By Doug Draper
Buffalo may be settled in for another cold, snowy winter but the city that hardly ever gets the respect it deserves got a nice warm plug this month – as warm as a bright sunny weekend in July.
This classic Victorian home was one of more than 340 properties people flocked to this past summer for the annual Garden Walk Buffalo. Photo by Doug Draper
The plug comes in an article in The Atlantic.com, the website for the internationally renown magazine by the same name and focuses on Buffalo’s great architecture and on what has become one of its most popular events, the Garden Walk Buffalo which takes place each year on every last full weekend of July and which will be celebrating its 16th anniversary in 2010.
Author Andrew Sprung described Garden Walk Buffalo as “mind-blowing” and as the “best events of its kind” on the continent, featuring more than 340 properties in tree-covered neighbourhoods of the city brimming with grand old Victorian-style homes.
It is a free event; drawing tens-of-thousands of visitors to the city during the two days the properties are open to visitors.
Buffalo Garden Walk is also a great opportunity for people appreciate great urban landscape to experience some of the finest architecture on the continent and discover that Buffalo doesn’t deserve the image often portrayed in the international media as place where the people spend too much of the year trudging through snow drifting between abandoned houses and rusted factory buildings.
“Buffalo has become a site of the triumph of imagination over physical reality,” writes Sprung, adding that the Garden Walk has inspired people across the city to garden and has attracted a throng of “new urban pioneers.”
You can view the Atlantic article by visiting:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/buffalo-dreamin.html
A slide show can be viewed at: http://buffalogardenwalk.blogspot.com/, and more information on Garden Walk Buffalo can be obtained by visiting:
GardenWalkBuffalo.com.
While we regulalry go to the best Modern Art Museum (the Albright-Knox) in The World, yes, The World, we have yet to be on one of the architectural walks. Thanks for bringing this again to our attention.
Gail b