UN-DO-RE-DO, BUFFALO

 

Buffalo, New York.  “Queen City” wants to reverse the decades-long population loss that puts it at a little over quarter of a million people now.   Downtown office lease signings are, for the moment, front page news and for good reason.  

Even on the shortest possible visit you’ll be likely to hear that Buffalo and its good people want company.  It’s the only place this reporter has been made to feel truly welcome, as in, move here, we want you.  That feeling of being welcomed by strangers is a confusing pleasure.

Thank you for it, Buffalo.  And in friendship this suggestion:  do make Buffalo glow again but don’t make the mistakes that Chicago and San Francisco are making.  Don’t squander your energy and invention by handing your work and your town over to the tech industry and their fierce kitten army of start-ups.  

Of course they’re cute and they seem to promise to spend and overspend: $20 martinis, half-million dollar studio apartments.  But please, dear Buffalo, don’t surrender municipal regulatory powers to bring in the Uber app as your own people are exploited to drive and pay for their own cars to build some billionaire’s portfolio.  An Uberless city is unappealing to techies.  Remember what the tech talent on that crowded San Francisco bus said last summer:  “I really don’t understand why they don’t  just Uber to work!”

Last week Chicago held its annual 3-day Neocon design conference at the Merchandise Mart.  Neocon keynotes have a practice of delivering seminal ideas.  One of them, Tom Eich, an engineer and product designer for ideo.com,  spoke with a certain amount of swagger about the work his company has been doing to free generally tech-centric businesses from the inconvenience and expense of  “place.”  

Mr. Eich made his presentation with what, outside of Manhattan, could be called a sneer.  His braggadocio was actually a dense collection of evidence in support of  his argument that even the google campus and Apple campus might one day be ghost towns.  This would happen because the “talent” – tech rhetoric for tech workers – will not be interested in commuting to a “place” – this word sneered.  If Eich is describing anything “real”  then all the “places” that make themselves over to please the tech industry may be left with newly scrambled economies.

If Chicago’s current courtship of all things start-up begins to fail  we can retrieve our collective memory of half-finished high-rises, covered in snow, ragged construction tarps flapping in the high winds.   The big schemes of more high rise offices, more high rise luxury condos buried beneath a civic stoicism, best not spoken of.  That was our skyline, best not spoken of.

Buffalo, your new Main Street promises to be a sweetheart.  All you have to do is make sure your city politicals make sure you come out of it with a diverse economy, an economically diverse populace, that your new Main Street will have something for everyone and be the destination everyone wants to get to on the week-end.  

Primary Source wants to see that happen and wants to return to Buffalo for that and for that missed opportunity of the fried baloney sandwich, number 3 in the mighty Buffalo culinary trio of Buffalo wings (with suicide sauce), Beef Weck and the fried baloney wonder!

Additional Sources:  

Here’s a link to a New York State website that puts population loss in New York State cities like Buffalo into a larger context: http://www.osc.state.ny.us/localgov/pubs/research/pop_trends.pdf.

Check today’s Chicago Tribune and Ron Grossman’s piece on the Uber phenomenon and its place in labor history.

 

 

 

One Block At A Time             nan turpin photographs                       

SUMMER OF BUFFALOVE (that’s how they say it)

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.

WHERE THE WATERS MEET

Let’s take a walk to Silo City
nan turpin photographs  

Buffalo, NY, dusk into night.  Who was it…someone told me it’s just the last fifteen years the people of Buffalo, Buffalonians, are proud of themselves and their town.  When does not proud turn into proud?  

When does let me out of here turn into I think I like it?  People who’ve been very ill and are on the mend pay close attention to this sort of thing and some of them know the morning, the minute they start to feel better.  Places are like that too and Buffalo is one of them and a delight to discover.  Buffalonians want you to know all about everything, not just how it all began, the river, the lake, the canal, how Black Rock wanted it but Buffalo got it.  These people want you to know how it is now, Main Street’s gutted like a fish but it’s not rotting in the sun, it’s being put back a block at a time.  

Dorothy, by day a Buffalo social worker, by night a civic wonder, asked us if we needed a ride back to town.  By then it was dark and the ruins of the grain industry, the massings of grain elevators along the river were ominously beautiful silhouettes and the old silos, dark inside with rusk and vampires, had become things we didn’t want to disturb.  Yes, take us home, Dorothy, and this good lady of Buffalo drove us around and around, and showed us the butterfly’s view of Buffalo:  the old Amtrak station, the lot where a Frank Lloyd Wright used to be, the stubbed ends of silos they’d managed to rub out before the people realized they had beautiful ruins here.  

Buffalo the 19th century, the city of industry, the city of movement of shipping, where all the good soft processed loaves of American began, Buffalo was building a new city on top of itself but it’s smart and tender enough to know they have to leave the rust and husks of what made them. On a clear day they can see Niagara Falls.  The information lady in City Hall said that.  You don’t believe?  “Go up to the top of the tower and see for yourself.  Take that elevator.”  We don’t see it but she’s right.  Niagara Falls, all that electricity, Maid of the Mist, Made in America, tell Buffalo something they don’t already know.  

And now they remember they know it again and they like where they live.  If you go and if Dorothy Mehnert asks you if you need a lift, just say yes and see what you see next.