Most Buffalonians can appreciate the cold. Living in a city with four seasons, a cold winter is a part of life, as is a hot summer. While many Buffalonians love the four seasons, including winter, they don’t like the false stigma that it snows year round. Buffalo got a reputation of being colder and snowier than other cities after a couple of walloping blizzards – namely The Blizzard of ’77 (forty years ago).
In recent years, we’ve come to love winter even more, with the arrival of a handful of outdoor skating and curling rinks at Canalside and RiverWorks. But did you know that the RiverWorks rinks were installed with refrigeration units because the Labatt Pond Hockey organizers couldn’t naturally freeze an outdoor skating rink in Buffalo for three or four years straight… it just wasn’t cold enough.
Yesterday it rained all day. Today there is hardly any snow on the ground. Just this morning, a Buffalo Rising reader passed along that Buffalo didn’t make it on the list for the Top 52 Coldest Cities. That’s not to say that it doesn’t get cold here, or that it doesn’t snow. It’s just that Buffalo is hopefully melting some of the frigid stigma that has been dumped on us for decades. Being left off the list of top coldest cities certainly helps to show that we are not eternally snowbound.
To top it off, it’s kind of funny that just as this city started to appreciate its winters with festivals and outdoor skating, etc., Mother Nature decided to pull a fast one. Let’s just hope that she doesn’t continue to wreak havoc on the local ski resorts.
Lead image: Larkinville Ice Fest
