Author: Rudra Chakraborty (Gorton Fishman)
Though I can’t remember for the life of me how I stumbled on it, I happened to read a Sports Illustrated article about the Queen City, dated January 20th, 1969. Reading it brought a mixture of laughter, sadness, amazement, and wonder. Sadness knowing the future that was to come after this article was penned, and realizing that the cold acceptance of this future was there even then. But the other emotions came fully realizing how much and yet how little has changed. Hindsight is a curious thing. A passage I think sums it up best:
“Buffalonians have a certain right to torpor in the area of civic boosterism. Their city is hard to love. It is dominated by heavy industry: steel mills, refineries, auto assembly plants and chemical businesses that rely on the cheap power generated in nearby Niagara Falls. This brand of commerce is by nature housed in dirty, slab-sided factories that negate whatever natural lakeside beauty Buffalo might claim. Add to this a long, dark winter and a populace of brawny, blunt, conservative second-and third-generation Polish, German, Italian and Irish workingmen, whose taste for civic beauty is at best muted, and you have the elements of a dozen grimy Northeastern industrial cities.
A drive down one of Buffalo’s streets arouses suspicion of a mysterious covenant between an asphalt siding cartel and the world’s architecture-school dropouts. Aside from a few new buildings in the downtown area (a library, a magnificent bank building, an ultramodern shopping and office complex and a burlesque house), Buffalo is a vast collection of yellow brick warehouses, factories, used-car lots, bowling alleys and stolid, boxy residences with front porches, punctuated by corner taverns where men gather to talk sports, consume draft beer and munch on a favorite local staple, cold beef in kümmelweck rolls, known simply as “beef on week.” The blue-collar men who populate the city fit the mold of William Graham Sumner’s original forgotten man: the middling white man who works hard, pays taxes, likes sports more than ideas and finds the modern world bewildering.”
Iconic, late Buffalonians and Buffalo staples appear in their heyday, such as Seymour Knox III (discussing the then rejection of Buffalo from major league hockey), Ralph Wilson, and Jack Kemp. Another interesting point was the debate between the Buffalo Evening News and the Courier-Express about whether to locate a Bills stadium downtown or in the suburbs, and the issues with War Memorial Stadium, where apparently “one must be equipped with iron kidneys, because someone forgot to build enough restrooms”. Bearing witness to all the people vomiting all over poor Orchard Park on Bills Game Days, you wonder what’s changed since.
At any rate, we all know what happened next. The stadium ended up not being domed and was built in Orchard Park. The heavy industry left the region for the South and the West, and the workingmen that lived in those boxy residences and drank at those corner taverns left with it, leaving behind abandoned factories, homes, and corner shops. The Courier Express folded. The “ultramodern shopping and office complex” is largely underutilized and became irrelevant in the face of new suburban office parks and the Walden Galleria (and is now heralded as one of the ugliest buildings in the city). And for the longest time, what remained was that bitter yet ingrained feeling of negativity, and perhaps ironically, a longing for that industrial past, that for all its dirt and gloom, was the lifeblood of the town.
But while we know the past, we also know our present and the future it’s shaping. While we build new buildings like HarborCenter, 250 Delaware, and a medical school, and vie to attract new talents and ideas from the San Francisco that used to scoff at “the armpit of the East”; we also bear a newfound love for our blue-collar roots. Instead of wanton tearing down of our history for superficial drab, we learn to reuse what we can. As we again discuss a new domed downtown stadium, our concern is not just cheapness, parking, or the glory of big league sports; it is the health and prosperity of the region as a whole. We learned that glorious silver bullet projects like skyscrapers and stadiums mean nothing without the corner taverns that serve draft beer and beef on weck, and the men and women that gather in them.
Above all, I believe we have learned that our attitude shapes our reality. We give certainly not undue credit to both businessmen and the state for their investment in the heart and arteries of our city, but we must ask if it would have happened were it not for the efforts of the pioneering homeowners and shopkeepers of Elmwood Village, Allentown, and the West Village. Would the Genesee Gateway and other redevelopments have come were it not for the Eddie Brady’s that kept the block alive when signs were telling people to turn out the lights after leaving the city for good?
As a new Bills season begins and Buffalo’s new beginning continues, I hope we continue to rid ourselves of worries about what we aren’t and focus on what we are and what we can be. For another beautifully relevant passage from the SI article:
“Despite its industrial ugliness Buffalo heartily supports the Albright-Knox gallery, an excellent zoo and the lively Studio Arena Theater. Additionally, the massive infusion of new money, ideas and personalities brought by the state university, which will enroll 40,000 students by 1970 and become one of the largest educational complexes in the world, is rattling the stodgy, hidebound elements of the city to their very foundations. Buffalo will surely change—as all the Eastern industrial cities that have been permitted to decay must change—but this in no way should alter its great appetite for sport.
Like the Buffalonian said as he ordered up another 15¢ beer, “One by one we ain’t very pretty but, when 60,000 of us get sittin’ inside that new domed stadium, some of them so-called big-leaguers are gonna think we’re damned beautiful.”
Whether we need a new domed stadium to be damned beautiful is up for debate. But 15 cent beer? That’s an idea I (and I’m sure any Buffalonian) can get behind.
About the Author:
Rudra is a graduate of the University at Buffalo and a software developer at a local company. He relocated to Buffalo after working in DC for a year. He enjoys blogging about beer, politics, current events, and urban issues in a non-partisan way.