Congratulations Buffalo! You Really Are Rising – AGAIN

A  Commentary by Doug Draper

Posted January 10^th, 2016 on Niagara At Large in Niagara, Ontario

As I post this commentary, residents in the Buffalo, New York area are bracing themselves for another one of those lake effect storms that sometimes leaves the city and surrounding areas buried in enough snow to make headlines across the continent.

Buffalo’s City Hall, both outisee and in its great hallways and chambers, is a towering monument to the era of Art Deco design.

Now people from coast to coast are about to be introduce to a side of Buffalo that at least some of us who’ve taken time to get off the 190 beltway between the Peace Bridge and Walden Galleria and airport in Cheektowaga, and ventured into downtown Buffalo and the neighbourhoods in between and around Delaware Park have seen rising for the past five to 10 years.

It is a re-invented and invigorated Buffalo for the 21^st century, and it is about to get the close up it is now so ready for and so rightly deserves on major cable channels across the country and world.

Inside the Grand Lobby of Shea’s Theatre for the Performing Arts in downtown Buffalo, New York click on image to enlarge

During the first days of this January, Katie Couric, who gained fame as a co-host on NBC’s The Today Show and is now a global anchor with Yahoo News, arrived in Buffalo to produce a segment on the city’s revival for a series the network will be broadcasting called “Rebuilding America.”

“I really didn’t realize the renaissance that is happening in Buffalo until I started to look into it,” Couric was quoted saying in The Buffalo News this January 6^th.

Now – and just days after Couric’s arrival – one of the world’s largest cable channels, CNN, announced that it is featuring Buffalo among its pick of the 16 “most intriguing” places and things to do in the United States in 2016.

“The renaissance of the upstate New York town of Buffalo is due, in part, to its celebration of its past as a transportation hub and site of great architecture,” begins a write-up on CNN’s website.

“The western terminus of the Erie Canal is what’s now called Canalside, an all-season entertainment district where you can ride ice bikes and skate during winter,” the write-up continues. “Once a feature of one of the world’s largest grain ports, the enormous grain elevators dotting the area are inspiration for the Silo City performance art space and a nightly Canalside light show.”

The Albright Knox Art Gallery bordering Buffalo, New York’s scenic Delaware Park

As a regular visitor to Buffalo, I have witnessed with what pride people in many of the city’s neighbourhoods have worked with each other and with local businesses and governments to protect and preserve breath-taking architectural structures and urban landscapes going back to the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries when a city prosperous enough to drew builders and landscape architects on the stature of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frederick Law Olmsted.

There are also the great farmers’ markets and outdoor festivals and a theatre and music scene that includes world-class venues like venues like Shea’s and Kleinhans with its Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, not to mention the Tralf and a host of other clubs featuring artists playing every kind of music imaginable. And the big artists like Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones are coming back after a couple of decades of Buffalo not making the cut when their agents were planning tours.

I could go on to mention Albright Knox, the Buffalo History Museum and all the other places that celebrate the arts and the heritage of the region, and being the film and music lover I am, how could I leave out the icon North Park Theatre, the Dipson Theatres and the greatest record store this side of New York City, Record Theatre’s flagship store at the corner of Main and Lafayette.

All of this is being fueled by an influx of businesses and good-paying jobs in such areas as high tech, medicine and renewable energy. ‘We’re Hiring’ signs have become more commonplace these days in a city that saw a hemorrhaging of jobs when Bethlehem Steel and other old mills fell by the wayside not that many decades ago.

Buffalo is obviously doing something right and anyone who spends a little time there can see and hear it in the streets and neighbourhoods where people are truly embracing the old slogan and ‘talking proud’ again.

Given Buffalo’s place as a major border city and gateway community in our greater Niagara region, this should be cause for celebration for all of us and give reason to hope that what Buffalo is doing right will catch on in neighbouring towns and cities on both sides of the border.

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