Tag: New York

If you haven’t already, it’s probably best to start with Part 1.

My leisurely ambling East had almost succeeded in filling in the time until my rendezvous in Syracuse. I had one spare day up my sleeve and three different ideas about how to fill it:

I could stay in Buffalo another night and get tickets to see Jagged Little Pill, the Alanis Morissette Broadway musical that was in town that night in the aforementioned theatre district,
I could head to Rochester and check out the drag scene there that I had heard so much about,
Or I could go straight to Syracuse and spend an extra day there while I awaited the arrival of my compadre.

For reasons I will come to shortly, after much deliberation I settled on Option 3.

Leaving Buffalo

In a story that will surprise absolutely no one Buffalo, like Detroit…and Cleveland…and countless other rustbelt towns and cities, no longer has rail service to its grand old train station. Instead, Amtrak trains call at one or both of two different stations (spoiler: not for your convenience).

Trains coming-from/bound-for Canada and Niagara call at Buffalo Exchange Street, a classic Amshack located directly under the I-190 flyover which is, at least, centrally located Downtown and close to the LRT.

The view from Platform 1 of 1 at Buffalo Exchange Street Amtrak Station.

The Lakeshore Limited coming-from/bound-for Chicago sadly doesn’t pass by this section of track and has instead been relegated to the distant suburban Buffalo Depew Amshack. Depew is in a light industrial area on the Buffalo urban fringe a few miles from Buffalo Niagara International Airport. It has plenty of parking but is sadly barely connected to Downtown by Buffalo’s transit system.

Getting from Depew to Downtown on transit requires two buses and somewhere between 80 and 120 minutes, depending on your enthusiasm for navigating American stroads on foot. That’s for a trip that is 20 minutes by car or under 3 hours if you fancy the walk. Tempting.

Depew Station courtesy of Google Streetview.

This lack of connectivity was yet another reason I gave the Lakeshore Limited a miss coming from Detroit.

Buffalo’s answer to Michigan Central: Buffalo Central Terminal

Opened in 1929, the grandiose Buffalo Central Terminal brought all the trains stopping in Buffalo together at a brand new union station. The building is epic, built as it was at the height of the golden era of rail travel. 1929 is actually really unfortunate timing as the Great Depression and subsequent road building spree made it just about the high water mark for intercity rail travel in the United States. The terminal is located a bit out of Downtown so that trains passing through the city from New York to Chicago could call there as well.

Like Detroit’s Michigan Central Station she is a grand old dame. Unlike Detroit’s Michigan Central Station she is ‘an unrenovated gem’ (would suit a motivated buyer looking to add value) and the rows of abandoned platforms give a strong dystopic energy. Horror film directors take note!

Buffalo Central Terminal. Credit: David Pape

Thankfully the community of Buffalo seems well aware of what they have in the building and there are efforts being made to the restore the building in some capacity, although that vision is unlikely to include rail travel.

The New York State Empire Service

4 trains a day head from Buffalo downstate to New York City, via Syracuse.

Two ‘Empire Services’ running from Niagara Falls that leave at 4:30am and 7:30am, mainly designed to get people to business (or pleasure) in the state capital Albany or NYC.

The aforementioned Lakeshore Limited leaves at a more leisurely 9am, but from the largely inaccessible Depew station.

The last option is the Maple Leaf that, like the name suggests, connects New York state with Canada, running daily between Toronto and NYC. The Maple Leaf leaves Buffalo heading South at 12:30pm, so I opted for that one. Apparently this is a risky choice because delays at the border crossing often mean the train runs late, and once an Amtrak train runs late it often gets really late as it can be held for extended periods in sidings to keep freight and other passenger services on-time.

4 trains a day might not wow international observers, but for regional America it’s basically incredible. Even better, the journey time of 2 hours 20 minutes is as fast as driving on the interstate.

Like most rail journeys a trip on the Empire Service is a beautiful one. Thanks to the topography of the Adirondack and Catskill mountain ranges, highways, railways and canals (more on that later!) are wedged into the valleys on their way across Upstate New York. This is great news for leisure rail passengers as for most of the journey from Buffalo to New York City the trains run alongside either the Mohawk or Hudson Rivers.

An elevation map of New York State. Trains, boats and automobiles all get upstate following the Hudson Valley north from NYC and then taking a 90 degree turn heading due West along the Mohawk Valley towards the Great Lakes. Basically the dark green bits.

This makes choosing the correct seat essential to maximising the views, a process that takes place onboard the train rather than ahead of time like it might on a flight or in Australia or Europe. The Man in Seat 61 has some good suggestions on that.

I was only going to Syracuse though so my seat selection was based on one thing and one thing only: an uninterrupted view of the Buffalo Central Terminal as we motored by!

The view of Buffalo Central from the left-hand side of an NYC bound Maple Leaf service. The colour of the sky is partly the smudgy Amtrak windows but mostly the smoke haze from the Quebec wildfires that were raging in June 2023.

The remains of Buffalo Central. All 14 platforms have been abandoned since 1979.

Syracuse, New York

The Amtrak station at Syracuse is yet another wonderful example of how far American railways have fallen.

The very 1990s William F. Walsh Regional Transportation Center looking its best under a hazy sky.

The train line through Downtown was dismantled to make way for a (you guessed it!) freeway, so the new station is a greyhound terminal/train station combo kind of near a mall and a stadium but mainly behind a huge warehouse.

Still epic. Downtown Syracuse’s old train station was closed in 1962 because the railway it fronted onto was ripped up to make way for Interstate 690. It’s now home to the offices of a TV station.

I managed to snap this photo of the other side of the long closed downtown train station from a bus travelling on I-690. There’s a huge mural of a steam train in line with the road deck.

Syracuse itself is very cool. America has a wonderful abundance of midsize towns and cities that just ooze potential. I’m sure some people like them just how they are, but in the large swathes of vacant land and gorgeous art deco buildings I see the makings of brilliance. I suppose there are just so many towns and cities like that that there isn’t the demand to kick things up a gear so they just kind of sit.

My attempt to capture the faded grandeur of Downtown Syracuse.

I come from a country where housing is so scarce that you literally cannot buy a house for less than 6 figures and if you want to live somewhere that has, you know, bars and buses and a university and a stadium and, like, things, you’re going to need at least half a million dollars. Going from that to seeing what is on offer in the Rustbelt I must say, I was tempted to bag my very own fixer upper then and there. The weather is a bit of a downer, though.

I was there in summer so didn’t have to put up with brutal winter these parts are famous for, but the weather wasn’t great either because Canada was on FIRE and New York (City) was getting smoked out, so of course it became international news. Guys, climate change can officially begin now because it has affected the centre of the known universe. The smoke was just as bad Upstate but the people there don’t make as big of a fuss about such things, and no one would listen even if they did.

If you’re wondering why my photos from Syracuse have such a handy apocalyptic vibe, well that’s partly just the rustbelt, but the thick smoke choking the air and making my eyes water probably helped as well.

There is plenty of room for in-fill development in Downtown Syracuse. The old train station is visible in the background.

So you’re probably thinking something like, yes, yes, nice old buildings, sad train station, but you could’ve been seeing the Alanis musical or Rochester drag! Why the rush to Syracuse?

Well, dear reader, because of one little incredibly important piece of nation building infrastructure; the Erie Canal.

The Erie Canal: America’s First Superhighway

If you aren’t familiar with the Erie Canal, I’ll let the opening paragraph from the Wikipedia article on it set the scene:

The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east–west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing the costs of transporting people and goods across the Appalachians. In effect, the canal accelerated the settlement of the Great Lakes region, the westward expansion of the United States, and the economic ascendancy of New York State. It has been called “The Nation’s First Superhighway.”

People like to froth railways, highways and the like, but the importance of those early canals on America’s industrial development can hardly be overstated.

These days the canal is still in existence and if you own a craft with a sufficiently narrow draught you can still navigate the waterway approximately 4 months of the year. There seems to be some limited opportunities for tourism on the canal and I’m sorely tempted to pack it all up, do up an old canal-boat and start plying the canal from Albany to Buffalo in the summer months.

The original 1820s Erie Canal near Syracuse. This section is closed to boat traffic. You can see a newer, narrower aqueduct that carries the canal water over the creek below. The bike path on the right hand side is the original tow path.

Exploring the Erie Canal

If you want to explore the Erie Canal on foot or bike it is pretty easy. The old canal boats made their way along the canal being pulled by horses that walked on an embankment alongside the canal called the towpath.

New York State has been particularly motivated about repurposing the no longer required towpaths into public trails. Thanks to a mix of rail trails, towpath trails and a bit of on-road cycling you can ride your bike all the way from Buffalo to New York City on a wonderful right of way that the government has named the Empire State Trail. Given that the rivers, canal and then, later, the railways, led development of upstate New York (and much of the rest of the world besides) these trails run right through small towns and into major cities. It’s all very European.

Well would you look at that, the Empire State Trail also follows the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys.

Syracuse not only includes some excellent spots to stroll along the canal it is also home to the Erie Canal Museum – the main motivating factor for my extra day in Syracuse. I was also keen to check out Onondaga Lake: ‘the most polluted lake in North America’ but given the aforementioned air quality I figured it wasn’t a good day for a cycling trip around the lake. Although perhaps fitting for its epitaph?

In 1910 Onondaga Lake was a popular recreation spot. The 20th century was not kind to the lake, but these days as long as you don’t disturb the toxic sediment that has settled on the lake floor it isn’t actually too bad.

The Erie Canal Museum

The Erie Canal Museum is pretty much the ideal small museum. It’s right downtown and partially in an old building that was originally built as a weighbridge for the canal. Canalboats would pull into a lock that housed a giant scale, the water would be drained out and the toll to be paid calculated based on the weight and type of the goods contained within the boat.

There is a lot going on in this photo but bear with me. This photo is taken from inside the weighbridge building that now houses the Erie Canal Museum. The stone ledge behind the rope is the original water line and the pink and blue structure behind it is a recreated canal boat sitting in what would have been the original weighbridge. The framed photo shows the weighbridge in more functional times and in the cabinet in the foreground is a scale model of the whole operation.

The city has long since filled in this abandoned section of canal, but the mere existence of this one remaining sign helps a visitor better get a feel for what downtown Syracuse would’ve been like in the canal heyday.

I had a wonderful time exploring the Museum and chatting with the volunteers there and then took a bus out of town to walk a section of the old towpath.

You can still see a lot of original works along the way and the Syracuse bus system is just substantial enough that with a little bit of planning I could take a bus to a bleak strip mall/highway interchange, walk along the canal for half a dozen miles and jump back on a different bus in a quaint old canal village. I couldn’t argue with those $1 flat rate bus fares, either.

Super scenic. A section of the old Erie Canal towpath trail just outside Syracuse.

The Barge Canal

The larger Barge Canal is the more modern iteration of the Erie Canal, built in the early 20^th century roughly halfway in time between the opening of the Erie Canal and today. The Barge Canal could carry larger barges and allowed the heavily degraded sections of downtown canalway to be filled in for development. It bypasses Syracuse quite a few miles to the north.

I didn’t visit the Barge Canal, but if you were to actually boat your way from the Hudson to the Great Lakes this is the canal you would go down.

It’s easy in the 21^st century to think of the canals of Amsterdam or the like and think of what an asset they are to an urban area but in the pre-sewerage and heavily industrial downtowns of the Rustbelt a canal was definitely not a tourist attraction. It must’ve been a huge relief to locals when the Barge Canal was opened and the polluted gutter running through Downtown Syracuse was filled in.

Before there was a car park there was a canal and before there was a canal there was forest.

Onward Bound

The next day my buddy arrived into Syracuse airport and my watering eyes and headache from the previous days exertions had just about passed. Sadly the outdoor concert we were in town to see was cancelled thanks to the air quality, but we had just as good of a time pub crawling our way through this fun little city.

Irish pubs and flags abound. Don’t let the car-centric design fool you, rustbelt cities are surprisingly walkable. We found plenty of pubs, dive bars and breweries to keep us entertained for an afternoon.

The following morning before sunrise we were bleary eyed and heavy headed making our way back down the hill to the Syracuse Transit Centre to board the Empire Service for New York City’s Penn Station. This time I made sure we sat on the right hand side to get the best of those expansive Hudson River vistas.

Bannerman Castle in the Hudson River, from the southbound Amtrak Empire Service.

That wraps up my adventures travelling by transit across the Rustbelt. If you’d like to get emailed when I blog please sign up below:

Travelling by Transit across the Rustbelt – Part 3: Niagara Falls USA

By Jed C

On September 8, 2023

In Travel

If you haven’t already, go and check out Parts 1 (Detroit) and 2 (Buffalo).

Niagara Falls USA by bus and foot

My Toronto friends have a habit of pulling a particular face when I deign to suggest making a trip to Niagara. It’s the exact same face that a certain kind of person (of which I confess to being one of) will give you if you mention a desire to visit the number one overcrowded tourist trap near their place.

If someone is visiting my neck of the woods I’ll probably dish out unsolicited advice that goes something like this…

“Bondi? Why? Bronte’s way nicer.”

“The Three Sisters? Well, up to you but definitely don’t go on the weekend.”

“The Hunter Valley? You mean Cessnock Heights!?” (jk who doesn’t love a wine region)

and for some Canadian flavour:

“Lake Louise? You know the Rockies is full of lakes that are just as epic and aren’t so popular you need to prebook a shuttle from the park and ride just to get there?”

So when I got this feedback on Niagara I could safely discount it as local’s bias and get on with planning my trip.

Niagara Falls, Canada or Niagara Falls, USA?

The first thing that will come up when you mention you are planning a trip to Niagara Falls is that the person who has been there before will tell you you simply must go to the Canadian side. I’m sure this bias is much stronger north of the border, but even tripadvisor seems to agree.

One thing I overheard, read online and was told countless times was that the all-important iconic view of the Falls is from Canada and that that is really the only side to see the Falls from.

I found the ambience of the Niagara Falls State Park on the U.S side of the border quite lovely, actually.

That was more than enough to send me gleefully rushing straight to the American side. After all, what’s more rustbelt than the more-rundown, less-loved version of an already tacky tourist attraction?

Transit from Buffalo to Niagara

Thanks, once again, to the general perception and approach of American transit agencies to being a safety net for the poor rather than a desirable means of transport competitive with the car, I was able to bag another brilliant transit deal: a $5 day pass within the Buffalo-Niagara region.

The price might be low but you pay for it in the system’s complexity.

The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority runs buses in the Buffalo-Niagara area as well as Buffalo’s lone light rail line.

To get from Buffalo to Niagara Falls there are a couple of express options at various times of day, one of which goes to a suburban mall rather than Downtown Niagara. If in doubt, the hourly all-stops works well enough.

The NFTA network has a bit of spagetti energy and they don’t appear to publish a PDF network map. But they’ve given the public access to their network planning tool that not only shows route frequency and stop location but also includes some handy demographic data!

I rode the hourly 40 all-stops bus and it was decently popular. Riders were mostly locals using the intervening stops, but there was an Amish-looking father and son making their way to the Falls with a paper timetable in hand. I haven’t seen a paper timetable in years, but it will surprise absolutely no one that I used to have a not-insubstantial collection of Newcastle bus and train timetables to my name.

I’ve had a couple of conversations online with people who seem to think up to date route and timetable information at bus stops is basically pointless because ‘there’s an app for that’. This is frustrating to me because it comes from a place of assuming that everyone both wants and is able to be constantly connected. Is it really good policy for a public service to only provide information to people with a smartphone and an active internet connection?

It is a much smaller subsection of society that are unable to figure out when the next bus is coming from a simple paper timetable embedded in a bus stop and it doesn’t seem like that much to provide.

But I digress. As someone who mostly travels without mobile internet (“Could I also grab the wifi password?”) I must admit that our modern world is a trickier place to navigate sans internet than it once was. Few cities let you access their bikeshare programs without an active internet connection (shout out to a notable exception – Vancouver), getting a taxi now all but requires one and paper timetables are a thing of the past, or so I thought.

A pair of the many similarly dressed people I assume are Amish enjoying the view across the Niagara River to the more impressive Canadian-side skyline.

It was nice to see a father and son on a trip to enjoy an iconic national monument and a transit agency that understands the diverse needs of their constituency. I also enjoyed listening to a couple carrying cans of drink, an enormous plastic bag full of clothes and much else besides, give generous and probably too specific advice to the Amish duo. It was a wholesome American transit scene.

Arriving in Niagara Falls, USA

Stepping off in Niagara the joy continued. I was most surprised to see that the American side is beautiful in its own right and very, very popular. I had forgotten that the majority of US Americans don’t have passports and Niagara is an important nation-building pilgrimage! In fact, Buffalo was the first city in the world lit up by electricity thanks to Nikola Tesla’s brain (there is a statue of the man in each city, the Buffalo one is handily located right by the Downtown bus stop) and the incredible power of the Falls.

The Niagara Falls statue of Tesla. If you get on the bus to Niagara from Church and Main in Downtown Buffalo you can enjoy the Buffalo statue of Tesla while you wait.

Middle America was out in full force. Black, white, brown, Amish, you name it. The people watching rivalled the incredible majesty of the famous falls.

Happily settling for the second-class view of the Falls.

Hiking the Niagara Gorge

After ducking into a tourist information centre and being told it was “too far to walk” to the Niagara Power Vista I decided to take it upon myself to walk there. The Power Vista was about the only tourist attraction in the town that appealed to me – a museum to the city’s hydroelectric past, present and future housed in a functioning dam just north of the city. The dam was built by Robert Moses, who must’ve taken a well earned break from trying to ruin NYC with stroads and freeways to duck upstate and expand the role of hydro in the region.

For fans of awe inspiring natural beauty and post-industrial decay I cannot speak highly enough of this walk. Within minutes of leaving the Falls I was riding an elevator that was once part of a huge power station that had been destroyed by the water it was supposed to be harnessing. The river was fast flowing and devoid of watercraft, thanks to the enormous rapids downstream that limit access. I had been expecting to spend the day at what is functionally a carnival and instead had stumbled my way into a majestic gorge that played a momentous role in the industrial history of the United States.

The Niagara Gorge as seen from the lower levels of the abandoned Schoellkopf Power Station.

I took loads of photos (few other activities provoke this response), enjoyed the company of many birds and a couple of snakes, wandered about the graffiti-covered rusting relics and generally followed any distraction that grabbed my eyes. This unfortunately meant that I was running a bit tight to closing time of the Power Vista centre which, as described, was really far away.

At Devil’s Hole State Park I found this old freeway lane that had been cut off from the adjacent highway and turned into a bike lane that ran the last mile to the museum. As I got closer I realised that the museum footbridge across the freeway did not include access onto my bike/pedestrian road. I thought about jumping various fences but this is a huge, functioning hydroelectricity producing facility in America and I didn’t want to get shot. There I stood, mere metres from the museum but more than 2km away on foot. It was half an hour to close so I gave up and trudged back to the park to rest my weary feet and figure out how to get home.

Power for Ontario (left) and New York (right). That building on the right is the Niagara Power Vista. Sadly pedestrian access from this point is over 2km away…

To catch a bus you have to think like a bus.

Waiting at Devil’s Hole State Park for a bus poses a tricky situation if you don’t have access to the internet. The obvious solution would be to just buy a goddamn sim card (adding roaming to my Canadian sim was prohibitively expensive) but I’m going to set that solution aside because: 1, I don’t want to and 2, I personally think that a public transport system should be usable without one.

At Devil’s Hole State Park there are three bus stops for three different bus routes, none which have a printed timetable.

The first is a dinky tourist shuttle that runs back to Downtown and leaves from the car park (top left). This has no timetable so you can’t really plan ahead with it. Apparently it runs roughly every 40 minutes and you can track the buses on the app or in your browser, but I was wandering about roughly along its route all day and I can’t say I ever saw one…

I hate everything about this. Why even bother having wifi on your bus if the only way to find out when it’s coming is to look it up on the internet? Maybe get some wifi at your bus stops first, or, you know, run to a timetable!?

On the nearby street there are bus stops on either side for route 52. The 52 runs at an irregular frequency of anywhere between 30 and 120 minutes between services. The route is a big loop that takes 40 minutes to complete. This meant that whichever side I got a bus from it would be between 10 and 30 minutes to Downtown. I was vaguely aware of some of this (I had done a small amount of research before I wandered off downstream) so I knew that whichever side got a bus first, that was the one I wanted to be on.

The 52 ‘North End Circulator’ timetable makes for a brutal game of turn-up-and-go roulette.

I found myself a good spot on the grass where I could eye off all three bus stops and I waited. It took around 30 minutes until the more direct 52B came along, which, all things considered, I feel like worked out reasonably well. I swiped my day pass and headed back to Downtown Niagara Falls. Well, almost. The Portage Transit Centre where the 52B and other suburban bus routes terminate is awkwardly located at the edge of Downtown in a kind of run down supermarket carpark. So I had to walk the rest of the way to the trendy (for the area…) 3^rd Street to get some dinner. I was absolutely starving after all of this and thankfully all-you-can-eat Indian seems to be a trend in Niagara.

The smokey haze courtesy of the Quebec wildfires did downtown Niagara no favours in the picturesque stakes.

I left the restaurant stuffed like a turkey with some time to chill before my all-stops bus back to Buffalo. I had just started gently perambulating to aid my digestion when I spotted an unexpected express bus which I felt the need to awkwardly attempt to run for. I was back in Buffalo all of thirty minutes later extremely satisfied with the day’s undertakings – and I hadn’t even gone to the casino!

Carry on to the fourth and final part 4: the Erie Canal.

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Travelling by Transit across the Rustbelt – Part 2: Detroit to Buffalo

By Jed C

On August 18, 2023

In Travel

Suggested reading: Part One: Motor City.

The next scheduled stop on my trip was Syracuse in upstate New York. I wasn’t meeting my friend there for a few days so I had some time to make my way across leisurely.

Planning my trip East from Detroit I had the lyrics of Detroit or Buffalo looping around in my head:

Better pack up and go
Detroit or Buffalo
Anybody wanna know where, I don’t know
I don’t know
God knows everybody gotta go sometime
And I’m takin’ this train to the end of the line
Missin’ every mile that friend of mine

I wanted to take that train, if not to the end of the line than at least as far as Buffalo. I just didn’t feel like I’d be doing Barbara Keith justice boarding a Greyhound. That, I live in a (passenger) train-free area, and I don’t particularly enjoying short haul flying. So I wanted to use this trip as a chance to catch as many intercity trains as possible.

Unfortunately, heading East from Michigan is a huge blackhole in Amtrak’s often patchy coverage. It’s not as bad as Wyoming or South Dakota, but it’s pretty bad.

The Amtrak System Map. At this scale Southern Michigan looks like a train traveller’s delight! Source: wikimedia

Red are trains, green are buses. At this scale it’s clearer that all the trains in Michigan head West to Chicago. To head East on the Lakeshore you need to get to South Bend, Indiana or Toledo, Ohio. Source: Amtrak

I guess Ohio never forked out for some State-subsidised local Amtrak service like the Cascades in Washington and Oregon or the Wolverine in Michigan. This means that only long distance trains pass through Ohio and they are set up for travel across the State more than within in.

The busiest of these is the Lakeshore Limited. She is a flagship long distance passenger train, connecting what might just be America’s two most traditionally transit friendly cities, Chicago and New York (also Boston, the train splits at Albany with half heading South to NYC and the other half continuing East). Sadly, like most long distance Amtrak trains the Lakeshore only runs once a day. It also leaves Chicago at 9:30pm which I believe is designed to provide a direct connection with the Empire Builder and California Zephyr coming from the West. They arrive in Chicago midafternoon, so I guess Amtrak wants some leeway so it’s not refunding tickets and providing complimentary hotel beds left, right and centre.

This all means that the Lakeshore hits Toledo, Ohio at the travel-friendly time of 3:15am. It’s hard to justify taking a five and a half hour train trip when you know you’ll sleep or be totally zonked out the whole way and arrive at your destination not yet able to check-in but too tired to enjoy the sights and sounds.

That’s annoying, but still manageable. What makes this train basically uncatchable is that the Amtrak Thruway coach that connects from Detroit to Toledo inexplicably leaves Detroit at 9:30pm, arriving in Toledo at 10:35, a casual four and a half hours before the Lakeshore Limited is due. I have no idea why this is the case, and since the Amtrak station in Toledo is in a quiet, mostly industrial neighbourhood at the edge of downtown, that would be a long wait. Oh, and the Lakeshore runs late around half the time, earning it the clever nickname the “Lateshore Limited’.

So, I gritted my teeth, hit pause on Detroit or Buffalo and pressed play on Simon and Garfunkel’s America.

If I wasn’t so tight (and stubborn), for around 250 USDs there are multiple daily direct flights between the two cities. But I am (on both counts) and so I paid $70 for the pleasure of taking a series of crowded coaches to make the trip.

At 4:30pm, half an hour late, I boarded the bus from Detroit’s unloved Greyhound station bound for Cleveland. There I had an hour to attempt to find something to eat in the area that didn’t come from a vending machine, before jumping on a full Baron’s bus bound for Buffalo that pulled in at 11:30pm.

It was a long evening.

In Buffalo

Having spent plenty of time in Detroit but barely visited anywhere else in the Rustbelt I was labouring under the false impression that the faded glory of turn of the century America was best experienced in Detroit. How wrong I was. Buffalo’s downtown architecture was at least as epic, and they had the inspired idea to stick a light rail through the Downtown spine a good 40 years before the Q-Line was conceived.

Wide streets, tall buildings, homelessness: ‘merica!

Downtown Buffalo rejuvenation

I was only in Buffalo for a hot minute and was mainly there as a stopping off point for Niagara Falls. In the wanderings I did manage on my brief visit I was struck by two things:

1. Vibrant queer scene!

Buffalo has a bustling theatre scene and what appeared to be a very prominent queer scene as well. I think the fact that I rolled into town on the last night of Pride was probably a factor here but the bricks and mortar presence of gay spaces make it apparent this wasn’t just a one-off thing.

I mean come on people Buffalo’s nickname is the Queen City.

This one might be Pride specific. This is Main Street in the Theatre District. To the right of the frame is the portal where the Buffalo Metro stops activating Downtown’s retail core and heads underground for a quicker connection to the suburbs.

2. Attempts to ‘bring back Downtown’

So prior to this trip my thinking about urban blight and declining downtowns in the Rustbelt and beyond went something like this:

Early 20^th century: Streetcar suburbs, manufacturing boom, prosperous bustling downtown.
Mid century: Rise of the automobile, racial desegregation, growth of suburbia, freeway sprawl, loss of manufacturing jobs, decline of Downtown, abandoned buildings cleared for parking lots.
Late 20^th century: People realised suburbia is boring and diversity is good. Gentrification. Rise of Downtown as a cultural hub and desirable residential area with less of an emphasis as a commercial hub and very limited manufacturing (mainly just breweries).

In Buffalo I found out I was kinda right but I was missing a bit in the middle. What happened there (and I’m going to extrapolate and assume this was a general trend) was that when the decline began in the 1960s the city government put their heads together to figure out what they could do about it. This bit had always eluded me. I’d thought that once the Downtown starting to decline everyone just sort of shrugged and starting spending their time and money at suburban office parks and the new enclosed malls that sprung up on the edge of cities in the 1970s.

Being in Downtown Buffalo I realised that this was crazy. The architecture alone is staggering. City Hall looks like this:

The epic Buffalo City Hall completed in 1931 (eeep bad timing), the snazzy 2011 Federal Courthouse and an obelisk commemorating the assassination of President McKinley which took place in Buffalo in 1901. The City Hall is just as epic inside, but sadly the (free!) observation deck was closed on the day I went.

The amount of wealth and prestige Downtown must have been incredible. And of course, all those fancy bankers, industrials and city officials want a nice, bustling area next door to their office and steady demand for their various premises.

So Buffalo came up with an ambitious plan to fix Downtown. The idea was that since suburbia had sucked a lot of demand away, the existing area was too large and not what people wanted. Best to turn Downtown into the equivalent of a giant outdoor shopping mall. To do this all the activity would be funneled onto a single main street which would be partially enclosed and flanked by parking garages accessible directly from the freeway network. A new light rail would run up that main spine.

The bit I had never really considered is that all this ‘urban renewal’ was phenomenally expensive. It required a lot of expertise and money in an increasingly broke urban environment. The city had one shot to reinvent itself in the post-automobile world and the landscape we got is the legacy of that era in cities across the world, but most notably in the Rustbelt.

“The Regional Centre: A Comprehensive Plan for Downtown Buffalo” (1971) brought in all those ideas we know and hate: expansive ring freeways, abundant peripheral multistorey parking garages, a covered pedestrian mall, lots of full-block towers. A lot of this got built but what the planners didn’t count on is that if you cut off Downtown from the rest of the city like this there isn’t much incentive to build there or go there and so people don’t. THIS is why so many US cities have vacant lot car parks taking up entire city blocks. For years and years the demand for anything else to be built just hasn’t been there.

Downtown Buffalo today

Today Buffalo is a mix of incredible art-deco and late 19^th century architecture, a rather loud and imposing light rail that doesn’t run frequently enough and a very, very visible homeless population.

Whoever decided high floor streetcars with pop-out staircases on some carriages and at-grade boarding at a single door accessed through this edifice are a good idea needs to have a long hard think about what they’ve done.

Even the single street that the aforementioned 1970s renewal plan funneled all the retail into, Main Street, is too long for the amount of commercial demand. So while there are vibrant stretches of the street, particularly up in the Theatre district, there’s an awful lot of dead space around too and that’s just on the main street (Main Street). In more recent years cars have been reintroduced to some sections of the street in an attempt to bring back some life, even if it’s just people moving to and from their parked vehicles.

Like Detroit, I got the impression that Buffalonians love their city (more than the regular amount) and have continued their city’s legacy of punching about its weight culturally.

There’s no doubt Buffalo has a lot of problems, but all in all it’s the sort of city I’m kinda sad we don’t have in Australia. A place with a rich and vibrant arts and culture scene that isn’t an ‘alpha’ city with x millions of residents and sky-high rents. A place you can afford to live in a walkable neighbourhood that has interesting things going on.

Is that too much to ask?

Next up: Part 3: Niagara Falls, USA

One last thing before you go:

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