Landmarks

This past couple of weeks I finally ventured to explore some areas in Buffalo I’d long been curious about. One exploration was motivated by the composition class I’ll be teaching this fall at Medaille College, the other by curiosity about a major Old Buffalo landmark.
The comp class is paired with another class in critical thinking (I confess to wondering at times what happened to good old-fashioned college classes) and we will form what is called a Learning Community. The other instructor and I will organize some of our syllabus around a theme, and we will try to link into some aspect of the “story of Buffalo.” Prof. Cullinan and I chose the theme of “life as a river” and the Buffalo River as the linking aspect. I was only vaguely aware of where the river was, and how to get there. Via the Skyway or the 190 south of downtown, I often passed by the old industrial waterfront and the deserted grain mills. But nothing in my two years here ever brought me into that part of the city, so on a recent sunny Saturday, after an errand brought me closer than I’d ever been, I took a left turn and skirted around the HSBC Arena and found myself where I wanted to be. The neighborhood is known as the First Ward, and according to Prof. Cullinan, is largely Irish (like her). I found the river by visuals, driving to the end of Hamburg Street, past McCarthy’s Pub, whose windows were crowded with handwritten community signage (“Benefit for Joey ____”). I thought of stopping, but made a mental note to return when I spotted a man walking a dog. He was in this sort of channel that looked like the remains of an old railroad bridge. When I drove to the dead end, I was at the river. I got out of the car. It was a beautiful summer day (one of the few we’ve had this year) and the grain silos were across the water. I could hear a couple sitting somewhere nearby, talking, and to my left, a solo kayaker was coming downstream. There are rusty old railway trestles, and the water looked as brackish as I expected it to be, but the sun and dry air did a lot to make the scene. Those deserted silos have a Monument Valley-meets-the Industrial Revolution grandeur, forlorn and daunting at the same time. What is going to happen to them? After leaving that spot, I drove around the First Ward some more, and eventually found my way to the mouth of the river. On the western side of the river’s mouth were some small-craft marinas and slips, and the sailboats looked very expensive compared to the mostly-deserted mills on the opposite bank. There were a couple of oil-painters across the river, so I crossed back over to investigate. This brought me to the General Mills plant, where some men on a weekend shift were taking a break at a picnic table. I spoke to the painters for a moment, then got back in my car and went home.
Today, after going to the Science Museum to see the amazing “Body Works” exhibit, I suggested to my friend that we drive in the direction of some of the churches whose steeples are among the highest in the city. We headed for St. Mary of Sorrows Catholic Church (now known as the King Urban Life Center), which is at the corner of Genesee and Guilford. The church was built in 1891, in the Rhenish Romanesque style, and designed by Adolphus Druiding. It’s a spectacularly tall church, and commands the neighborhood the way a cathedral must have commanded towns in the Middle Ages. Large swaths of this part of the city were among the bleakest and most desolate I’ve seen since I moved here. Although there are empty lots here in Allentown, they seem like English gardens compared to the blocks of blight in this part of Buffalo. My friend and I commented on how bleak it felt, even on a Sunday afternoon in summer.We drove next to St. Stanislaus, which is a substantial complex on Townsend Street three blocks south of St. Mary of Sorrows, and then we drove to the Central Terminal. I’ve seen this building only from the highways and expressways, but seeing it up close was amazing. Hard to believe it was built less than a century ago, and that it was used for only 50 years. There were a lot of cars in the lot, and I found out by going on the terminal’s website that a public tour was going on. Despite that, between the churches and the grain mills and the terminal, it brought some of the harder, harsher reality of Buffalo home in a way I hadn’t experienced yet.