“I needed insurance that fit my lifestyle. I chose Blue because I feel they gave me the most bang for my buck.” • $250 wellness card • Over 50 free preventive services • $1,000 in savings with Two For One discount program • Recognized worldwide
To find out more about our health plans, including whether you qualify for a tax credit to help pay monthly premiums, visit
ShopBluePlans.com
A division of HealthNow New York Inc., an independent licensee of the BlueCross BlueShield Association.
Nick, Member
ShopBluePlans.com
WE ARE BLOCK CLUB THE BRANDING AND MARKETING AGENCY THAT WANTS BETTER. WE’RE A TEAM OF DESIGNERS, WRITERS, MARKETERS AND ENTREPRENEURS.
BLOCKCLUBONLINE.COM
PRIX FIXE 3 COURSES
1 1 9 8 HE R TE L AVE N U E 716.873.4291
Monday - Thursday $33
BUFFALO, NY 142 16 ristorantelombardo.com
WE SPECIALIZE IN BRANDING AND MARKETING FOR FORWARD-THINKING BUSINESSES AND ORGANIZATIONS.
The branding and marketing agency that wants better.
BLOCKCLUBONLINE.COM
3945 Main Street, Amherst www.faceaface-paris.com
visualeyeswny.com - 716.832.3452
Every space has a story. Ours began 130 years ago right here in Buffalo.
Our business is about solutions for people brought to life through interiors that cater to today’s evolving workforce in healthcare, education and business environments. Let us create the perfect space for your business to tell its story.
3901 Genesee St., Suite 800 Buffalo, NY 14225 716-633-5600 millingtonlockwood.com
millington_layout_v2.indd 1
9/24/14 2:37 PM
h s e r f stive & fe
at the co-op 807 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 716-886-2667 | www.lexington.coop Open to everyone 7am-11pm daily
12 BCM 37
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 37 BORDERS
CONNECT
14 Issue Contributors
ADVERTISING & DISTRIBUTION advertising@blockclubonline.com
17 Letter from the Editor
SUBSCRIPTIONS blockclubonline.com/subscribe
18
The Conversationalists Interview by Ben Siegel Dave Imus is a superstar of geography, having designed what has been called the “greatest paper map of the United States.”
BRANDING & MARKETING blockclubonline.com
22
Inch By Inch Case Study by Taylor Schupp In Cleveland, a rising immigrant and refugee population is growing its own food on an enterprising urban farm.
24 Haunted Peripheries Essay by Shasti O’Leary Soudant The fragility of our social contracts. 28
In the Shadow of the Sacred Heart By Jennifer Connor Photos by Harper Bishop Crossing town on bike to learn more about Buffalo’s East Side, Tour de Neglect raises questions about the state of the city.
39 Borders Photo essay by Block Club The boundaries of our lines. 44
A Porous Border By Woody Brown Photos by Candace Camuglia Taking a gander north, and comparing notes on our Rust Belt neighbors north of the border.
56
One Nation, Under God Poetry by Lizz Schumer Traversing the intersections of politics and religion through experimental poetry.
EDITORIAL & CONTENT ben@blockclubonline.com
DESIGN & OFFICE BLOG clubhaus.tumblr.com FACEBOOK, TWITTER, VIMEO and INSTAGRAM @blockclub #blockclub #BCM37 PRINTED SUSTAINABLY. This magazine is printed on FSC®-certified post-consumer and post-industrial recycled paper. Production of this brand of paper consumes five times less water than the industry average, reduces air emissions, frees up landfill space, and saves the world’s mature trees. 731 Main St. Buffalo, NY 14203 716.507.4474 blockclubonline.com ©2014 BLOCK CLUB INC. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported License. This work may be reproduced and shared for personal or educational use only, and must be credited to Block Club magazine. Such use for commerical purposes is strictly prohibited.
FPO
Please recycle this issue and pass it along to a friend.
61 Me Likes You Comic by Lauren Barnett
ABOUT BLOCK CLUB Block Club is a branding and marketing agency founded in 2007 in Buffalo, NY. We work to build and strengthen brands for forward-thinking businesses and organizations. In Block Club magazine, we tell stories about a better Rust Belt. Learn more at blockclubonline.com. BCM 37 13
ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS
Woody Brown pg. 44 Woody Brown’s writing has appeared in The Millions, The Rumpus, CASE Magazine and Artvoice. He won the Peter Burnett Howe Prize for Excellence in Prose Fiction and was a finalist for the 2012 DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Contest. He is at work on a novel. Candace Camuglia pg. 44 Candace Camuglia is bad jokes, boyish charm and a multidisciplinary artist. She has recently exhibited photographs in two solo shows: “Under the White Sky,” and “Cemeteries and Windmills in Western New York,” which will soon be released as a book.
BLOCK CLUB MAGAZINE EDITORIAL STAFF
PUBLISHER PATRICK FINAN patrick@blockclubonline.com
Jennifer Connor pg. 28 Jennifer Connor is a teacher, musician and writer who lives in Buffalo, less than a mile from the Niagara River, where she goes to watch the sun set over Canada. She has lived in six states now and has hiked and biked her way through many more. Lizz Schumer pg. 56 Lizz Schumer is a writer, reporter and photographer in Buffalo. A 2012 Pushcart Prize award nominee, her poetry and prose have been published widely. Her book, “Buffalo Steel,” was published by Black Rose Writing in 2013. Lizz is editor of The Sun in Hamburg. Shasti O’Leary Soudant
pg. 24 Shasti O’Leary Soudant is a multimedia artist, designer, writer and teacher. She has one child, one spouse, one business and no pets. She has travelled extensively, published sporadically, exhibited internationally, and speaks fluent second-grade French.
Alan Sylvestre
pg. 18 Alan Sylvestre is a visual journalist based out of Oregon. A graduate of the University of Oregon, Alan focuses on visual storytelling through characterbased narratives. His work can be seen online at alansylvestre.com.
14 BCM 37
EDITOR BEN SIEGEL ben@blockclubonline.com
CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRANDON DAVIS brandon@blockclubonline.com
PHOTOGRAPHER STEVE SOROKA steve@blockclubonline.com
DESIGNER JULIE MOLLOY julie@blockclubonline.com
DESIGNER TIM STASZAK tim@blockclubonline.com
DESIGNER RYAN McMULLEN ryan@blockclubonline.com
PROOFREADER TAYLOR SCHUPP EDITORIAL & DESIGN INTERNS JORDAN BURBY TAYLOR SCHUPP TYLER SCHWAB ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTORS LAUREN BARNETT HARPER BISHOP
P A I N T I N G S • F R A M I N G • P R I N T S • G I F T S • H O M E / O F F I C E • E S T. 1 9 0 1
TROMPE L’OEIL Masters of Deception October 17 – November 15, 2014 J o h n Ye rg e r L a ur a A b bo tt M a r y K a t e Aru n d e l l L uc et t e B a n a s L oui s e D a o u st
K a re n F o egen L e sl i e F o rn a lik E m i l y Ga rdner P a m He n rich J o a n Ho rn
Coni Minneci Micha el P rez ios o Joa n Sha w
NIELS YDE ANDERSEN (1888-1952) Etchings, Drawings & Friends November 22 – December 20, 2014
478 MAIN STREET
EAST AURORA 14052
716.652.0940
MEIBOHMFINEARTS.COM BCM 37 15
16 BCM 37
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Borders
The last few issues have been spent looking inward, riffling through our identities to discover hidden demons, suppressed truths, the things that keep us from being truer people. These themes and stories have not been, and emphatically so, about our interconnections. Of course, on a grand scale, it is all about how we function together in our spaces, and on an even bigger stage, how we are all more alike than we are different. That we are neighbors, colleagues, family and friends is intrinsic to any story we publish. But we are individuals, too, and complex creatures to boot. For as many shared streets, bridges and tunnels on which we might base our narratives, there are even more intersections in our own minds and hearts. The rule of thumb being, as on an airplane, take care of yourself first before you extend your services. This is good planning. This is smart leadership. This is sustainability. With Borders, we begin to expand our perspectives to consider the environments in which we function. There’s a whole world out there, full of rules and contradictions. How do we manage and survive on other people’s turfs, in foreign lands, and in return, how do we set the parameters for what is ours? These are questions that arise in a number of contexts on a regular basis, geography and politics being, perhaps, the most obvious connotations. These are both physical and intellectual borders—and sometimes emotional. On a map, their directions are clear: borders dictate where we can go and where we must stay; who is allowed and who is forbidden; how we might cross and what we might find. On one hand, it is a blueprint for our security, but on the other, it is an explorer’s bucket list.
This has always fascinated me about limitations: I feel compelled to obey the boundaries that others set, yet I have a hard time settling for what’s been written; I want to write my way through what’s yet to be explored. Creative people are explorers in that way. (Others are, too.) We push boundaries in order to prove that we can, to convince us all that we are more powerful than popular constructs would have us think. What we find on the other side of that scaled wall is anyone’s guess, but you can’t say we didn’t try. Personal security is another thing, of course. We must respect where others tell us is forbidden, in whatever way that means. We all deserve the freedom to define what’s on and off our personal limits, and we must respect what others dictate. The paradox remains in most other instances, though: run until you hit the great wall of separation, and decide what kind of person you are. Do you recede and stay where you’re told to, confined to observe from a distance, question from afar, wonder from over there? Or do you climb and see what’s on the other side, not even sure that it’ll offer a better view? That’s not as rhetorical as it might sound; it is not always smart to jump ship, even romantically. Safety is a strong criteria for these lines. Still, the option is there. Explorers have found worse things by staying home. In this way, borders are not rules, but permissions: who decides where you go, what you can do, who you are? That, for sure, is rhetorical.
BCM 37 17
THE CONVERSATIONALISTS
LIVING
LEGEND THE TYPICAL PERSON LOOKS AT A MAP AND SEES WHERE THINGS ARE LOCATED. DAVE IMUS LOOKS AT A MAP AND SEES A MUCH BIGGER STORY.
O
Interview by BEN SIEGEL
n paper, Dave Imus is a textbook geographer: “a specialist in the area of study that deals with location of countries, cities, rivers, mountains, lakes, etc.,” according to Mirriam-Webster. This is true; Imus has been designing maps in his studio, outside of Eugene, Ore., for more than 30 years. He started his company, Imus Geographics, the year after graduating college. He is an avid outdoorsman, spending vacations and work hiatuses “mostly in the mountains.” He is fascinated with where we live, and has many points of entry to that dialogue—a true conversationalist. Since 1998, Imus and Massachusetts cartographer Pat Dunlavey have produced state maps of California, Nevada, Alaska and Oregon, earning awards from the country’s foremost geographers, the American Congress on Surveying & Mapping/Cartography and Geographic Information Society. Their 2010 collaboration, the Essential Geography of the United States of America, won Imus and Dunlavey first place and Best in Show in that organization’s annual map design competition, earning acclaim from publishers and media for their map’s revolutionary design. A 2012 Slate magazine article called the map “the greatest paper map of the United States you’ll ever see.” On paper, Dave Imus is a textbook geographer. But peel away the page, and you’ll find a storyteller. BS What do you see when you look at a map? DI My interest has always been in the graphic quality of
BS What do you notice that the untrained eye wouldn’t? DI The graphic quality of maps is really that thing that other people don’t notice that I [do]. It took me many years to come to the conclusion that a lot of American-made and North American-made cartography doesn’t pay attention to details. Cartographers allow things like roadways to overprint rivers, and that drives me nuts. But it’s almost universal. The attention to detail isn’t great enough to work on those problems. So I don’t think most people notice that sort of thing, but to me that’s one of the most important aspects of a map, is legibility. BS How do you prioritize between, say, man-made roadways and natural waterways? DI Everything on a map needs to be in balance. If it’s not, your eye is drawn to what is out of balance, and your eye is trying to figure it out. If this were classical music, this would be a symphony, in its highest form, and most complex and inter-coordinated and orchestrated [way]. And if it’s not, it’s hopeless.
On a general map, if you can’t follow the streams, if you can’t even see them at a glance, then the map has failed. So you know, they’re really not at odds. As a geographer, I don’t view the human footprint as any different from nature. We’re here naturally, just like the forests and rivers. And so what we do, even though on the ground it may be pretty destructive and unsustainable—geographers
maps. I’m a geographer, and I’m endlessly thinking about geography, but when I get a new map, I check it out for the level of attention to detail that the cartographer has given to “I consider my work something more related to somethe map, and what’s it communicating and how well does it thing like botanical illustration than I do engineering. communicate it. Those are the things that I look for. I start with the basics, the science of it all,” says Imus. 18 BCM 37
photo by ALAN SYLVESTRE
BCM 37 19
don’t make that judgment, we just map what is, and then let other people make their own judgments from that.
light on their subject. Because you’re really trying to capture the essence of something.
To me, the network of roadways in the United States is a thing of beauty and artistry, because all of these infinitely efficient engineers that plan all these roadways all over the place to follow the routes of least resistance, that has a blend with the land. It’s rare that we ignore the shape of the land when we’re building roadways, so they’re a reflection of the shape of the land.
BS Tell me about your design choices. What is your criteria when choosing fonts, and colors and line strokes?
One thing that I do that is very rare in cartography these days is I move things around. If the road overprints the river, I move the road back. So it’s no longer an engineering diagram when you do that; it’s not schematic or something. But you know, that’s what artists do: we take liberties with light sources and things like that in order to cast the right light on our work. So I move things around. BS Doesn’t that disrupt continuity between the map and navigation? DI What I say is, you have to lie to people to keep from misleading them. And that’s what you do when you move a roadway back from a river. You might change the angle a little bit, but you make that river crossing very clear. When you pay attention to detail like that, [it] allows people to make more sense out of your work than less sense. We’re not trying to guide missiles down people’s chimneys here. We’re trying to give people an understandable impression of the land. BS That’s something I would never have considered, because I always assumed that maps were strictly scientific, a very exacting document. DI Right, and all those changes that I do, I believe stay below the level of consciousness. People aren’t judging the map by saying, Oh that road’s too far from the river! Like a freeway on my United States map is like a mile and a half across, at scale. And so you’ve got to do something. That’s a lie right there. You’re telling all these fibs.
I consider my work something more related to something like botanical illustration than I do engineering. I start with the basics, the science of it all: the longitude and the latitude—that’s dead-on stuff—and state boundaries. You can’t move that stuff around. But then the rest of it is, okay, how do we massage this? How do I render this so that it’s most easily accessible to the eye. Botanical illustrators take liberties with lighting and things like that to cast the best 20 BCM 37
DI Well for the type, there’s two fonts here: one is Bookman Old Style, a nice, conservative, serif font; and the other is Frutiger. I picked two fonts that don’t look a lot alike, but aren’t radically different styles. I focus, endlessly, on creating contrast and balance, and I look at every graphic element’s color, its value, its pattern, and sometimes its orientation. With the type labels, I’m creating a hierarchy of values so that you can stand back from the map, and you can see what the big cities are; you don’t have to get right up to Colorado to see where Denver is. You can see it from six feet away, so you can see Denver with everything else, too. With color, the Essential Geography map completely avoids using orange and purple—[it uses] primary colors; it does have green, which is the only secondary color on the map. That creates greater visual contrast. There’s less contrast between a primary color and a secondary color right next to it, than there is between a primary color and the next primary color. On this map, your eye doesn’t have to distinguish between blue and purple, and purple and red.
What people have said about this map is that it has the appearance of simplicity, and that’s the idea. You try to make it appear as simple as possible, but then you can layer in all this information because you can see it all, because it looks simple. That’s my design approach in a nutshell. BS We use maps differently now. GPS tells us where to go, whereas before digital, we would have to use a printed map to figure out where to go. Do you think there’s a shift there where we no longer have to be as investigative or adventurous with our way finding? DI GPS doesn’t connect you to your surroundings any more than where you’re going to make the next turn. One of the tragedies of geographic illiteracy is that people are so disconnected from the world around them. It’s like random scenery, or something. I don’t think that the digital navigation maps that we’re all using these days are going to do anything to help that at all. I think it’s going to go sort of in the wrong direction. But you know, those maps that we’re using now are really just continuations and improvements on the old-style transportation maps that have all been around.
I think a lot of people would look at a map and say, Okay, here’s the freeway from where we are and where we want to
Maps don’t tell you whether or not the people living there are happy. be. And other people would look at a map, a little more inquisitively, and decide, What’s the most interesting route? Do we want to take an extra hour to arrive at a destination and see something we’ve never seen before, or are we in a hurry and just want to go quickly on a freeway? Even the old-style maps allowed you to do that. BS It strikes me that your mapmaking has less to do with navigation and more to do with a narrative. DI You know, you hear about a place: Clarksdale, Mississippi. Okay, there is it. And that’s all you care [about]. Well, it’s up in the northwest part of Mississippi. Well, you know, maps have the potential to tell a story about every place: Is it flat there? Is it forested? What’s the elevation? What are the landmarks around there? Is it close to a river? So you make all these things visible at one time, and you get an impression of the geography of the place. You can see on my map that it’s 175 feet above sea level. It’s in the Mississippi Delta, where the blues come from. It’s close to the Mississippi River. It’s flat there, and there’s a lot of people living there, because there’s not a lot of city labels…that tells you a lot about Clarksdale. It’s no longer just a point on a piece of paper. It’s no longer just data; it’s information.
If you look at any place on the map, it tells a story about that place. And that’s what other maps didn’t do. I think that the lack of maps that tell stories in North America is why North Americans are so unfocused on geography. This is the type of map that is created for the purpose of making the lay of the land understandable. There’s things that maps don’t tell you. It doesn’t tell you that Minneapolis and St. Paul’s got a lot of grain elevators along the Mississippi River. It’s doesn’t tell you whether or not the people living there are happy. But it tells you a great deal about the general geography of a place. You should be ale to look at this map and know the basic geography of any place on it just about as well as somebody who lives there. BS It’s ironic what kind of faith we put in a map. When I look at an image of North America—an image from
space—it’s just this blob of land. You can recognize some landmarks, like we can see where Texas turns into Mexico, we see the Florida panhandle, but it still looks almost alien. And only when we lay these imaginary lines down do we recognize it. There’s a falsity to that that I find interesting. It’s just a big blog of land at the end of the day, isn’t it? DI Yeah, you know, I think you get at a really interesting aspect to all this: geography isn’t even possible without maps. Because you can’t visualize the land without a good map. You can visualize what you can see, but try to visualize what’s over the next ridge. I can’t point to every feature in Oregon. I know the geography of Oregon like the back of my hand. But I can’t really exactly point to Mount Hood from where I am. So maps clarify all this. They simplify. Like anybody writing a book, they decide what’s important, and how [to] communicate it. Without that, you can’t really understand the lay of the land, because it’s incomprehensibly complex. That satellite imagery of North America? Every little stream, every road, every house is on there. You can’t wrap your mind around that stuff. You need to have somebody who’s skilled at painting the broad strokes so you can understand.
I talked about botanical illustration. You know, everybody knows what a pinecone looks like because you’ve held one in your hand, and botanical illustrators are really great at reflecting that. But [with] geography, you can’t hold it in your hand. You can’t see it all at one time. It’s just too big and it’s just too complicated. So without these maps, which are geographic illustrations, you can’t get your mind around geography. BS Your Essential Geography looks at the country on a macro level, from such a distance. Is working on a micro level, on city street maps, something of interest to you. Or is that like a different part of your brain? DI Let me tell you about street maps [laughs]. I started out making street maps and my first map was a street map of a small city in Oregon that I drafted with pen and ink on Mylar. And then within a year or two I was making elaborate maps for Rand McNally in the Portland area. And I consider those days paying my dues. It’s like a musician that has to play in bars for years before they break out of that and start playing in performance halls. Street maps, they’re necessary but they’re really data-heavy and you know, there’s not much you can do to them. I don’t know, they just don’t interest me that much. Anyway… BCM 37 21
CASE STUDY
Inch by inch HOW ONE URBAN FARM IN CLEVELAND IS GOING THE DISTANCE.
E
by TAYLOR SCHUPP
ach year, hundreds of refugee families around of the photos. Wallis turned around and realized that the the world flee their homelands and arrive small boy in the picture had grown up and was now the in Cleveland, Ohio. Many have never seen teenager standing behind him. the world beyond the refugee camps, born “It was a magical beginning with that family and a magiand raised within their barbed-wire bounds. But this cal beginning with the organization,” says Wallis. apparent end of the road is really just the beginning of From that first moment on, The Refugee Response another journey that, while free from the turmoil at home, continued to grow and find new ways to improve their carries its own set of challenges. services. The most unique improvement to the organi While teaching at a university in Thailand, Ohioan zation was The Refugee Empowerment Agricultural David Wallis began visiting the refugee camps along the Program (REAP). About 80 percent of Cleveland’s refugee border. He gradually built relationships with the Burmese population are qualified agricultural workers. Instead of in these camps. Right before Wallis left to come back to the limiting this group to menial labor or dead-end jobs, they States, he was charged with an important task: finding the created REAP to offer refugees the ability to use the skills right community to deliver care packages to, prepared by they have in a job they actually find fulfilling. his mother, a teacher, and her class. The program takes on two to three refugees each year in “I had this body-sized duffle bag and I lugged it around paid farming positions and works with them on a two-andfor days, wanting to find the right end of the story for her a-half acre plot to adapt existing skills to their new environstudents,” says Wallis, who would join with a local school ment. Produce is then sold to more than ten local restauand distribute supplies, speak with students, share stories rants, including Great Lakes Brewing Company, as well as at farmers’ markets. REAP also holds biweekly workshops and take pictures. After this experience, Wallis and his childhood friend for the larger refugee community on topics like soil and Paul Neundorfer, who had also left Cleveland to teach winter growing. in Thailand, were inspired to come home and help the The ultimate goal is to instill transferrable skill sets that refugees in their own community. However, they quickly will make refugees employable, valuable contributors to realized there was a need for refugee services beyond hous- the regional economy. ing, food and clothing. To fill this gap, Wallis and Neun- The creation of REAP coincided with the development dorfer formed The Refugee Response, an organization that of the Ohio City Farm. Built on an abandoned lot in Cleveoffers tutoring for refugee children while teaching their land’s Near West Side, the farm has now become one of the parents English and helping them navigate America’s nation’s largest contiguous urban farms and is a bright spot social and financial systems. for a neighborhood on the rise. The Refugee Response is The first group they helped was a large Burmese family one of its tenants and through REAP, enables local refugees who had recently resettled in Cleveland. While none of the to thrive, not merely survive. family members spoke English, Wallis was able to commu- Profits from the Ohio City Farm plot make up 30 to nicate with the father in Thai. They shared stories from the 40 percent of The Refugee Response’s operating budget. camps, and Wallis brought a laptop to show them pictures Plans to expand REAP are already in the works, with from his travels. He settled into the couch with a dozen several trainees working on a new edible schoolyard at a local Burmese children huddled close, eyes locked on the screen. charter school. As he scrolled through, the family began recognizing familiar faces, camp leaders, friends. Suddenly, a hand Special thanks to Jennifer UIrich at the International reached around his shoulder and pointed to a kid in one Institute of Buffalo for translation services. 22 BCM 37
photo illustration by RYAN McMULLEN
BCM 37 23
VIEWS
Haunted peripheries OUR SOCIAL CONTRACTS IN RUIN. by SHASTI O’LEARY SOUDANT
B
orders can be arbitrary and fluid things, the results of convention and accretion, subject to the shifting personal geologies of custom, belief, loyalty and circumstance. Symboldependent creatures that we are, the line encapsulates a linkage of points past which we are unable to move without consequence. When a map takes shape, it becomes as much a contract as a guide. Intentional or not, just or not, and whether we like it or not, its clauses define us. We have little choice as to where and how most distinctions are drawn, and we spend our lives, both as individuals and as a species, failing to transcend them. In truth, we have such little understanding of the domains our maps represent that we get lost all the time, even in our own backyards. Alfred Korzybski, a scholar who initiated the field of General Semantics, and theorized that humans are limited by what we know through our nervous systems and our languages, made the now-famous assertion that “The map is not the territory,” indicting the continuous mistake of confusing our models of reality with reality itself. For instance, longitude and latitude, those critical components that comprise our “system of the world,” are not intrinsic to the Earth, but manufactured guides that make sense of our passing. We mark time and distance with abstraction to orient ourselves, laying down hopeful breadcrumbs to help us find our ways through the chaos, back into the safe, welcoming arms of our tribes. While we depend on tribal affinities for safety, they also set limits on our capacities to love, trust and feel empathy. The lines we cross from one social status to another, one neighborhood to another, one culture to another, are rarely literal marks drawn in bold colors onto solid surfaces for our benefit. Often, we have no way of knowing where a line is until we find ourselves on the other side of it, suddenly alone and afraid. In the Age of Information, negotiating social terrain has become the apotheosis of human navigation, and mistakes 24 BCM 37
have proved dangerous. Unintentional transgressions occur often in these liminal spaces, and the punishments inflicted on trespassers fall far outside the purviews of proportional response. Witness the rise in online bullying and its heartbreaking results. It appears that the private meridians we carry within ourselves, the demarcations of our personal space and internal territories are proving the trickiest to patrol and maintain. Disastrous consequences await the unwary traveler. Sometimes, we find ourselves cruelly and abruptly deported out of our comfort zones, due to factors beyond our control. Small twists of fate have a nasty way of turning into full-blown twisters, and their capricious winds can lay waste to the most deliberately laid foundations. Maps are of little use when your world has turned upside down. For instance, many Americans have found themselves torn from their moorings in the last decade. A sudden descent into poverty is devastating, but consider those who have lived with it their entire lives. The abyss takes all comers, but those of us who are new to it lack a very basic understanding, and find it difficult to ask for help from those who speak poverty fluently. We, the newest victims of an increasingly violated social contract, point to our rightful places on the map with despair: “There! There is where I am supposed to be! I could have been a contender!” Within the iconic perimeter of these United States, the map has indeed become the territory, a powerful fiction superimposed upon the land, involving us all in its plot. In a depression, or a recession, we are not citizens, but characters, thrust helpless upon a gigantic stage, tasked to conquer adversity with the most American of qualities: our legendary rugged individualism and indomitable gumption. If our bootstraps should tear from the pulling, and we fail to triumph, may we no longer call ourselves “Real Americans”? Relegated to the shadows behind the scenery, are we then made to do nothing but turn the cranks and pull the chains and run the spotlights to make the stars of the America Show glow bright, front and center? The relentless competition for that rarefied island of light is throwing us all into darkness. To paupers in an Economy of Attention, the injustice of anonymity and powerlessness endemic to a life lived on the margins of poverty and racial inequality can give rise to a certain type of anger that is partially appeased by schadenfreude: How we love to watch the stars fall from the sky, for we are lit briefly by the flares of their glorious wakes, our dignities rekindled. What makes us jostle so for supremacy? Why the persistent push for expanded turf by coloring our maps outside
illustration by TIM STASZAK
Safety is not what we think it is, and it is teeming with ghosts. the lines? Why not attend to the benefit of our neighbor across the hedge as we would to our own, instead of growing those bushes so thick and high as to blot out their sun? Why must Our Tribe be better, stronger, faster, richer than Your Tribe? Is our internal sense of self-worth so fragile and anemic that it is unable to sustain itself outside of the aegis of constant comparison? Reliance on outdated maps, and the rejection of foreign ideas and misunderstood customs, robs us of skills and resilience that can only be learned and developed in the unexplored. Instead, we shred our social contracts and clump for safety with like minds. By driving ourselves into the centers of our herds in order to guard against incursion, we consign our most vulnerable to the edges, using them as shields, hence rendering ourselves utterly insulated, blind and bloodied by their sacrifice, muffled by the very safety we think it has bought us. Safety is often not what we think it is, and it is teeming with ghosts. So much of what we seek when venturing outside of our comfort zones involves the identification of common ground, the dirt that lies beneath all of our feet. From this, we may one day be able to fashion a system of beneficial exchange and unambiguous translation. We all need the same things to thrive. We can subscribe to the idea that “good fences make good neighbors,� but how tall does that hedge really need to be? Can we forge better relationships
with those on the other side of it if we grow it just high enough to protect our sense of agency, but not so towering as to be forbidding? There’s a strange irony to the fact that we sometimes get along better with the neighbors whose fence is tall enough that we have to rise up onto our tiptoes to see across it, rather than the folks whose every move we can observe through a short chain-link fence. Ultimately, borders are important. Cultivating the patience, humility and understanding to cross a given line without aggression is to acknowledge its validity as a legitimate boundary. The simple act of reaching across a fence to shake hands can create an echo of kindness that reverberates outward and nourishes the community, much as the act of reaching across a table to feed an incapacitated loved one nourishes the soul. This may be the path to one day traversing all borders freely, without being worried for our safety, our identity or our pride. A society is a fragile construction, and the paper onto which our maps are so delicately drawn is more fragile still. We must somehow strengthen these contracts with one another, understand our differences better and rededicate ourselves to protecting the variety that is so vital to a healthy organism. We must be willing to throw out the lovely but obsolete maps that would hem us in, and with patient, familiar hands, redraw new ones in which all roads lead to home. BCM 37 25
From everyday essentials to your favorite suit or dress, nobody does it like URBAN VALET! Call us at 716-885-4351, or if it’s easier, visit us at MyUrbanValet.com to schedule your FREE pick-up/delivery. Just specify the location of your pickup and we'll return the items on your scheduled delivery date. We’re about delivering more than perfectly pressed clothes... Look good! Feel good!
We’re as close as your front door! 716-885-4351 I MyUrbanValet.com
TEA IN THE LEAVES Curl up on the porch for a cozy cup of tea as autumn chills the air and paints the trees. Make reflection a daily ritual with a handcrafted gift of gratitude for a friend or yourself.
Milky Chai Teapot and Cup HANDCRAFTED IN NEPAL
5596 Main Street Williamsville - 716.810.9333
Use this logo for reductions only, do not print magenta. Do not reduce this logo more than 35%. Magenta indicates the clear area, nothing should print in this space. You may reduce the logo to 30% without the tag and strap lines. Color of Wood Block Motif critical match to Pantone 1805. Letters print Pantone Process Black.
williamsville.tenthousandvillages.com
Nativity and ornament unveiling Wednesday, October 15th. Bring in this ad to receive 20% OFF one item. Offer valid at participating stores until 12/31/14. Not valid with other discounts, purchase of gift cards, Oriental rugs or Traveler’s Finds.
In the Shadow of the Sacred Heart Story by JENNIFER CONNOR
Photos by HARPER BISHOP
Place does not lie passively in the ground nor is its action limited to announcing itself from a highway sign. It crawls up inside of us and informs us as to where and how we will stand and move in the world. I can talk back at it, I can run away from it, only to find out that I have taken it with me. I have been in Buffalo just two years now and I am a product of a time in which people move around. I have lived on the East Coast, the West Coast, briefly on the Gulf Coast and now I live on the shores of the Great Lakes. There are some things you can learn about place from moving around and there is a lot more of knowing what you can’t know. As in: I have learned that you don’t know a place until you have lived there for a really long time. I have been here for two years, and I see the layers, and I am humbled, completely humbled, by people who have lived here and who bear the memories of their forebears, and so I try to listen. There are a few kinds of listening that have served me. There is formal listening, as in school or on tours. There is the informal listening of stories from porches and street corners and dinner tables. And last, there is an atmospheric listening: the wind in the silver maples, the float of children’s voices, or the deep silence and resonance of a long abandoned church, interpolated with the coos and warbles of pigeons who, like the lilies of the field and the sparrow, do not worry for their shelter, because they are sheltered under the beautiful and derelict auspices of Sacred Heart. All of these types of listening have their place in this story.
28 BCM 37
BCM 37 29
30 BCM 37
If, as The Little Prince says, we do not see but with the heart, then it must also be that we cannot hear without it either. It makes sense that Sacred Heart would occupy a central place in this story. I can imagine that Sacred Heart itself may be listening—to the tours that come through; to the generation upon generation of children who have played in its shadows and the adults whose roots are anchored there; and to the whispers on the wind coming from downtown developers. Sacred Heart is the second stop on the Tour de Neglect, a bike tour which founder David Torke describes as an effort to highlight the criminal neglect of architectural treasures on the East Side of Buffalo. I join the tour at Hotel Lafayette early on a Saturday. All is quiet, just a few folks on bikes, bright blue sky shining over the canyon of downtown buildings, the colors crisp and clear. At the hotel they are beginning preparations for a wedding; we will arrive back here three hours later in time to see the bride emerge. It is an ideal summer morning, refreshing now and with the promise of heat. This group has some nice bikes—a Bianchi, a Fuji, handlebar tape, bike gloves, clip-in shoes; we are well set up. We mingle and introduce and wait a few minutes out of consideration for Buffalo time and then Torke rounds us up. He draws out our route on my map and I note that we are riding entirely outside the inset box demarcating downtown. “That’s what this tour is,” David tells me. “Out of the green zone—taking most people out of their comfort zone.” David is not sure how many of these tours he has done. “Maybe a couple a year since 2007—I could say 30,” says David. His tour initially began as a real-estate pitch: “Saturday morning meet-ups at the cafe at Delta Sonic geared towards buying in to save a house,” with “hand-holding” to cross what he calls “the psychic Berlin wall”—Main Street. He immediately names as one of his “favorite things I’ve ever done” how he “stitched together” the deal that allowed Wilson Farms, a family farm on the East Side, to acquire their land from the city. City planner and co-conspirator Chris Hawley joins us and after a few more logistics, we set out. Even eight bikes stretch out enough to look like a sizeable group. We ride Previous: The Sacred Heart Cathedral, Emslie Street. Left: Velma Holt, in her Bristol Street home. Next: Neighborhood boys out on their bikes.
down Broadway Street and turn right onto Emslie Street and pull over to the sidewalk. There are still no people around. We stop by the vacant lot next to an abandoned church that towers over us, a cathedral in my estimation, though I am not sure what determines a cathedral. The sharp light casts every weed in the lot and texture of stone in relief. And it’s not just a church. Church complexes of a bygone era typically included the land, school, rectory, convent and outbuildings. Around the base of this shuttered church complex are sleepy streets of modest and well-kept homes. St. Ann’s was built by hand in 1878 by German parishioners. Her interior, which contains 35 Bavarian glass windows, an ornate statuary and an 1895 pendulum clock are now indefinitely cloistered and no longer under threat of destruction due to a reprieve from Rome. David toured the “clockworks that feel medieval, like entering a time warp” with Buffalo State professor and stalwart defender of St. Ann’s, Marty Ederer, who suddenly appears striding towards us from the enormous brick convent to the rear of the church. Marty greets us enthusiastically and describes the process of winning a ruling from the Vatican to maintain the church as a place of worship. Marty is devoted to saving St. Ann’s and has dedicated a great deal of time and energy to this struggle. In the face of neglect, he cares, a lot. I ask him what parishioners remain in the neighborhood and he replies: “We have to give up the idea of parish being territorial. There is nothing wrong with being a destination church.” Someone asks him what he thinks the chances of saving St. Ann’s are. He pauses and then tells us he has no idea. “If you are praying people, pray for us,” Marty says. “It’s like Charles the Fifth said: I came, and God conquered.” Someone chimes in: “But the Turks didn’t think so.” He laughs. “That’s true,” Marty says. He wishes us well on our tour and leaves to finish his unofficial caretaker duties at the massive convent building, which is sealed, as is the school complete with rollerskating rink on the top floor. Our chance meeting with Ederer makes clear to me the inherent tension of preservation. Here is a thoughtful and intelligent person who, in the face of neglect, cares deeply and is putting his care into action. Place and people meet most obviously in the form of buildings. It is meeting point materialized and where they no longer meet, we find neglect. When the German parishioners lived nearby, BCM 37 31
the structure itself represented an incredible conversation with their place, a conversation crafted by hand, with the sacred. Now most parishioners do not live nearby, and the conversation of this place and people has changed. The next such building is down Emslie Street. “This is one of my favorite streets in the city. You’ll see about five examples of different architectural styles of houses. It’s like archeological layers,” David tells us. It is about 10:30 a.m., and whereas Broadway was pretty deserted, mostly a cinder block building and vacant lot, Emslie’s porches are full of people who look at us riding by and wave or say hello. I think I can safely say that every person on the porch or sidewalk is black, and every person on a bike is white. Some of us cyclists wave and smile. Dave greets people as we pass. Trees shade our route and the small front yards have flower gardens, statues and mottoes attached to porch rails. We stop and lay our bikes down on the steps of another grand-dame of an edifice, with weeds spouting from cracks high up in the facade. The tour today is an exercise for the neck, to crane, to peer upwards. “Dave! It’s block party day!” A man approaches, smiling warmly, taking David’s hand. Simultaneously a swarm of four kids ride up on bikes from another direction. “Tonight, six o’clock, we’ll have a parade for the kids, food, music; then later on in the night more stuff for adults.” Dale’s invitation has an air of ambassadorship. “Have you been in this church before?” another tour participant asks the boys. They have not been inside and they join us, tentatively. (I hope that we are not getting them in trouble.) I would guess that this is the sort of dangerous abandoned building that children would be specifically banned from entering, and with good reason. We file down the alley to the open side doors, under feathery ailanthus, the tree of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The high windows are smashed. The roof is open in one quadrant. Pigeons swoop and coo and their droppings are everywhere. All pews are removed, and red plush cushions are hilled up in the middle. Random trash, some thrown, some artfully arranged, a thick layer of plaster dust where the sacristy might have been and in the center of the white dust, an open leather suitcase. We scatter to corners; the boys peer into the dark chambers behind the altar where the floor has rotted. They pose for photographs on the altar. It most distinctly reminds me of my visit to a postKatrina elementary school in the Lower Ninth Ward. 32 BCM 37
The doors to the school were also wide open. Everywhere was the evidence of children, their absence highlighted, whereas here there is no context for the children who now wander around looking and think, What? Why would adults leave a place to exist in such a condition? When I revisit the church later, Avier, seven years old, looks up at facade, the plywood on the doors, the broken glass, and asks, “Did a bomb go off? No, the walls are still standingit wasn’t a bomb. Why is it like this?” Outside on the steps again I ask the boys what they think. They answer promptly: “Smells like doo-doo.” I ask them if they think it should be fixed, and they again answer promptly: of course it should, because it obviously took so much to build it, and it should not just be left to rot. What would they do with it? I ask and one boy says: Boys and Girls Club; another suggests using it as a school. The Tour de Neglect does not end at Sacred Heart and Bristol Street, of course, though this ultimately became my destination. We crossed under the Belt Line, the commuter and freight rail that used to ring the city, and continue on. We learn much more history, information; we pass through the shadows of many more such grand and decrepit buildings and down lanes of Morning Glories and Queen Anne’s Lace. Towards the end of the tour, hot and tired, a couple of us stop at a yard sale and lemonade stand after a woman watching the ride go by calls out, “Hey! What is this?” We gratefully drink down several glasses of mango lemonade and then tell her that we are on the Tour de Neglect, visiting abandoned properties. Tiarra, 28, is affronted. “The first couple of times I saw these groups go by on bikes, I thought they were just on a tour of Buffalo, something I could be proud of. But a tour of neglect?” Tiarra says. I ask her what she would take people on a tour of and she immediately responds: “Historic landmarks like the Underground Railroad, the Apollo on Jefferson, MLK Park that they just fixed up so kids can go there now, even Bailey, for East Side culture.” Her niece and nephew are listening to her intently. I ask her what she would do with these abandoned properties, what types of cultural assets she feels would benefit her neighborhood, and she is stymied for a second. Then it comes to her: wrong question. “Honestly, what I want to see is black-owned business, point-blank, period.” Others at her yard sale chime in to
I can see that a lot is wrong. I am curious, too, about what is right and I am also eager to place these buildings in the context of people and their stories. say that they too feel the sting of these neglected properties and want attention brought to the issue, want to see them remedied. Torke’s suggestion, as it is throughout this tour, is a “pragmatic mothballing for future reuse. It is never too late; everything can be fixed eventually.” He talks about Sacred Heart’s convoluted property transactions, various owners and liens and responsible parties, and then about the disastrous one-two punch of white flight and urban renewal. Sacred Heart was also victim to a massive propane explosion in 1983, as well as a storm in 2008 that brought down the school, which has since been removed. Later he reiterates, about Sacred Heart and the other sites we visit: “This is what happens to cultural assets. If this [were] on the West Side of Buffalo, in South Buffalo, on Elmwood, it would not be permitted. There would be public outcry, it would be sealed, or sold, or turned into condos. It speaks volumes about what is wrong.” I can see that a lot is wrong. I am curious, too, about what is right and I am also eager to place these buildings in the context of people and their stories. When I return later I am able to hear these stories of place and relationship that represent a complex set of shifting lines that define who is who, who can cross, and who is inside or outside. When we laid our bikes down on the steps of Sacred Heart, I did not know that we laid them down on one of those lines. Sacred Heart is the listening heart at the center of many people’s stories and exists as a physical manifestation of these shifting lines which may be invisible to the naked eye but whose consequences are not. Zoomed out, the border looks like Main Street. Zoom in, cross the center line and suddenly what at first appeared to be a solid mass has many parts within. At night I return for the block party. Dale mentioned that many alumni of the closed parish schools will be present and I want to meet the people who live in the shadow of the church. It turns out that I also was called to go there to meet some of the most welcoming people I have met so far in Buffalo. First I watch the impressively serious teenagers of the Diva and Drill Team perform a series of routines while proud friends and family applaud and document. Dale
Holt, Torke’s acquaintance, welcomes me. We walk up Bristol Street under the shade of massive sycamores. On the way, he pauses to compare knuckle scars with an old friend and they reminisce about Sister Eunice, a former teacher at the school at Sacred Heart. He introduces me all the way down the block, until we arrive at the stoop where his mother, 97-year-old Velma Holt, holds court in front of her two-story, single-family home. “Sit down and watch the people passing by,” she invites me. I join her cluster and then, in a little while, her dinner table in the side yard, laden with ribs, barbecue chicken, baked beans, potato salad, New Orleans-style sweet tea, all of it cooked by her son, all of it delicious. Down the block, people stand, sit, eat in side yards; teenagers collect food to bring in to grandparents in the house; children bounce in the bounce house; people dance at a couple of dance areas. There is a moment of excitement when the kids accidentally bring down the entire water slide. An idyllic breeze rustles the leaves in the big old sycamores. “My son went to that school,” Velma tells me. She is petite, alert and calls me Honey. “When I first went down there and knocked on the door, the priest told me, ‘You have to go to the colored church.’ ‘The colored church? Where is that?’ I asked. ‘Michigan Avenue,’ he said.” Velma turned theological on him and after testifying to their same-held beliefs, told him in her kind and humorous but pointedly honest manner that he would not be likely to go to heaven if he denied her the chance to go to Mass. When she first started to attend Mass, “No one would sit in the pew with me, either side.” Her neighbor Bruce Beyer interjects: “But you probably nursed the priest on his deathbed.” “I did! At the end he was in Buffalo General and I went to visit him and he said, ‘Velma, do you forgive me?’ ‘Honey,’ I said, ‘I forgave you long ago.’” She seems to have forgiven her mostly white neighbors of the ’50s as well, assuring me that they were all friendly to her, eventually. She ended up working for the diocese for 60 years as a cook and brought Dale to work with her when he was a baby in a basket in the kitchen. She sent her children to Sacred Heart school and made sure they all went on to higher education as well as studying her profession of cooking for a practical sideline. Her son Dale is now a sought-after professional chef. He has also followed BCM 37 33
in his father’s shoes as a musician, beginning as an organist at Sacred Heart. Velma’s husband, George, was a jazz trumpeter who played with the Lennie Lewis Band, along with a number of Duke Ellington’s musicians after his band broke up. He played locally, nationally and internationally with several other bands, eventually holding down a decade-long gig at the Anchor Bar. During dinner, Mrs. Holt’s friend Jane Irving sits to my left; the dignified Mrs. Irving reminisced about jazz clubs in the area, the Moonglow and Little Harlem, where they could go see the pantheon of great musicians, all for $3 at the door and a $1 drink to stay all night. They all agree that the loss of Little Harlem was tragic and it is an interesting contrast to their reaction when I ask them about the nearby church. Maybe it is too big or too much out of their hands or just a fact they have long accepted, maybe they don’t want to think about it tonight, but everyone I ask at the block party speaks in a pretty matter-of-fact manner about what they consider to be an inevitable demolition that will be expensive. No one I talk to believes it can be saved, though many people express the sentiment that all responsible parties should be held accountable: the city, the Catholic Diocese, and the current owner. Before I go Mrs. Holt takes my hand. “I love you,” she says. “Come back.” Most people don’t tell that to someone they just met and even if they did, they wouldn’t sound sincere. I think a long and good life must lead to a belief in love such that it is a real and active part of the everyday, and I think that the sage elders know it. I do go back to talk to Mrs. Holt. She doesn’t answer so I leave a message with her neighbors and then end up talking to them as a thunderstorm tears through. Mac Wells has lived on Bristol Street since 1957, and his wife, Marsha, since the ’80s. Their house is similar to Mrs. Holt’s, with a front porch and empty lots marking where neighboring houses used to stand. They agree to share more of the history of Bristol Street with me. In loving detail Mac, or Puddin’, as he is known, maps out a neighborhood diverse and creative in resources. The creativity seems to persist to the present day: the annual block party and neighborhood reunion is a huge affair drawing hundreds of people from in and out of town and funded entirely out-of-pocket, which seems to be a block tradition. Mac describes how they pooled pocket money 34 BCM 37
as children to buy sports equipment that was kept at his house, close to the lot behind the fire station where they played. “Kickball, dodge ball, baseball, everything. Every kid could play, didn’t matter if you had the toys or not because it was all right here.” He draws intersections in the air with his finger and names the businesses at each corner, taking me on a virtual tour of his childhood home: “Now if you go out to Williams and turn right…,” or “This is back on Broadway...” On the list were Loblaws grocery, Cadets’ Cleaners, bars like the BonTon or the Gitdown Lounge, the Simon Pure brewery, and the recently shut-down Boxy Pizza, clearly a favorite. Notable were the Bond Bakery, where a loaf of bread cost a dime and whose sweet smells wafted through the streets, and Zeldner’s Wild Game Store, where, as the name says, wild game hung from the ceiling and a variety of fresh greens jostled for space with more traditional cuts of meat. “Everything was so fresh. We didn’t have to go anywhere—the neighborhood was packed,” says Mac. And that’s not to mention 20-cent tickets at the Plaza movie theater; the red chrome counter at the Garden of Sweets; Byrd pool hall, where if you lose, you pay; and the variety of activities for children at the P.A.L. at Willard Park Complex. But the stores were not the only local economy. People helped each other. The kids shared equipment. Mac’s father shared vegetables from the garden out back or baked goods from Blue Seal Bakery, where he worked. Mac weaves a picture for me of his home without hesitation, with complete familiarity and surety. He can name, clearly, where he is from, what patch of earth, and what covers every part of it. He can name, too, where he could and could not go. His house literally marked the edge of the black and white neighborhood, and he knew people and went to school with people in both directions. However, after third grade he left Sacred Heart, which had tuition and a uniform that could look like a target if you stood in the wrong place. He moved over to the all-black Public School 75. He lived across from the fire station which did not hire AfricanAmericans, which was also true of most middle-income, public sector jobs. By the end of the ’60s, a new layer of lines determined Mac and Marsha’s movements—the territories of gangs such as the Mad Dogs, Pythons, Slaves of Soul and Manhattan Lovers. “Females were allowed to go anywhere but males were not,” Marsha tells me. “We went to the Apollo, we didn’t
have to be worried about gangs jumping us.” At that time the Howard Street neighborhood was known as Dodge City. In spite of the overt threat of violence, Mac lit up when he remembered Live at Seventy-Five, the selforganized basketball tournament at Public School 75 that all the gangs sent their best players to. “We got bleachers from all over, painted them, set up a court and painted a big basketball in the middle that said ‘Live at Seventy-Five,’” says Mac. “You say that phrase to anyone who was there, they’ll remember.” Mac tells me other personal family history embedded in these streets, his story dramatically backlit by lightning and ominous clouds that pass outside. Both Marsha and I are jumpy from the thunder crashes. Throughout the stories Mac and Marsha interrupt each other to fill out a story or give context. Marsha grew up not far away, in the Perry projects, yet she says repeatedly, “I never knew a place like this block existed. Right here.” Mac chimes in: “Paradise in the ’hood.” Marsha’s family grew up relatively well-off in the projects. “We used to make fun of the projects, but really the people there had the good jobs,” Mac says. When Marsha’s family decided to move out and went to tour a home in a white neighborhood of Buffalo, neighbors burned a cross on the lawn. I get to hear about how Mac and Marsha met: “We talked all about who we were, our
family history, where we were from, and it was beautiful.” What I did not mention earlier: the block party is also a celebration of their tenth wedding anniversary. Before I leave I ask about Sacred Heart. “I’m gonna hate when that comes down,” Mac says, and shakes his head. “It’s like a wall, protects us from the wind coming off the lake, the snow, from Jefferson Avenue, from people coming through. And what will they build after?” They see me off as graciously as they greeted me. It is pure chance that we return to schedule a portrait session with Mrs. Holt on her birthday. She has been receiving visitors and taking calls all day—all week, probably—and receives us warmly nonetheless. With grace. And generosity. And though my story is written, of course there is more. Her stories cannot help but unfold, this time stories of how she has enculturated a stewardship of her neighborhood that is now reaching through generations. The unfolding continues within as well. It is the mystery of stories and deep listening, for the lines they draw can either entangle us in the complication of an indelible past or lead us onwards, drawing maps that unfold as we need them. BCM 37 35
Now R eNtiNg Wayne & Waldorf
Modern Living in a Historical Residence
The History of Wayne & Waldorf The Wayne & Waldorf apartments were designed in the late 1800’s. Architect W.H. Archer, who also designed the Trinity Episcopal Church, at 371 Delaware Ave., originally designed these buildings with Italian style exterior and projecting bay windows. The plans for this historic landmark and the photos of the architectural drawing above were published in the article titled “The New Waldorf ” in The Buffalo Courier (now known as The Buffalo News) in January 1897.
716.220.8486 SinatraAndCompany.com 617 Main Street #350 Buffalo, New York 14203
• Near Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus • Gated parking • Hardwood floors • Stainless steel appliances • Bike rack • Laundry in building • Rents from $1,200 per month
Come inside and stay awhile.
Perfect for before and after the theater, art gallery, concert or sporting event. Monday Wine Nights • No BYOB Corkage Fee in Dining Room • Monthly Wine Dinners
Lunch Monday - Friday • Dinner Seven days a week 888 Main St. Buffalo, NY 14202 • 716.885.1885 • cocobuffalo.com
IN MOTION WATCH
LIVE, FREE
See TED x Buffalo 2014 as it happens on your computer, tablet, phone, or at the downtown Buffalo/Erie County Public Library. Watch videos of all speakers after the event at TEDXBUFFALO.COM.
FACEBOOK.COM/TEDXBUFFALO TWITTER.COM/TEDXBUFFALO INSTAGRAM.COM/TEDXBUFFALO
38 BCM 37
Borders Photos by BLOCK CLUB
BCM 37 39
40 BCM 37
BCM 37 41
42 BCM 37
BCM 37 43
A Porous Border Story by WOODY BROWN
Photos by CANDACE CAMUGLIA
“We like to play hockey, have kids, and grow old,” croons Jian Ghomeshi of Moxy Früvous on “Gulf War Song,” the Canadian band’s perennially timely hymn about the absurdity of war. The line, like almost every lyric Moxy Früvous ever recorded, is tongue-in-cheek. It is at once a bit of self-deprecation and a sincere indictment of armed conflict, the goals of which are many and varied and universally opposed to that summary of the mellow, bourgeois Canadian Dream. The band, which never achieved national success in the United States, enjoyed significant local popularity in Buffalo. Ghomeshi is now the host of the immensely successful arts magazine show “Q” on CBC Radio One, the highest-rated show in the 10 a.m. timeslot in CBC history. He and the other three members of Moxy Früvous hail from Thornhill, Ont., a small suburb of Toronto that, apart from its proximity to the largest city in Canada, is generally representative of the villages and townships that dot Southern Ontario. The band was quirky, clever and aggressively Canadian. Rush Limbaugh (“a dose of P.T. Barnum/with a Mussolini twist”), W.P. Kinsella, the Michigan Militia and trips to the grocery store were all equally deserving of the rhyming, syncopated Früvous treatment. In fact, “Cross-Border Shopping (The Sabre Dance),” a song they first performed in Buffalo, concerns a way of life with which many citizens of Western New York are intimately familiar.
The exchange rate has not been consistently favorable to the States since the turn of the decade, but before that, and especially before the turn of the millennium, Saturday morning trips to Zellers, Sobeys, Loblaws and Ikea were common for families in Buffalo. They are the reason that I know racinette means “root beer.” Canadians, too, crossed the Peace Bridge to shop in the United States, though they did so in order to avoid taxes, not to capitalize off of the exchange rate. Drinks are duty-free, smokes are duty-free This is gonna be quite a shopping spree Toys and gasoline, nylon, neoprene Toilet paper and soap Start packing the car We’re leaving today I’m gonna buy a ton of it In old New York The Peace Bridge is the way most of us cross the CanadaUnited States border, which, at 5,251 miles, is the longest international border in the world. The American cities and towns that lie on that border, especially those along the Great Lakes, have been the subject of an immense amount of scholarship. But what of Canada? We decided to hop the fence and do a little exploratory fact-finding. How are our cultural landscapes similar, and how are they just as foreign as our two flags indicate?
46 BCM 37
The Peace Bridge has been the subject of decades of strife. Traffic on the bridge is constantly delayed, often for hours, which stymies cross-border trade and tourism. In addition, local, state and national environmental groups from both countries have pointed out for years the adverse effect that millions of idling trucks and cars have on the sensitive local ecosystem. The Great Lakes, especially Lake Erie, are already heavily polluted in many areas, a fact to which anyone who has ever dodged seaborne syringes or buzzing piles of dead fish can attest, and the concern is that the straw that will break the Niagara River’s faunal back might be the continued existence of the Peace Bridge itself. If you find yourself sitting in stopped traffic on the Peace Bridge, you may be on your way to one of Canada’s many beaches, almost all of which are (or were until recently) much less disgusting than those within Buffalo and its not exactly pristine environs. You may find yourself thinking that yes, all of this pollution and rust and non-biodegradable trash really is less of an issue on the Canadian side of the equation. The existence of a distinct national difference, a separation of identities, will be confirmed once you reach the Canadian customs booths and see that their stop signs say “STOP / ARRÊT.” As anyone who has ever been to Paris can tell you, this is a specifically Canadian thing—the signs in France just say: “STOP.” It would be misled to see this as just hair-splitting, though. Languages and dialects have a unique status in Canadian culture, whose linguistic politics has a long, often contentious history. And it’s not all a result of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which established several new state borders after Great Britain acquired territory from France. If you drive far enough, you’ll see stop signs written in Abenaki, Cree, Mi’Kmaq, Mohawk, Wendat and Inuit. Americans love a doppelgänger. In film, and in the media generally, Canada is our happier, friendlier, healthier neighbor to the north, a nation that looks a lot like us, speaks our language, for the most part, and yet is different from us. This is why stereotypes of Canadians tend to focus on their accents and their habit of saying “eh” and “sorry.” These are the signposts that function, like the evil Mr. Spock’s goatee, to mark and distinguish the uncanny. Popular American culture would have us believe that Canadians are somehow better in touch with an easier
way of life, what with all of their universal healthcare and general kindness, but also that they are silly or dumb, the nattering nabobs of Niagara Falls. “South Park” has spent many jokes on this dichotomy. We suppose them to be like us, but different. They may enjoy hunting like any good American, but they also name their children things like Gord and Rufus. Michael Moore, in his much lauded, much derided 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” locates in Canada the opposite of the climate of fear that he claims pervades the United States. Our complex, uncanny relationship with Canada has primed us to be receptive to this argument, which at first seems so obviously true as to be self-evident, but which tends to collapse under analysis. In one famous scene, Moore travels over the border and opens several unsuspecting Canadians’ doors, all of which are unlocked. Though this sequence takes place during the day, and though all of the homes shown were occupied by their owners at the time of filming, Moore extrapolates from this that Canadians simply never lock their doors. We are to believe that they are a generous, magnanimous, fearless people, people who may at first appear naïve, but from whom we Americans might stand to learn something. He interviews a man in a restaurant in Toronto about why he does not lock his door. “You think as Americans that the lock is keeping people out of your place,” the man says. “We as Canadians see it more as when we lock the door, we’re imprisoning ourselves inside.” It is also an easy observation to make when you live in Toronto and not, say, Flint, Mich., or in Buffalo. The fact is that Canadians deal with a crime rate that is an order of magnitude lower than our own—2.0 homicides per 100,000 people in Toronto, as opposed to 18.3 in Buffalo and a staggering 54.6 in Detroit—which probably contributes to the fact that they are less afraid of crime, if indeed they are. There’s closer proximity between economic histories— and current realities—of the American and Canadian Rust Belts. Stories of factory closings indicate a familiar picture that is border-blind. In the summer of 2013, the A.O. Smith water heater plant in Fergus, Ont., about 50 miles west of Toronto, closed for good. The facility had been in continuous operation for more than a century and was one of the largest employers in the city. More than 300 people worked at BCM 37 47
48 BCM 37
BCM 37 49
50 BCM 37
BCM 37 51
Canada is our happier, friendlier, healthier neighbor to the north, a nation that looks a lot like us, speaks our language, for the most part, and yet is different from us. the 500,000-square-foot factory, all of whom were summarily laid off on July 1. The average hourly wage of the union workers was $22. Four months later, the Heinz plant in Leamington, 30 miles over the border from Detroit, which had been in operation for 104 years, announced it would close within the year and 740 people would join the scores of Canada’s unemployed. In 2012, Caterpillar closed the ElectroMotive plant in London after its 460 employees rejected 50 percent pay cuts. Prime Minister Stephen Harper had announced on the factory floor in 2008 that Electro-Motive would receive $5 million in tax breaks. In 2010, the plant was sold to Caterpillar. Two years later, the building was empty. This is, of course, also not just a Canadian thing. Buffalo has struggled for decades to fill the rusted, faded carapaces left behind by manufacturers that formerly comprised the vast majority of the local economy. Neither Southern Ontario nor Western New York is particularly wealthy—that is, both have crippling unemployment (a mere 45.9% of the working-age population in London, Ont. has a full-time job), widespread poverty and a general lack of prospects for economic growth in any but the densest metropolitan areas—the money necessary to avoid something like the bankruptcy of Detroit, the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States history, must come from somewhere else. A visitor to Buffalo who decides to drive south on Route 5 will see quite a lot of the skeletons we keep in our regional closet. Hulking grain silos, the giant faded poster of the American flag with the caption “United We Stand” that went up on the side of the abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant after Sept. 11, 2001, half-empty strip malls and shacks selling electronic cigarettes and buying gold, a strip club, long-dead gas stations that still advertise gas for $1.50 a gallon. All of stands as it always has, but older, sun-bleached, a little overgrown. The Regional Municipality of Niagara—Southern Ontario’s “Niagara Region”—on the other hand, with its relatively flat, serene, industry-free landscape, seems hundreds of miles away from the oppressive struggle of life after the death of the industrial juggernaut. In many 52 BCM 37
ways, it is. A visitor on a day’s jaunt across the border is not greeted by the ghosts of the 20th-century’s prosperity. Mostly she will see roads, trees, small stores, maybe a WalMart, maybe a restaurant, maybe the water. Tim Horton’s. In the distance, an abandoned factory will emerge, a shuttered grain elevator, perhaps. These ghosts never leave the Western New Yorker. Southern Ontario simply does not look as badly off as Buffalo does. Part of the reason for this is that, despite its similar pedigree of fleeing companies, it’s not. Canada spends about $24.5 billion Canadian on its military, a number that contrasts starkly with America’s budget of $683.7 billion. Things like health care suddenly seem a lot more affordable when you aren’t concerned with building, say, an aircraft carrier, which costs between $4.5 and $6.2 billion dollars. (The United States has 19, more than half of the aircraft carriers in the world.) We don’t tend to think of Canada as the foreign country that it is—we share too much in common, we look too similar. But there are innumerable differences that define the national border between us, many of which we cannot or will not recognize. Perhaps it is too burdensome to consider the fact that the economic factors we navigate in the American Rust Belt are just as prominent and nonnegotiable in Canada, but they have charted a different course through the changing landscape of the Great Lakes. Though we both call the world’s largest freshwater lakes our home, we have made decidedly different beds for ourselves. Theirs has not been a peerless path, but it is something from which we can learn. Which, fine—who knows? Maybe Canada cannot tell us anything we don’t already know. Who would believe that, though? Only someone who, miraculously, is unimpressed by one of the wealthiest, freest, most educated countries in the world, a country with a diverse population and a rich history, the second-largest country on the globe, whose 31,700 large lakes contain a large portion of the freshwater on Earth. Instead of crossing the bar and comparing notes on our shared crisis, however, it seems that we would rather sit and stew. Sometimes it’s easier to stare at your wrong answers than to ask for help; doing the latter often just reminds you of how little you really know.
BCM 37 53
all yoU NeeD eaTiNg DriNKiNg to know about liviNg in your city worKiNg PlayiNg
SUbSCribe
17. /
$
New (Lower) Price!
38 12 issues a year
Call 1-855-MYSPREE (1-855-697-7733) or visit www.buffalospree.com and click “Subscribe” FREE digital edition for all print subscribers
Now available for: iPhone, iPod, iTouch, iPad, Google Play, & Amazon Marketplace
DowNloaD our new Spree App
*
2 bonus publications
To receive your free digital edition: add your email to your account online at www.buffalospree.com or contact agambacorta@buffalospree.com
www.buffalospree.com
1738 Elmwood Avenue, Suite 103, Buffalo, NY 14207
POETRY
One Nation, Under God by LIZZ SCHUMER
In this issue, we take a step away from short fiction and venture into an experimental form of poetry known sometimes as wiki-poetry. It utilizes a formula in which a single keyword—here, both Politics and Religion—is defined, by Wikipedia, in the first paragraph, and followed by a paragraph of literary response. The next definition is then taken from subsequent keywords in the Wikipedia entry, forming a thread of related but different definitions. The rest of the poem alternates between factual definition and fictional interpretation. The effect is an interruptive, disjointed, yet still coherent meditation on a theme; its format is dependent on our expectations of narrative borders and guidelines, pushing them— and you, the reader—into new territory. At times it feels disconnected, and other times, uncannily, ironically entwined. These two pieces explore a dialogue about two unavoidable boundaries in our lives, and contemplates the nature of their confinement.
56 BCM 37
illustrations by JULIE MOLLOY POLITICS is the practice and theory of influencing other people on a global, civic or individual level. More narrowly, it refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance— organized control over a human community, particularly a state. Prop 8 scrawled across the screen, men in suits with conservative hair, mouths in puppet motion. Mary Ellen smoothed her skirt with tarantula hands. “I just don’t see why you’re so worked up about it. It isn’t like you’re going to get married.” Her mouth, King Elizabeth at the gallows. “And if you were, well, there’d be plenty of time to work that out.” Hens cackle more sweetly, and crows. “Girls like you aren’t exactly knocking down your doors.” My cheeks inflamed, I tasted iron in my mouth, which tastes like rebellion, like blood. A state is an organized community living under one government. The term state is also applied to federated states that are members of a federal union, which is the sovereign state. “It’s the way things are. That’s why we have a government,” she purred. Like laces on boots with zippers up the back, Mary Ellen was all for show. All bark and no bite, unless she came untied, and then watch her snap. Grown-up daughters don’t throw stones at the glass houses they grew up in. I nodded, my mouth filling with bit-tongue. “Its not like I’m going to get married, except I don’t have a choice, do I, anyway,” I muttered. “State of the union is: it sucks,” I’d said and spat on the floor. And got suspended for four days. She of the soft hands and butterfly clips, the sharp tongue and leather boots, she caught my eye and held it in her mouth, curled at the corners like her hair. Dumpsters, she’d whispered, and we went for cigarettes at bathroom break. Goosebumps rose before, she reached my neck, the protest chants she taught me on my mouth more than her lips, because I didn’t know how to believe it. And we made up new worlds without lines between right and wrong. We didn’t know any better, then. The executive is the part of government that has sole authority and responsibility for the daily administration of the state. The executive branch executes or enforces the law. “—And I mean really, what has he done for me lately? All we hear is ‘Gay this,’ ‘Gay that,’ and they haven’t even looked for that plane,” Mary Ellen ranted. “Those are human lives we’re talking about, just floating around out there, like that TV show where they’re all on the island. Total anarchy, which just goes to show you.” “Human lives we’re talking about,” I echoed, but the man on TV couldn’t hear me. The mother in the room couldn’t hear me.
Moral responsibility is the status of morally deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment for an act or omission, in accordance with one’s moral obligations. She was my first. I didn’t know what to call it, the rising of the tide. Didn’t know that the feeling between my legs, like I had to go to the bathroom, meant what I really wanted was to go to the bathroom with Her. But man lies with a woman, after marriage we can’t have, because it’s a sin. So I swallowed her name, kept it between my heart and my stomach where feelings belong. Deciding what if anything is morally obligatory is a principal concern of ethics. “—The problem is, no one has any morals anymore, not like when we were kids. Used to be, gay meant happy. No one’s happy now. It’s all ‘eff this’ and ‘eff that,’ and I don’t know what-all I’m supposed to show the grandkids, not like I’m getting any. Are you even listening to me?” “Yes. No one’s happy now.” Desert in philosophy is the condition of being deserving of something, whether good or bad. The word is related to justice, revenge, blame, punishment and many topics central to moral philosophy, also “moral desert.” “—It took him two hours to die, you know. And I think that’s just awful. I mean, they need better methods, don’t they. Never took anyone two hours to die by decapitation, but of course you can’t say that.” Justice is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, religion, equity and fairness. Ethics, sometimes known as philosophical ethics, ethical theory, moral theory and moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct, often addressing disputes of moral diversity. “Race doesn’t exist anymore, I don’t think. I don’t see color. I just think everyone needs to count their blessings.” She touched my arm with fingertips rimmed in porcelain white. “I just think of all the good Lord’s blessed me with.” My stomach churned as the TV moved on to another world, another world that didn’t seep into hers like mine. In philosophy, action has developed into a sub-field called philosophy of action. Action is what an agent can do. Which is why they created the FBI, the CIA. Which is why James Bond appeals to us, because we want to believe there are powers that can subvert the government from the inside. We want to believe we have power, even while we’re trying to destroy it, even while we’re afraid to step outside of what we know we have. BCM 37 57
RELIGION is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence. The rhythm of prayer soothed me, when I was a kid, and it all felt like a mantra: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. The priest’s eyes widened when I told him that’s the catch. Maybe we already have what we’re praying for. Maybe heaven is here, and hell, and we decide which one. A cultural system is the interaction of different elements of culture. While a cultural system is quite different from a social system, sometimes both systems together are referred to as the sociocultural system. I was never a kid who followed the rules. I drew a coyote with a horn and it looked better that way, but I still got an F on the test. See also: why volleyball requires a net, even though hitting it is illegal. There are rules to everything, but a person’s got to learn the first rules to learn the next ones. That’s what school is for, see also, learning how to be what they’ve told you. Which is why love is a sin, except God. See also: worship only what you can’t see. A major concern in the social sciences is the problem of order. One way that social order has been theorized is according to the degree of integration of cultural and social factors. I was born in the shape of a paradox, like most little boys. But I never outgrew it, butting against my reality, that kept me away from the safety of society, where I might have blended in. I didn’t fit, so I grew out of my clothes and into a world that wouldn’t hold me, and that’s where I learned the secret: that we’re all bound feet, except we forgot how to escape before we learned it was an option. Lace felt better than leather, on the skin that God gave me, so I took on the hairshirt Job wore. Social system is a central term in sociological systems theory. Minimum requirements for a social system are interaction of at least two personal systems or two persons acting in their roles. She said it will come naturally. Except it didn’t, and I shrank away like it didn’t matter, because it did and I thought lies were what you were supposed to do when you were hurt, to keep the other person guessing. She left with a squeal and my father whooped me for screwing, even though I told him I wasn’t. And he refused to believe me, because what guy has the most popular girl in school over to watch a movie. I admired her hair, I said. I wanted to touch it. To see how it’d been done. Did they make wigs that way? In biology, an organism is any contiguous living system, such as a vertebrate, insect, plant or bacterium. All known 58 BCM 37 34
types of organism are capable of some degree of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development and self-regulation (homeostasis). I wanted to touch her breasts to see what they’d feel like, approximate them in my hands like my chest couldn’t, no matter how many Judy Blume pumps I did. I cursed myself in ways I didn’t understand until I did, and then cursed myself for being something I never wanted, but couldn’t escape. Contiguity is a continuous mass, or a series of things in contact or in proximity. The concept was first set out in the Law of Contiguity (one of Aristotle’s Laws of Association) which states that things that occur near each other in time or space are readily associated. The principle laws of association are contiguity, repetition, attention, pleasure-pain, and similarity. The basic laws were formulated by Aristotle and John Locke. Both philosophers taught that the mind at birth is a blank slate and that all knowledge has to be acquired by learning. Momma always said she’d drive off into the sunset, except the sunset hurt her eyes and she lost her sunglasses somewhere in the birth canal. “I’m happy with the hell I know,” she said, and I think she meant she was afraid to stretch like cats do, their jaws opening until the breaking point us humans only imagine. I was afraid to jump when she said to, and now my feet are cemented into the ground. I stare at myself in the mirror and flutter the eyelashes I don’t have, locked myself away in a drawer full of crystals and lace that wasn’t supposed to be mine. Repetition is the simple repeating of a word, within a sentence or a poetical line, with no particular placement of the words, in order to secure emphasis. This is such a common literary device that it is almost never even noted as a figure of speech. It also has connotations to listing for effect and is used commonly by famous poets such as Philip Larkin.
Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody. Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, 1962
BCM 34 37 59 BCM
Boutique
Shop handmade and shop local at the Western New York Book Art Center Boutique! Doo-dads for discerning artists and olio for ordinary people: ~ handmade letterpress prints ~ high end bookbinding supplies ~ printmaking supplies & decorative papers ~ hundreds of books on bookmaking & design ~ hundreds of unique handmade cards ~ dozens of items from local artists ~ small press poetry and fiction books ~ architecture prints Open Wednesday-Saturday 12pm-6pm! WNYBAC is located at 468 Washington Street, Buffalo, NY 14203. www.wnybookarts.org (716) 348-1430
Shop our Last Minute Panic Holiday Marketplace Dec. 12th from 4-8pm and Dec. 13th from 12-6pm!
60 BCM 37
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
Me Likes You by LAUREN BARNETT
BCM 37 61
DON’T EAT LOCAL.
DEVOUR IT.
a deck of 50 $10 discount cards to locally owned restaurants HOW IT WORKS
1
spend $30 or more on food at a featured restaurant.
2
redeem your city dining card with payment.
3
receive $10 off your bill.
www.citydiningcards.com