On 5/17/05, Alan P. Hayes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip>
I've been going back to Buffalo to take pictures, revisiting my old haunts after 25 years. It's not a bad place for photography. Lots of great rundown architecture, though people are getting a bit thin on the ground. <snip>
In all seriousness, I feel bad for Buffalo.
Last year for GFM, I bussed from Toronto to Pittsburg to meet Mark Roberts. On the way back, I had a couple of hours to kill in downtown Buffalo at about 2:00 in the afternoon. I was right smack in the middle of downtown.
Toronto downtown at that time of day is bustling - people in suits with briefcases zipping about, heavy traffic on the streets, couriers and delivery people clogging the sidewalks and roadways. I had just come from Pittsburg, and it was about the same as Toronto - a bustling, busy downtown core.
Buffalo was dead. No one out and about. There were a few big office buildings, but no one was around them, no one going in and out. It's a dead or dying city.
Sad, really. I guess the death of train travel killed them.
cheers, frank
-- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson
They made some major mistakes, like building the new University center in the north suburbs instead of in the city on the lakefront, also shutting down Main Street for about five years to build a one line rapid transit that ended up going from nowhere to nowhere. I think the death of heavy industry probably had a lot to do with it, too.
But I tell you, Pittsfield's got it beat completely for desolation. On the rare occasion that we go for an early evening walk, in our admittedly small town downtown, we regularly come across a lone shell shocked business traveller, who's left our single hotel in search of dinner. There's not much we can do for them, either. If I didn't regularly get to New York, I probably think of Buffalo as bustling.
--
Alan P. Hayes
Meaning and Form: Writing, Editing and Document Design
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Photographs at http://www.ahayesphoto.com/americandead/index.htm
