funding that helped build Interstate 990 and a four-lane Highway 219.

Largely 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.

Nowak Sr. served in Congress in a very different era than today. Elected from the vast class of “Watergate” Democrats after the scandal-plagued resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, Nowak joined a House delegation that included 37 representatives from New York, compared with just 26 today.

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

“When I came here, I decided that being on the Public Works Committee would be a good way to bring our problems to the federal government,” he told the Buffalo News in 1991.

By “interface,” Nowak meant, in part, taking advantage of the huge amount of “earmarks” that members of the Public Works Committee were entitled to report to their districts at any given time. Derided by budget hawks as wasteful spending, Nowak saw earmarks as a vital means of reviving a metropolitan region reeling from the loss of its heavy industrial base, culminating in the closure of Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna plant in 1983.

“I have sought to match local needs with federal opportunities to help mitigate these impacts and maintain our quality of life in Western New York,” he said when announcing his retirement from Congress in 1992. “It has been the most rewarding part of my representation.”

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

“Nowak has been very helpful to our state in general, particularly in the area of ​​public works, where he could have been chairman of the Public Works Committee next year,” then-Governor Mario M. Cuomo said in 1992. “So he is a particularly heavy loss.”

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

After graduating from Riverside High School, Nowak enrolled at Canisius College. There, he became a basketball star, graduating in 1957 as the school’s all-time leading scorer. And although he was drafted by the St. Louis Hawks of the National Basketball Association that year, Nowak instead joined the U.S. Army and, after two stints in the military, earned a law degree from the University at Buffalo in 1961.

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

Nowak retired from Congress 18 years later, saying that the high turnover in Congress in 1992 made him fear that if he remained, his eventual successor would be at a severe disadvantage in terms of seniority accumulation.

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

Nowak avoided the limelight during and after his years in Congress. He explained his unconventional political style in a 1991 interview with the Buffalo News.

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