Buffalo: Behind the caricatures, lies a great city
A skeptic finds himself charmed by reality of a town he’d cartooned in his mind
by Bill Taylor in the Toronto Star. Read more at www.TorontoStar.com
As a cynic, less than enchanted at the prospect of spending a whole day in Buffalo, I can sum up the experience in one word: Go!
Yes, that’s crow I’m eating. Consider me charmed, my illusions of the City of No Illusions — also known as the Queen City — in shards around my feet.
C’mon, how could you not be won over by a place where you can watch the sun sinking into Lake Erie? (A map will show you how uncommon sunsets over water are in the northeastern States.)
But, as I drive across the Peace Bridge, I’m not watching the sun; I’m looking for a plume of smoke. In search of the eternal flame, three alarms and counting . . . .
At one time, Buffalo’s fabled Eyewitness News anchor Irv Weinstein, seemed to be on TV every evening with a burning suburban structure to report upon, generally torched deliberately. Fifteen years after he retired, his voice still resonates.
“If I had a dime for every time someone mentions fires in Cheektowaga or Tonawanda . . . ,” says Peter Burakowski resignedly.
Burakowski is with Visit Buffalo Niagara and has lived most of his life here. He and lots of citizens, he says, call themselves “Buffalovers.”
I wasn’t even a “Buffaliker.”
It’s as quick to drive from Toronto to Buffalo as to Belleville, but I could count my visits on the fingers of one hand. And have a couple left over . . . .
To me, it was an oddball place with a small-town ethos — its population, around 261,000, is lower than Vaughan’s — built on a shaky foundation of chicken wings and over-optimistic sporting aspirations. And serial arsonists in the ’burbs. Hamilton with a baleful edge.
Which is why I’d been a stranger, either stopping short at the retail malls or speeding by en route to “nicer” destinations.
Buffalo’s underpinnings are, in fact, resoundingly solid. At one time, Burakowski says, it had more millionaires per capita than anywhere in America.
As the region’s industry and economy mutated, the city languished.
But many of the bravura mansions remained intact, along with the broad, park-like streets laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also gave New York its Central Park. The business edifices of downtown were and are equally imposing.
So when Buffalo — “a city that struggled to get out of its own way,” says Burchfield Penney Art Center exec. Kathleen Heyworth — began pulling itself together a few years ago, it actually had a lot to work with.
Hence now the direction signs downtown saying, “Theatre district . . . Shopping . . . Convention Center . . . .”
And two major art galleries. The long-established Albright-Knox has a worldwide reputation. Less well-known, but almost as remarkable, is the Burchfield Penney, right across the street.
Theatres? No fewer than 20, from tiny avant-garde playhouses to the wedding-cake opulence of the 3019-seat Shea’s Performing Arts Center, a non-profit theatre that stages shows right off Broadway. It was opened as a “movie palace” in 1926 by Michael Shea, said to have been born in St. Catharines. Its painstaking restoration is still under way, but the interior, by Louis Comfort Tiffany (best known for his stained-glass work), is breathtaking.
What else? A thriving music scene, club scene, LGBT scene, food-truck scene (Toronto take note!). Neighbourhoods full of restaurants and quirky stores — about as far removed from cookie-cutter mall merchandise as you can get — and a revamped industrial area, the Larkin District, partly inspired by our own Distillery. A light-transit system, both above and under ground, runs through the centre of the city. Riding the surface route is free.
There are design surprises everywhere, from sculpture where you’d least expect it to houses painted in colour schemes that are . . . eclectic? Eccentric? Fun, anyway.
It’s a work in progress still. The revitalization of the old Erie Canal terminal and parts of the waterfront is a year or so from fruition, as is the transformation of massive grain silos near the lake. One may soon have a restaurant on its roof; another is planned to get what Burakowski believes will be the world’s tallest climbing wall.
That could almost be a symbol of Buffalo’s ascent.
Did you know . . . ?
Childhood living. Among those who spent part of their formative years in this fair city were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and concert pianist Leonard Pennario.