Parkside Candy began in 1917 when the Kaiser family founded the business in North Buffalo's Parkside neighborhood, first operating a candy shop and restaurant at 2304 Main Street before building a larger candy shoppe, restaurant, and factory in the University Heights neighborhood ten years later. Designed by local architect G. Morton Wolfe and constructed between 1925 and 1927 at Main Street and Winspear Avenue, the new building paired a modest Arts and Crafts exterior with an elaborate Adams Revival interior featuring a checkerboard floor, oval domed plaster ceiling, antique brass glass display cases, and hand-carved woodwork, while the factory behind it stood as an early twentieth-century daylight factory whose cleanliness was a point of pride and even a feature shown to customers on tours. George and Molly Kaiser shaped the business around an atmosphere of refined taste, especially for women customers, blending the candy store with the tearoom and offering chocolates, sweets, ice cream, non-alcoholic beverages, dainty lunches, and curbside service. In 1951 James Kaiser succeeded his father George, and the family later closed its other retail outlets, including the original Main Street store, to concentrate operations at Main and Winspear. In 1981 Philip Buffamonte purchased the operation from the Kaiser estate and continued it in much the same tradition, using machinery nearly as old as the building itself to produce large batches of sponge candy and lollipops as the business expanded across the Buffalo Niagara region and into wholesale shipping nationwide. The surrounding University Heights area, along with University Park and the Baily-Kensington neighborhoods, had once been the largely rural Buffalo Plains of farmland and woods, but from the late 1880s into the early twentieth century it developed into residential communities as Buffalo's industrial growth, expanding trolley lines, and the 1912 move of the University of Buffalo to Main Street drew development outward from downtown. Developers including Anthony J. Huck, J. Walter Gage, and Lewis Kinsey built neighborhoods alongside major corridors such as Main Street, Hertel Avenue, and Baily Avenue, creating a range of housing from substantial brick and stone American Foursquares to more affordable bungalows, and these streetcar suburbs continued to grow into the mid twentieth century as population spread outward from the city center.