Home of the Bisons
nan turpin photographs
Buffalo, NY. Here’s how to get friendly with a new town fast: go to their Triple-A minor league baseball park the night you arrive. The Buffalo Bisons play hard no matter what. Lose tonight, win tomorrow. The park holds 18,000 and even if a few thousand don’t make it to the game, who comes is loud enough to let the team know they are loved.
After dark, before you even start to figure the deserted downtown out, the little ball park can look like the only place to get food on dry land. There’s a restaurant inside, Pettibones, and an outpost of Charlie the Butcher’s selling the best Beef Weck around. Pettibones has Buffalo Wings but who can pass up a Weck?
Before the Bisons got Coca-Cola Field (1988) they had another park, Pilot Field. You can still find pictures of it on-line. The “new” park is just back of the bottom of Main Street and once you figure out how to get past all the chain link construction fences and deserted Main Street-induced anxiety, you see the ball field is holding the place for city life that’s still going on. In the next 72 hours you’ll see there’s plenty of life going on in Buffalo but it’s this ball game that helps you see all that.
The Bisons might lose one night but they win the next. And the first night in a new town, with all the shock and questions and wrong assumptions revealed, there’s nothing quite as calming as a Triple-A game with a lot of heart. In Buffalo, New York.
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