Tom Dennis
There is no industrial landscape more dolefully picturesque than the befuddled eastern shoulder of Lake Erie just south of downtown Buffalo, known as the Old First Ward. As far as first impressions go–especially if you’re entering the city via I-190 N or State Route 5–Buffalo’s is quite difficult to vanquish as you bypass the once bustling respiratory system of the second largest city in New York State.
Driving atop the ribbon of concrete known as the Skyway, the General Mills factory can be seen. The white and emerald beacon stands tall among fallen peers that once teamed to champion world rankings in grain refinement, while sodden neighborhoods of blue-collar melancholia huddle closely for warmth on streets named Ohio, Michigan, and Louisiana. In its drunken, and ill-conceived pageantry, the bridgeway wraps its embanked legs and torso 110 feet above a now vacant (and inaccessible) outer harbor, winding past a modest hockey arena, and clumsily forking its way by a revitalized Navy Park. Autos cross nimbly on tip toes, as to not wake the dingy giant from its industrial coma.
Taking this corridor into the city will often conjure up inclinations of disgust and curiosity for both visitors and locals, and questions exhaled from tired lips often go unanswered. Where is our surface boulevard? Where is our downtown NFL Stadium? What of an Environmental Impact Survey? What of a waterfront plan? Where is our Stanley Cup?
Even though it is Buffalo’s fate to bear the brunt of its ever-growing cast of critics and naysayers, the people that dwell below the shadowy silos have remained shinning disciples in their abundant loyalty to their home. Even if they haven’t seen Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ’66, many people might imagine a 90s-era Zenith TV and Lay-Z-Boy recliner bolted to the floor of each and every South Buffalo living room, as hand-crafted Bills relics and Irish-Catholic crucifixes are carefully curated and affixed to the yellowed walls. And yet, every shallow issue of prejudice taken up with the area, in the end, is for naught, for these homes are the mitochondrial storehouses of the overworked and underpaid. Priding themselves on a long-winded history of stewardship and traditionalism, the aura of the Old First Ward feels strangely unchanged since the mid-70s as both Friday nights at the Swannie House and Sunday morning mass at St. Clare have probably drawn the same throng of faces since their inception.
However vital or fair first impressions are, under the microscopic lens of tolerance and curiosity, this discarded section of the city has remained most stimulating to me. In its ruins, I have found solace, and in its misgivings I have been granted the most mystical and clairvoyant of beatitudes. Each time I’ve found myself either invading or bypassing the sub-metropolis, I’ve experienced both beautiful and terrible images of renewal, history, oversight, and abandonment. Sure, we can inquire about aforementioned grievances as we tear through numerous unappraised neighborhoods at 65 MPH, but at such high speeds one can only hope to entertain the prudence that such a force of entropy can potential award and withstand. In fact, it is not so uncommon that we find enlightenment in these most unexamined places.
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I have kayaked down the Buffalo River, the winding watershed and industrial artery to the huddle of silos. The experience wields a faint psychedelia, as towering honey-combs form tall, shadowy doorways of rust and decay. I have felt like what I imagine a blood cell in an animal feels like a second after it has died. The water is still warm here, but without the beat of fabrication and shipping, the river sets out in the sun to become a gel, a puddle, a portal, a memory.
I have climbed into one factory shell as a nostalgic parasite; tunneling through manufactured caverns as my imagination feeds off the copious amounts of dead matter that are clusters of bricks, foundations reduced to anthills, crumbs of glass and mortar, rusted scaffolds of steel, abyssal elevator shafts, and wilderness coming into its own, as small trees and weeds sprout up through fractured loading docks near the river.
Inside an old grain elevator I have climbed and laughed my way to a summit, opening doorways that said ‘KEEP SHUT’ and ‘DANGER’. I have been spooked by the gargle of ghostly machinery and vanished into dark corners. From the top floor I have seen a view reminiscent of what men have sometimes thought they’ve seen.
I have flung myself to the precipice of the industrial clump and learned that there is no greater tragedy than to kill yourself for something that was already dead. To gaze over a perfectly mapped city in real time is overwhelmingly omniscient and irrevocably heartbreaking. Especially when that city has addressed its hundreds of learned apothecaries with wounds that will never heal in a million years.
Impractical Cartography 