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A thanks to Block Club for 40 issues of excellence.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 40 HOME
CONNECT
THE FINAL ISSUE
BRANDING & STRATEGY blockclub.co
14
Issue Contributors
DESIGN & OFFICE BLOG clubhaus.tumblr.com
17
Letter from the Editor
18
The Conversationalists Interview by Ben Siegel Tim Bartlett, general manager of the Lexington Co-op, reflects on 10 years on Elmwood, and a second home on Hertel.
FACEBOOK, TWITTER, VIMEO and INSTAGRAM @blockclub #blockclub #BCM40
22 Living the Dream Case study by Margaret Finan The Buffalo City Mission wants to end homelessness in the City of Buffalo by 2020. And it has a plan to make it happen. 24 The Pilgrim’s Process Essay by Shasti O’Leary Soudant A mother imagines the ideal city for her daughter to call home. 28 Fly Away Home By Chris Hawley Photo by David Torke An avid urban explorer ventures out to discover that sometimes you have to leave home in order to find home.
EDITORIAL & CONTENT ben@blockclub.co
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 blockclub.co ©2015 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.
34 Home Photo essay by Block Club Behind the scenes. 44 The Silent Influence By Jennifer Connor Photos by Max Collins Digging in, looking up, floating through: exploring our urban wilderness.
FPO
Please recycle this issue and pass it along to a friend.
56 The Good Life Short fiction by Brian Mihok A man and his bicycle. 61
Last Encounter Parting words from Block Club magazine.
ABOUT BLOCK CLUB Block Club is a branding and strategy 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. BCM 40 13
ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS
Jennifer Connor pg. 44 Jennifer Connor is a writer, musician and preschool teacher at The Rose Garden. She lives less than a mile from the Niagara River, where she goes to watch the sun set over Canada. She finished this article on Father’s Day, so, this one’s for you, Dad. Chris Hawley pg. 28 Chris Hawley is a city planner and history buff with a strong affinity for his hometown of Buffalo. He went to high school in South Carolina, college at New York University, and returned home about 10 years ago. He works for the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Planning. Margaret Finan pp. 22 Margaret Finan recently moved back to Buffalo from Savannah, Georgia. She occasionally trains other people’s dogs, the happy vestige of one increasingly dusty psychology degree. Her writing has previously appeared in Block Club and The Buffalo News. Brian Mihok
pg. 56 Brian Mihok’s work has appeared in Everyday Genius, 1913, Hobart, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. His novel The Quantum Manual of Style was published in 2013 by Aqueous Books. He is the editor of matchbook, a literary journal.
BLOCK CLUB MAGAZINE EDITORIAL STAFF
PUBLISHER PATRICK FINAN patrick@blockclub.co
EDITOR BEN SIEGEL ben@blockclub.co
CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRANDON DAVIS brandon@blockclub.co
PHOTOGRAPHER STEVE SOROKA steve@blockclub.co
DESIGNER RYAN McMULLEN ryan@blockclub.co
DESIGNER JULIE MOLLOY
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.
julie@blockclub.co
DESIGNER TIM STASZAK tim@blockclub.co
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT MARGARET FINAN maggie@blockclub.co
David Torke
pg. 28 David Torke is a prolific photographer and chronicler of forgotten landscapes of Buffalo and the Rust Belt. Since 2004, he has written and edited fixBuffalo, a blog detailing the collapse and regeneration of Buffalo’s East Side. 14 BCM 39
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER MAX COLLINS PROOFREADER TAYLOR SCHUPP DESIGN INTERN LAURA HOERNER
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THANK YOU FOR 40 DELICIOUS YEARS!
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Home Look around you. Breathe it in. Listen for it. Is this the place you remember? Before it all changed? Before it felt new again, then old again? Before they repainted the walls, dug up the carpet and re-stained the cabinets? Before the sound of little feet, patrolling the perimeter of every room, grew into tree trunks, planting themselves in new yards? Before our fabled memories turned into resurgent nostalgia? Before you were an occupant, and not yet a landowner? Before you had a say, and not just lots to say? Our homes provide us with all that we need in life. Their shelter, a basic human necessity. Their warmth, a comfort and condolence. But beyond the essentials, they do something even greater, oftentimes behind our backs: our homes empower us. The way they open themselves to visitors, letting bodies rest and rejuvinate, congregate and conference, mix and mingle. They’re our breeding grounds, our launching pads, our wake-up calls and our lullabyes. On their walls, we express who we are, displayed for guests and our own reminder. On their floors, we dance in celebration and lay in contemplation. What is this place that we love so much? That confines and incubates us? That drains us by nightfall and charges us by morning? That keeps all of our secrets and accepts no tresspassers? That holds us when we need it and pushes us away when we need it more? If you’re like us, the questions don’t end. There are too many things to learn from, to notice. They surround us. Even the innocuous have a purpose, keeping our spaces clean, our tools fresh, our ship moving. This place is a storyteller’s fantasy, not just for its luscious past, or its more-impressive-by-the-day present, but for its inescapable future. The sense that transformation is both miraculous and inevitable. That today’s art is painted on yesterday’s canvases. That this is a city we want to thrive in. That this community is our home. This has informed our editorial vision since our very first issue, in May 2007. Even when we made improvements and changed formats, we were only refining the question: What is this place?
A lot has changed since we began taking up space on your coffee table and toilet. A lot more remains to change. It will come, in part, from a place of inquiry, of asking the right questions to the right people, of insisiting on answers that make sense. Change is inevitable but growth is not. There is always more to learn. There is always more to do. As we turn the page on the magazine’s chapter here at Block Club, a company that continues on, serving our clients with branding and strategy —and, while we’re at it: as Buffalo turns a page of its own brand book, re-thinking its own brand story, hopefully, with every opportunity—we must think about our stories as strength. The stories that give us strength and the stories that will give others theirs. We must capture what today felt like, what this era stood for. We must plant things that take root, breaking ground and doors and ceilings, alike. We must make beautiful things, and make things beautiful. We must relish these times, in whatever corner of this place you curl up into. We must provide safety for those who don’t have it. We must feel safe with each other. For me, our magazine has been a sanctuary, a safe place to explore the things that I love, with people I love. An ongoing experiment in language, dialogue, rhetoric, color and shape. There’s comfort in this refuge; art, design and creativity need freedom to breathe. This has been my home. This is where I breathe. There are plenty of definitions and interpretations out there. Everyone has their own idea. Of every theme we’ve ever chosen for an issue of this magazine, this is the one that seemed at once simple to grasp and impossible to pinpoint: the perfect perch from which to tell our final stories. And maybe the perch from which you’ll tell yours. Look around. You’ll know it when you see it.
BCM 40 17
THE CONVERSATIONALISTS
A BRAND NEW
HERTEL TEN YEARS AFTER CHANGING THE FACE OF ELMWOOD AVENUE, THE LEXINGTON CO-OPERATIVE MARKET READIES ITS SECOND HOME.
T
Interview by BEN SIEGEL
im Bartlett has one of the friendliest faces on the block. Tim is general manager of the popular Lexington Co-operative Market, located on Elmwood Avenue between Auburn and Lancaster. His role there means many things to many people. He loves his staff as a coach loves his all-star, championship team. He loves his produce like the farmer who grew it. And he loves his neighborhood, the one that ten years ago screamed, campaigned and fundraised for a modern, progressive market that could provide whole, real foods that were grown responsibly and sustainably, that supported local economies and farmers, and that brought together a community of diverse, but likeminded, citizens. The Co-op celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2011, and this year marks its tenth year on Elmwood, after decades on Lexington Avenue. Today, the Co-op boasts more than 10,000 memberowners. The thriving Elmwood Village that surrounds and largely supports it has become a go-to example of urban revitalization, gaining regional and national attention for its walkability, art and culture, and attention to sustainable food. Together, they are a tent pole to the street, to the neighborhood, and to a metro city of loyal member-owners. Tim speaks proudly of the Co-op’s guiding principles as he reflects on the past decade in their current home, and looks forward to the Co-op’s announced opening of a second location on Hertel Avenue. For Tim and his legions of fellow owners, the Lexingon Co-op is, first and foremost, a home.
TB The cool thing about the Co-op is that it sort of sprung
from the street, or sprouted from the street, from the neighborhood and the community. We started in 1971 as a wine club, and, you know, people wanted access to good food [so] they opened a storefront and then we sort of grew and now it looks like it’s just any other grocery store. But really, it is owned, controlled and created by the people who shop here and the people who live here. I think the Co-op [provides] such a great example of something that’s so prevalent in Buffalo and in this neighborhood, in particular, which is this: I think of it as community-based entrepreneurialism. The Co-op was just like this big idea that a bunch of people had, and so they started it together to meet their own needs. It really started to serve the community. Think of the Elmwood Festival of the Arts in the same way; people just imagined this thing that could be different from every other festival. You know, it would be more about all kinds of art. It would be not just the art you can sell, but the art that people can enjoy and then it would be something that the whole community could come together and put on or create. And so I think of those two things—and also, in some ways, the Garden Walk—as three examples of the community doing things together that make the community better. The Co-op is part of that. All have contributed to making this neighborhood more livable and more walkable and just a more dynamic place to live. I studied urban planning and the best communities are the
BS The Lexington Co-op celebrates its tenth anniversary
on Elmwood Avenue this year, and in that time it’s been witness to, and part of, the street’s rebirth. Can you filter “Twenty percent of our workforce are refugees from that through the lens of your members, your customers? It’s other countries. The access to different kinds of foods quite a fixture in the neighborhood. is such a great thing that a city can offer.” -Tim Bartlett 18 BCM 40
photo by MA X COLLINS
BCM 40 19
communities that are very organically evolving in creating themselves, and that’s where the entrepreneurialism that happens in the community is shared. I think Elmwood is one in Buffalo because we have been ignored, and we have ignored all these chain stores, and we have ignored national trends, and we have been down and out for so long, we have just been allowed to evolve organically. BS Looking back at that year at that time in this neighborhood, what do you think were the elements that encouraged, or maybe discouraged, that kind of growth? TB The thing that got the Co-op out of a little tiny store-
front on Lexington and here on Elmwood was $560,000 invested by 200 different people who were member-owners of the store. BS Like your current fundraising campaign for the new
store on Hertel. TB Now we are doing another catalogue campaign and we’ve already got [at time of printing, in mid-June] $1.5 million from 200 people. We’ve doubled the amount from roughly the same number of people.
It’s just so inspiring to see that. Back then, I think it was so inspiring to just call up people who you wouldn’t think had any money to scratch together and they would make these $10,000 and $15,000 loans to the Co-op to help it move to Elmwood. People just wanted it on Elmwood and so they said, ‘We are going to do it and that’s going to happen and that’s it.’ And like that, the collective moved it to Elmwood. It’s really interesting [that] a lot of people are getting priced out of the Elmwood market now, in terms of the housing market, because it’s expanded so much. BS It’s quite a different neighborhood than when Block
Club started, just across the street, eight years ago. Progress was so much more localized then, it was so much more about your street and your neighbors than the city at large. TB And it’s grown overnight, over a decade, into a wider
conversation. BS What are the necessary ingredients for a strong neighborhood, for one that can support the Co-op and other kinds of community-based projects? What is missing here that any strong community needs? TB When I was my daughter’s age—my daughter is in seventh grade—and when I was her age I used to go to the Boys & Girls Club every single day. Just having that shared space 20 BCM 40
that middle schoolers can go to every day to skip or run around or play games and do stuff and still be kids, but also have this amount of freedom. I think it’s something that we don’t have in this neighborhood right now—a Boys & Girls Club, or a YMCA, or something like that, that the kids can ride their bikes to. That community building and that freedom for kids, I think, is so important. I think our Delaware Park is such a strength of this community, that access to green space, and access to the water. BS An observer might say that the Elmwood Village has hit a sort of plateau, and is now sustainably functional. What kind of growth do you think it’s still capable of? TB I would love to see more public space as part of the conversation for what to do at [the soon-to-be-vacant] Women & Children’s Hospital. A pocket park [on that site] could be really fantastic, or maybe put a YMCA there and a park that people could go to. I think that permeability between the Elmwood Village and the West Side, the racial barriers of Richmond and Main Street, I think, have sort of gotten more permeable and the integration of so many political refugees over the West Side has really changed. It’s changed our Co-op, in that about 20 percent of our workforce are refugees—Burma, Somalia, places like that. The access to different kinds of foods is such a great thing that a city can offer. BS That’s wonderful. So you’re moving to Hertel Avenue, opening a second store. TB Yeah! BS What have you learned about opening and operating the current store, on Elmwood, in your planning for the new store? TB The more that we can make our second store spring
from the community, the better. We are trying to get as many people from that neighborhood invested in our capital campaign as possible. So far, $350,000 has come from the Hertel neighborhood. We are going to start doing community forums, [which we did] when we moved to Elmwood. We asked people, what are your hopes, what are your dreams, what are your fears for this store? When you walk into this store, what does it smell like? What does it taste like? What do you hate about our Elmwood store? Because North Buffalo is a very different neighborhood and our job as leaders in the Co-op is always to
We think everybody should have access to a Co-op. They make people’s lives better. facilitate the community being expressed through the Co-op. When we think about going into another community we really just have to listen to that community, and find out what it wants. And then help the store be representative of that community of owners who use it. BS Our conversation about food in Buffalo has just exploded in the last decade. TB We are so spoiled here, and we’ve always had access to
good food. Only eight percent of the world’s soil is considered prime food-growing areas, and Western New York has prime soil. We are so fortunate to have access to that kind of food that is so good, even for a short amount of time. I hope that our owners continue to be passionate enough about their Co-op to yell and scream about what it’s not doing. As an organization, we are so imperfect and have such a long way to go in terms of realizing our dreams in the world, and the accountability that comes from the customers holding it to a high standard is so powerful and it’s so great. So I really hope that people don’t stop yelling. I think the big question for Western New York and New York State is that farming is the No. 1 industry in the state. Part of that is because of the soil we have access to. And we have such great growers, but these growers are retiring or wanting to retire. We keep building homes on top of this soil that’s perfect for growing food. I just fast forward 50 years with the urban planning decisions and the lack of people going into farming, and it’s very scary to think about whether or not we are going to have access to local food. It really motivates me because my family has been farming in this area since 1820. I will be the first generation that doesn’t farm that land, those 180 acres. What I love about the Co-op and what gets me up in the morning is that we are focused on creating a market for local farmers, and paying them with a fair price so that they can be a viable business. BS It’s interesting, because when you think of urban density and urban planning, you tend to think about vertical
real estate—how to get the most out of your footprint. But it’s about the actual soil, too. The surface area. TB We are ruining the soils by putting basements in them. The wetlands are so important to our whole ecosystem and our whole soil, and we are just draining them; you know, it’s crazy what we did. With this new urbanism, where people are moving back into the city, and there are restaurants opening, and there’s the Co-op, creating this market for locally produced foods—that’s how the city is supposed to operate. The city is supposed to be the marketplace for the food that’s grown in the hinterlands, like that’s where the customers are in the city and the growers are around in the country. It’s funny to see how it started to flip, where we’ve actually got farmers in the city. BS As you prepare to open a second store, and one in a different neighborhood, what is your responsibility to the community to expand your footprint and give more people access to this food? Obviously, you exist to serve your members first, but to what extent do you feel the Co-op should think outside of that box? TB The first co-operative principal is [to be] open to everyone, regardless of racial, political, religious discrimination, and that was the principle that was created in the 1800s by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers. And again, we’re most successful when our owners represent a crosssection of the people who live in that community, when our staff represents a cross-section—when the people empower the Co-op. And I think that is something that we do a good job [of]. We want to keep pushing ourselves to be even better and move into a new community. I think just allows us to broaden that.
We can never rest and never be okay with just taking out a sliver or a specific segment of an individual community. We always want to be pushing ourselves to represent as broad a base of people as possible—economically diverse, racially diverse, religiously diverse, politically diverse. We are open to everybody and we are at our best when we are a village dream for the whole community to come together and run into each other and talk about food and commune over good food that nourishes our bodies and our community. Our vision is by 2050 to have a thriving Co-op in every community that wants one. Because we think everybody should have access to a Co-op. We think it makes people’s lives better.
BCM 40 21
CASE STUDY
Living the dream THE CITY MISSION WANTS TO ERADICATE HOMELESSNESS BY 2020.
A
by MARGARET FINAN
sudden health issue or a lost job, an unexpected event that leaves one with no financial safety net—homelessness can happen to anyone. In fact, 84 percent of all homeless individuals are experiencing it for only the first or second time. Such umbrella figures mask the uniqueness of each case, though; a one-size-fits-all housing solution does little to break the exhausting cycle many individuals struggling with homelessness find themselves in. Stuart Harper, executive director of the Buffalo City Mission, wants to change that. With the help of The Dream, a 16-step program developed to eradicate homelessness in Buffalo by 2020, Harper and the Mission are looking to break the cycle through counseling, education and emotional and spiritual care. The Dream addresses the root causes of homelessness by tailoring its 16 steps to each client’s specific situation. Founded in 1917, the City Mission is a Christian organization that today consists of the Men’s Community Center, a 92-bed emergency shelter and long-term-recovery facility on East Tupper Street, and Cornerstone Manor, a 122-bed facility for women and children, on East North Street, offering emergency and transitional services. Even at full capacity, the City Mission turns no one away for the night, providing for clients’ immediate short-term needs of food and shelter. Though crucial, when it comes to more complicated cases of homelessness, such emergency response is little more than a Band-Aid. The Dream goes beyond the basics of triage; it offers the time and tools needed for a homeless client to obtain and maintain his or her own self-sufficiency. It offers independence. In the past, clients going through traditional transitional programs got stuck in a cycle that grew impossible to ignore: upon exiting transitional living, the client would work with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to secure affordable housing, but due to underlying issues, they’d get caught in an unbelievable dilemma, says Harper. He says that while HUD is focused on getting individuals housed, it can’t carefully tend to the problems that may have caused homelessness in the first place. 22 BCM 40
“Most of the people we work with have never been able to manage a household on their own. They may lack education or marketable skills. They’re still dealing with underlying issues of violence, addiction, illiteracy or health problems. So now they’re trying to manage a household on top of it— they just end up back at the emergency shelter again. We were seeing it over and over again,” says Harper. The Dream process helps a committed client working with case managers to address any underlying issues, identify natural talents and pursue the education necessary to obtain a career-path job complementary to those talents. All the while, the client lives in City Mission housing, holding a part-time job or internship as they work towards a degree. “We want to hold on to these clients for as long as we can, to provide positive modeling for them, to help them re-learn any helpful and necessary behaviors they may have missed out on,” says Harper. The last step of The Dream gives clients the opportunity to volunteer with the City Mission or another agency working for the homeless. That luxury of time, Stuart notes, is why they utilize a private funding model. Unlike government funding, private funding is not attached to specific programs with inflexible completion deadlines. Harper offers the typical 28-day rehab timeline as an example: “28 days. Or, now, it’s even cut down to the 14-day program. Anyone who’s been an addict for 14 years—you’re not going to see their addiction problems solved in 14 days.” At its end, the client’s Dream process will have facilitated him or her in finding both a long-term job and affordable, sustainable housing—no further housing assistance needed from either the City Mission or government programs. With this in mind, the City Mission describes The Dream as a “hand up” rather than a handout. With a major expansion of the Men’s Community Center and headquarters on the horizon, Harper and his team have the whole community in mind. Amid Buffalo’s ongoing renaissance, the City Mission team believes progress is not progress unless everyone has a chance to participate. “It’s all about pulling people in, and pulling people up,” says Harper.
photo illustration by RYAN McMULLEN
BCM 40 23
VIEWS
The pilgrim’s process A CITY OF NO ILLUSIONS. by SHASTI O’LEARY SOUDANT
R
uby loves New York City. It’s a Center-of-the-Universe thing. She can feel it. After seeing Patti Smith speak at Kleinhans this spring, she turned to me in the car and said, “When I’m older, I’m going to go there with $20 in my pocket and see how far I get.” I take a deep breath. I grew up there. That city can fuck you up. My daughter’s 12-year-old ambition and sense of adventure fills me with pride, but my perspective on New York is distorted by experience, having witnessed the ceaseless onslaught and exodus of thousands of hopeful seekers. The City is like boot camp for the wannabes of the world. The promise of a larger-than-life stature in a larger-than-life metropolis can feed an overgrown ego, or mercilessly execute a shrunken one. I fear for her. I was born in that messy mecca, and spent my early childhood being dragged around the world by a man desperate to escape its incredible gravity. But where could we go? After New York, what was enough? What could he aspire to? When we returned from Europe, I was ten, and the following years were bruising. My parents divorced, and with my mother’s emancipation, our fabric frayed. She embraced The City with an adolescent fervor, and I was suddenly left holding down the fort while she partied like it was 1979. The week I turned 16, I broke ranks, left high school and dove in. My stupidity was enormous, and I incurred a series of battle scars that left me armored to the teeth. Anger, ennui and luck all combined to form the quintessential Native New York City Girl: numb, frustrated, overwhelmed, unimpressed, over-stimulated and bored all at the same time. A month and a week after I turned 19, my father succumbed to the inevitable result of treating his body like an amusement park. A year later, I broke like an off-brand 24 BCM 40
Barbie doll. The next five months were spent working through grief, panic attacks, agoraphobia and post-traumatic stress, and in the fall of 1987, I saved my own life by taking my little inheritance and leaving. I talked my way into a transfer to Purchase College with a disastrous 1.29 GPA from the film program at the School of Visual Arts, and made a clean start. Four years later, I emerged with my very first Real Friends, and a renewed appreciation for the city of my birth. During our occasional forays, I had come to see it through their eyes, and my armor gradually relinquished its choke-hold, allowing me to finally let go of the clumsy, destructive coping mechanisms I had once glued to my hands. When I met my husband in 1994, New York and I had finally come to an understanding: it was where I was from, but I suspected “home” would one day be someplace else. When the time came for Jethro to return to his yearly cooking gig in Provincetown, I didn’t hesitate. We got engaged, and I left New York for good. Kind of. I was glad to be gone, but I continued to build my client base there and did relatively well as a freelancer. I had grown up terrified of becoming a bag lady, so it was an accomplishment to have extracted a successful creative livelihood from publishing, one of the many “glamorous” industries. Truth be told, the drab hallways and cramped offices that churn out blockbusters and bestsellers are a disappointment. When the curtain is pulled back, the wizard is just another cranky alcoholic, afraid for his or her job, barely making ends meet on a salary that would buy a lifetime of security in a hundred other towns. After he graduated cooking school, Jethro and I went looking for one of those towns. We made quick work of many lovely second-string cities, feeling them out, plumbing their cultural depths, taking measure of the available friend-stock, but still finding ourselves strangely lonely and not fitting in. While trying Brooklyn again, the World Trade Center vanished less than a mile from our stunned eyes. A month later, we carefully drove our moving van through narrow streets papered with heartbreaking flyers featuring the faces of the missing, and left New York for the last time. We came close to finding home in Portland, Maine, where our daughter was born. There was great art, good food and wonderful people, but coastal real estate had skyrocketed in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, and we found ourselves priced out faster than we could save the money for a down payment. Buffalo, where Jethro’s mother had grown
illustration by TIM STASZAK
Everything is parabola. Those curving arcs lead us so far away that home is only a few steps further in the same direction. up, offered a reasonable alternative, and we looked at is as a weigh station, a pit stop for us to get our shit together. They called it the “City of No Illusions,” which I sort of loved. There was a brutal lack of glamour when we first moved here. It was like the Anti-Glam, the Bizarro New York. All the graceful architecture and Olmsted parks in the world were not enough to redeem the unremitting bleakness that permeated the rows upon rows of bleached and cracking houses, the worn-away gargoyles, the injured, fetid waterfront, the Cheerio-scented sky. The laughably cheap cost of our house was the perfect pretext, obscuring the strong but inexplicable pull we felt in our bellies. Everyone we met asked us the same question: why? Why come here, of all places? You could live anywhere. Why Buffalo? Each time the question was asked, the answer was different: sleeping with all the windows open, the morning birds and evening cicadas, being able to see millions of winter stars from our huge backyard, the soft footfalls of people walking their dogs at night…mundane things, always at a loss for grander explanations. Ten years ago, we’d thought Buffalo was just another bead on our itinerant abacus, a liminal place. But something deep and primal kept us here. The interstitial has always enchanted me: gravity, love, the space between atoms.
The magnetic vacuum of the universe, constantly, actively, preventing everything from spinning apart, even as it widens. Everything is parabola. Those curving arcs lead us so far away that home is only a few steps further in the same direction. Ten years later, I look at Ruby, doing her homework in the distorted rays of afternoon sunlight streaming through 100-year-old panes of glass. Her Tourette’s is ramped up to a fever pitch in the ecstatic outpouring that the safety of “home” allows. She sniffs, squeaks, scowls, grunts and contorts her way through her math problems, annoyed, but not crushed by the weight of her disobedient brain, and encased but not imprisoned by her magnificent and spastic five-foot-eight frame. Her friends are kind, kooky and tolerant. Her school is diverse, public and embracing. She, at 12, laughs often, cries rarely and is more confident than I could ever have dreamed, mercifully and miraculously free of the heavy armor I found indispensible at her age. In six years, her tics will most likely have subsided to a soft murmur that few will notice, and she will be ready to take on the world with $20 in her pocket. And then, suddenly, it hits me. Why we’re here. We are giving her a City to Run Away From. And a City to Run To. BCM 40 25
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Fly Away Home Story by CHRIS HAWLEY
Photo by DAVID TORKE
The sun rose and the morning air swept over me through an open front door, in a vacant mansion where I stayed the night in Wheeling, West Virginia. I slept on a cot set up in the living room. A grand staircase—original woodwork still intact—led upstairs from the foyer. Plaster crumbled from the walls. Utilities—the basics of electric and heat—were not available or required. The roof over my head was all I needed in this forgotten industrial city on the Ohio River. The house had been abandoned for more than 30 years, before hosts Brian Wilson and Stephanie Wright purchased it in 2013 and began rehabilitation. On the night of my stay, the house was empty and open to some of the elements—though dry, thanks to an intact roof. Human occupation had not yet been restored, with the exception of Brian and Stephanie’s backyard “tiny house,” itself under construction and occupied only part-time. Before the night’s stay, I had no idea who Brian and Stephanie were, but a friend back home in Buffalo, a preservation activist, did. She picked up on my numerous Instagrams of the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, West Virginia Independence Hall, Capitol Theatre, Heritage Port and Centre Market and linked us up. She had not yet met them in person either, but knew of them as Wheeling’s young preservationists. After a few text exchanges, I was invited to be a guest at their work in progress.
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These spontaneous connections are not uncommon in my travels. As a city planner, I travel with the love of cities on my sleeve. I seek out, frequently with social media backup, cool people doing cool things in their hometowns, particularly here in America’s former industrial heartland. Among the “placemakers” I have met in various Rust Belt bergs, Brian and Stephanie are two of the most passionate and indefatigable. The house was built in 1893 for Thomas Baird McLain, a druggist whose medical supply store in downtown Wheeling sold prosthetic limbs, false teeth, glass eyes, and parrots. The couple purchased the house, they said, in part because “it spoke to us,” and also to show Wheelingers what could be done with a little bit of money and a lot of hard work. “We wanted to present an alternative to the most common approach our city has used to address the vacancy crisis,” said Brian, alluding to the City’s recent demolition binge. “This house has been our chance to show that a better option exists for these discarded structures.” In the rear of the 3,200-square-foot McLain House, the new 200-square-foot tiny house is part urban oddity, part practical necessity. Stephanie explained that the tiny house gives them sanctuary from the chaos that comes with rehabbing an old building. The tiny house is almost entirely made from recycled materials, the majority from homes that have been demolished in Wheeling. The frame is from a nearby outbuilding that Brian and Stephanie dismantled and transported to their back yard on days off. The entry detail is from another nearby demolished structure, and the oak floor boards from another. “The tiny house started off as a joke honestly, but the more we laughed about the idea the more it started to make sense,” said Stephanie. “Basically the entire project was made possible through materials discarded by others. You know what they say, one man’s trash is another man’s... tiny house?” Wheeling is a place that not many people think about, but should. Prior to its industrial boom, the city was the site of the Wheeling Convention that resulted in West Virginia’s secession from the Confederacy. In its prime, Wheeling was a manufacturing powerhouse at the convergence of the Ohio River, National Road and Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and was among the country’s leading makers of glass, pottery, tobacco, beer and especially cut nails—giving it the title of “Nail City.” Wheeling has been in a population free-fall since 1930, 30 BCM 40
when its population was nearly 62,000. Today, the population is about 28,000, a 55 percent decline—a consequence of the twin forces of deindustrialization and suburban sprawl. Downtown can be a lonely place, with too many vacant storefronts and a rising number of vacant lots. In 2012, the City of Wheeling bizarrely demolished a block of historic buildings in the heart of the Main Street business district for unspecified economic development. The site remains empty today, and it is unclear what, if anything, will ever be built there. No privately funded new construction has taken place downtown since 1982. Wheeling is turning the page, however. A wave of young entrepreneurs and activists—Brian and Stephanie are only two examples—see unrealized potential where perhaps previous generations, or current politicians, saw only blight. Jake Dougherty, a 25-year-old who runs Reinvent Wheeling, pointed to Wheeling Brewing Company and Second Life Arborist & Fine Woodworking as examples of the new Wheeling. The latter, which makes woodworking equipment available to residents who may not be able to afford their own, was supported by “Show of Hands,” a crowdfunding event put on by Reinvent Wheeling. Even a “lovescaping” campaign organized by Brian and Stephanie—modeled after Buffalo’s “heart bombs” to raise awareness about vacant historic buildings with tons of potential—snagged a major win. The effort lured attorney Glenn Elliott to purchase and rehabilitate the Professional Building, a seven-story, turreted stone structure that could easily be compared to Buffalo’s long-vanished Erie County Savings Bank. Public officials seem to be catching on, too, with the Regional Economic Development Partnership working with the Woda Group to undertake downtown’s first ever loft apartment conversion at the former Stone & Thomas department store. Twenty-two apartments are now under construction. The conversation has changed in Wheeling. Glenn Elliott is fond of saying that Wheelingers now talk about the city in present and future tenses, instead of only the past tense—about how great it could be, rather than how great it was. If my travels have taught me anything about urban regeneration, it is that the many small steps, rather than the headline projects, are what make a city great again. The tiny initiatives add up, and are grafted upon the larger moves—like the demolition of a parking ramp to
“The Rust Belt has fallen so far that it has become the new American frontier. I want to explore that frontier.” create the parks at Heritage Port, expansion of West Virginia Northern Community College at the former B&O Terminal, or rails-to-trails along the Ohio River that can take you from Wheeling to Washington, DC. News media pay lavish attention to what has been lost in the Rust Belt and, at least until recently, scant attention to what is being created in its place. Meeting people like Brian, Stephanie, Jake, and Glenn help fill in the gaps. Before I arrived in Wheeling, I had no intention of spending much time there. I was on an Ohio River road trip from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati with photographer David Torke. If we’d zoomed by on I-70, we would have spent no time there at all. Thankfully, our shared rules of travel made that outcome unlikely and an introduction to Wheeling all the more likely. There are a few rules that I follow in my travels: • Never take the highway. Limited access expressways, by nature, limit access to anything that could be interesting. Highways only go through; local roads go to. The lesstravelled routes produce greater returns—insights, stories, surprises—for the travel time invested. • Get out and walk or bike. The least effective method of travel, if learning is an objective, is to stay in an automobile. Along the voyage, frequent stops for a walk around the block or bike ride down the street opens up a whole different perspective. • Meet locals. Total strangers will often open up— sometimes with the most personal and intimate stories— about the place they call home. Social media can broaden these opportunities further. • Talk to the bartenders. Bartenders may have stories of their own, but they have everybody else’s, too. No one can give you more insight about a place than a bartender. • Be a traveler, not simply a tourist. A tourist is a participant in a program. A traveler follows his nose and intuition, and is open to improvisation. • Pick the right travel companions. Travel with a small group of friends who are curious, adventurous and patient. Curiosity is what gets you to pull over; adventurousness draws you in further; patience tempers the urge to reach a destination when the unplanned surprises along the way are what matter most. I view travel as an opportunity for idea exchange. I am always looking to gain or impart something valuable. It is travel for study, as well as for entertainment and leisure.
I also view the Rust Belt as a brotherhood, cities bonded by a common lineage and a common struggle. I’m fascinated by how folks in the Rust Belt are attempting to survive, even thrive—or, in some cases, giving up. So much of my travels has focused on navigating this landscape. Poverty, racism and economic dislocation are familiar challenges in the Rust Belt, but so are its strengths: a rich history, sense of place, an inherited wealth of walkable neighborhoods and downtowns and culture of hard work. The Rust Belt has fallen so far that it has become the new American frontier. I want to explore that frontier. I want to dig, investigate, turn over stones, and see what I find. In the process, I hope to understand and appreciate Buffalo better. Bernice Radle is a friend, city planner and “Buffalover” who often accompanies me on my travels. She led our recent trip to Detroit, whose story of struggle and resurgence is practically ubiquitous in the national media these days. It is the poster child of the Rust Belt, the example of the hard fall and hopeful rise. In a 36-hour sprint, we experienced the Guardian Building, Campus Martius, Eastern Market, Shinola Detroit, City Bird, Mercury Bar, Detroit Institute of Bagels, UFO Factory and a once-vacant Arden Park mansion brought back to life by Paddy Lynch, a 30-year-old undertaker who we learned about and connected with on the same day through Twitter. “You have stolen my heart, Detroit,” Bernice wrote in her blog. Her post detailing our pilgrimage was picked up by Deadline Detroit, an online news site that aggregates and produces original reporting and commentary about the Motor City. As city planners, we tend to attract attention when we show up in a city and start asking questions. Activists and entrepreneurs are eager to tell us their stories, show us their successes and hear our take. If we have something positive to say—and we sure as heck did about Detroit!— it’s not unusual to find ourselves thrust into a debate between local believers and skeptics. The Deadline Detroit report is one example, with a comment stream that pitted disparate views of the city against one another and sometimes against ours. “Is it really difficult to impress someone who chooses to live in Buffalo in 2015? It’s more miserable and geographically irrelevant than Detroit,” wrote one commenter. BCM 40 31
“Nothing in the city is worthy of your praise, I assure you.” “It’s too bad some can’t handle positive comments about what’s happening in Detroit,” wrote another commenter. “There is a lot of good stuff happening and yes there are some rough areas outside of downtown. I am thankful to those that are trying to make a difference.” Detroit still grapples with huge problems. Widespread poverty and unemployment have not disappeared as a result of the resurgence of Downtown, Midtown and Corktown, and the city struggles to ensure that revitalization efforts are inclusive and equitable. More work is needed. But the work of rebuilding Detroit’s economy is well underway and naysayers, if they are to be taken seriously, must at least pause and think before tossing barbs at local enthusiasts. The Great Lakes region is dotted with a constellation of mini-Detroits, the many manufacturing towns and cities that built America. The grit, entrepreneurial spirit and can-do attitude is alive and well in many of these places. But for every Wheeling or Detroit where things are happening again, there are a dozen others—Steubenville, McKeesport, East Liverpool, Gary, Middletown, Weirton or Aliquippa—where not much seems to be happening, at least not yet. When I stop at such places, I ask the locals, “What happened here?” The answer is always the same: the plant closed. The jobs departed. Nothing is left. I want to believe that all of these important places, that did important things for America, can continue to exist and regain an economic purpose. Some may not. I stopped at Mingo Junction, Ohio, best known as a film location for the 1978 movie “The Deer Hunter.” The city was built entirely around a single plant of the Carnegie Steel Co., later the Mingo Works of the WheelingPittsburgh Steel Corporation. The plant closed, likely for good, in 2009. Mingo Junction is the archetypal steel town. Metal scrapping, not steelmaking, is now the city’s main economic activity. In 2012, the defunct Mingo Works was purchased by the Buffalo-based Frontier Industrial Corp., whose website says it specializes in “industrial gutting, plant strip-outs and scrap metal recovery.” As I stood on Commercial Street, I watched a parade of dump trucks and tractor trailers, full of scrap metal and machinery, trundle out of town. The physical remnants of Mingo’s economy were literally being hauled away. I met Bibo Potenzini, a 78-year-old retired motor repairman who worked at the plant, as he was leaving a 32 BCM 37
Commercial Street tavern. He is one of the lucky ones—a full pension, secure retirement and brand new, fire engine red Lincoln convertible. Bibo was proud to say that the car parks itself. “This town did right by me,” said Bibo. “But there is no future here.” Nearby, condemnation notices were posted on the windows and doors of nearly every building. The crunch and crash of demolition activity heard only a few hundred feet away seemed destined for this shadow of a once crowded downtown. If I ever visit again, I wonder if I will find that Mingo Junction has become an empty field. I will never write any city off. Cities are resilient. And life is full of surprises. History confirms, however, that not all cities survive drastic change. Darwin could easily have had cities in mind when he wrote, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Youngstown, Ohio, was written off, but it turns out that its epitaph was written prematurely. Black Monday— the day on Sept. 19, 1977, that Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company laid off more than 4,000 workers—is remembered by every person over 45 years of age in Youngstown. As the steel industry collapsed, here and nationally, the rug was swept out from underneath the city and there was no Plan B. The entire economy was built on steel, with nothing else to bank on for the future. A generation later, things are finally turning around. I recently traveled to Youngstown with an expectation of seeing nothing but devastation. Similar to Wheeling, Youngstown has lost substantial population—62 percent since 1930. The only more sobering statistic is the poverty rate, a staggering 36 percent. But the statistics do not tell the whole story. I met architect Paul Hagman in Buffalo, actually. A resident of Youngstown, he, too, is a Rust Belt adventurer, and had previously visited Buffalo to see if all the terrible things he’d heard were true. Now it was my turn to have preconceptions uprooted. I sent him a message on Facebook. He dropped all plans and offered up a nickel tour. The first stop is the Rust Belt Brewing Company Tap House, which opened in 2013. It was a Sunday, when the tap house was normally closed, but bartender and assistant manager Katelyn Bowden opened the doors just for us. Rust Belt Brewing is the Steel Valley’s premier BeerOriented Development site, anchoring the mixed-use redevelopment of Erie Terminal Place. The beer is great—
and with names like Blast Furnace Blonde, Rusted River Irish Red Ale and Coke Oven Stout, the beer also taps into Youngstown’s industrial heritage. The tap house has also become a gathering spot for young urbanists—countercultural elements that have cast aside their town’s pervasive negativity and made the conscious choice to invest their lives here. “So many people bash Youngstown, though this is the town that raised them,” said Katelyn. “Youngstown taught us to fight, to never give up. It taught us to appreciate both the struggle and the reward. Youngstown made us tough, and taught us that it is possible to rebuild what has been destroyed.” Youngstown has more going for it than an excellent craft brewery, great symbol of revival that it is. I was most struck by local efforts to grow a new economy from literally nothing. I stopped by the Youngstown Business Incubator (YBI), which made a bet more than a decade ago that it could create a local software industry from scratch. It was a seemingly absurd gamble, but paid off big. YBI now spans more than 100,000 square feet of space in five buildings in what was formerly a deserted section of downtown. A couple dozen software firms are now in operation at the facility. Turning Technologies, its biggest success story, employs more than 300 people and was recently rated America’s fastest growing privately held software company. America Makes, the only institute in the United States that is focused on growing capabilities and strength in the 3D printing industry, set up shop in downtown in 2012. The institute, awarded more than $40 million by the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, works with partners like Youngstown State University and Case Western Reserve to develop commercially viable 3D printing techniques. The city is betting that it can carve out a niche in this emerging sector, too. The so-called “old economy” isn’t finished either. In 2012, Vallourec opened its 1 million-square-foot Youngstown plant, employing 500 people, to make steel pipes for the energy industry—perhaps why Rust Belt Brewing offers a beer called the Frackin’ Porter. Downtown’s skyline—outsized for a city of 65,000 people—is the basis for a recent development boom. Heritage building stock that was vacant or half-vacant for years is being transformed to office, hospitality and residential space. Nearly 500 downtown housing units have been added, with more in the works. The gradual expansion of
Youngstown State University—with more than 14,000 students and 2,000 staff at downtown’s doorstep—is a major impetus. Katelyn lives in Wick Park, a Youngstown neighborhood that was once notorious for crime and drugs, but has calmed down since, making it safe for community gardens and housing rehabs to pop up. Her home still has visible bullet holes, a reminder of how things used to be. “Aside from that,” said Katelyn, “it is a well-maintained and cared for house, with a beautiful history and beautiful details. I keep the bullet holes though; they make for a great story.” I couldn’t help but get wrapped up in the new confidence and bravado of “The Yo,” as Katelyn and others call the city. To choose to live in a place like Youngstown is to commit to enduring a barrage of bad press and mockery, but the folks I met here seem to be immune to it. “Defend Youngstown,” is the new rallying cry. In my travels, I have met people who view their hometowns as more than simply the place they inhabit. Home is a place to defend and honor, a motivator, a recharger. Places like Wheeling, Detroit and Youngstown are on stronger footing because they have tapped into the necessary precondition of culture change—from a defeated to a can-do attitude. This change in perspective is motivated by a sense of ownership, attachment and loyalty to place that has developed among Rust Belters who have decided not to flee for the suburbs or the Sun Belt. Living in a Youngstown or Wheeling is not for everybody. It’s not like living in Boulder or Portland or someplace else that is just so easy, where the work of creating a great place is largely complete. Taking on the restoration of an old brick mansion that’s been abandoned for longer than you’ve been alive, in a neighborhood that’s suffered decades of disinvestment, isn’t a walk in the park. It is hard work, often with limited evidence of eventual reward. Brian Wilson and Stephanie Wright understand this dynamic better than most. “Just like any relationship, there are really good days and really bad days,” Brian said. “There are nights I lay awake and worry, and nights I can’t sleep because I am too excited about a particular project. We get frustrated and leave on spontaneous road trips because we just can’t take one more day, then end up cutting the trip short because we get homesick.” Like Brian and Stephanie, I often leave home, if only temporarily, to find home again. BCM 37 33
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The Silent Influence Story by JENNIFER CONNOR
Photos by MAX COLLINS
Last year on a warm fall day I went for a run in Tifft Nature Preserve, an interesting confluence of the industrial and natural. It was unusually hot, and so on the eastern edge of the pond I stopped in the shade of a single fencerow tree. The black, still pool in the dirt road suddenly gained depth; I crouched down and peered in. There I was: transported unexpectedly to an underwater realm of miniscule industrious black snails. The young ones carried just a beginner baby toenail of a shell; the elders had gnarled overgrown shells. There were snails on top of snails, eating fuzz off of the mud and each other, a mysterious and busy world in a shallow puddle, on an unused dirt road bordered by swamp and train tracks. Each puddle became a window whose dusty dirt shade snapped open to reveal jewels, living pictures in slow motion. What if we were to look into our own puddle, so to speak? What would we see? Ecology as a study predicates a primacy of relationships between living things and their environment. It is not simply the environment. It is the study of dynamic interactions and the patterns that emerge, the places where relationships flow, and where they stagnate. This is the story of intimate relationships; of the air we breathe, the water we bathe in, the plants and animals we eat. The air touches every part of us and makes visible our shape; water plumps every cell; the earth provides every mineral that even now is repairing the minute structure of that frame and that cell that is you. This is our real first home in the world, and every home after is home to a home.
Ecology originates from the Greek work oikos, mean- “Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for ing “home.” Taken literally it means the study of home. the education and refinement of her children. Consider When we think of our home, when we think of the place the silent influence which the flowers exert, no less upon that gives us what we need to go forth in the world, we the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower.” do not often turn to the ecology of our place. We might It is a source of children’s power to have this innate talk about our actual house, or even the city we grew up knowing of their place and understanding soak into their in. Yet it is the strangely invisible visible, that which is all pores. It is also a source of their potential suffering, as in around us, that creates and defines us at a deep level. As in- instances of environmental toxicity. What Thoreau calls a dividuals it shapes us, body and soul; as a society it shapes silent influence may be for children a shouting influence, our culture and economy—another word stemming from an uproar for those who startle at a gnat, exclaim over a home—and influences which neighborhoods will thrive, dapple of sunlight and gallop behind a leaf blowing on the wind. In an urban ecology children embody firsthand ecoand which will wither. How do we characterize this web that composes Buffa- logical knowledge. Home not only holds us as we are, it lo as a home place to all of its people, not just a geographic shapes who we are to become, and we spend the rest of our marker, but who we see, what we smell, what we do, how lives understanding that which we absorbed when we were we feel. As a home it may be satisfactory or not, successful small and reorganizing that material to regenerate home or not, as close as our blood or as far as we can get when for ourselves as adults. we leave. If, now, Buffalo is a web, then let’s travel every In the yard, they dig, all the time, and excavate remains strand, the length and breadth of each span, and be like of the city of the recent past. Chunks of concrete, bricks, the spider, who knows where all points attach, and not bits of glass bubble up to the surface and in return they like the fly, who is shaken by every vibration and breeze leave shovels and buckets and toy cars. Left at the task for without knowing from whence they come. Henry David long enough, I am certain they could dig through the topThoreau tells us, in “Autumnal Tints”: “We do not know soil, through the clay, to the bedrock of Onondaga limehow widely or narrowly we are to look.” Look with deli- stone left by the glaciers who left epic snail trails of rock cacy and balance, with sensitivity and with some abandon, and gravel in their northward recession and caressed the landscape into the flats and curves that now hold our city. and then we can attempt to travel those paths. Buffalo is a city of the plains—not the Great Plains but the smaller-scale Erie Plains—with the Niagara EscarpI used to believe that the trees made the wind with ment dropping off to the north, the Allegheny Escarptheir wild movements. Even when my father corrected me ment heaving up from the south traced by the I-90, while I didn’t believe him, because the fact was obvious. Look the Onondaga Escarpment quietly bisects our city, from at how hard they worked, swaying and thrashing their Glen Falls to the heights of City Honors, from Serenity branches. I am a teacher of young children and when I ar- Falls in Forest Lawn Cemetery out to the Niagara River. rive at work it is not uncommon to find something left on The ground holds not only the city’s roots and bones, but my desk, for example, a crab claw. It is there to be admired. also the materials that generated it, as the buildings are I reach into my coat pocket at work and find the vertebrae clad in the limestone that underpins it. To know what we of a small animal. In my desk drawer, in a jewelry box, look up at, we have to look down. We have to dig. there is a desiccated lizard, a birthday present from a five- Vincent Kuntz, gardener, contractor, contra-dancer, year-old boy. The rocks that the children pretend to cook tells me where to start. in the play kitchen are chunks of Devonian limestone that “You want to know what the soil is like, ask someone contain fossils and were found on the shores of the lake. who digs holes for a living,” says Kuntz. He is out at 7 a.m. Occasionally I find on my desk the wingless moth or shell- on a Sunday morning to transplant tomatoes and survey less snail, tenderly placed in a shoebox, collateral in a quest the community garden he maintains. He has been digging or inspecting holes for a living for about four decades and to understand by taking apart. Immersed in their place, children take it all in. They see his curiosity has sparked and grown. We walk and talk and experience place without filter, in all its dimensions. around the garden, to the plastic trash cans filled with soil Thoreau wrote, in “A Natural History of Massachusetts”: that he has excavated from various projects around the city. 46 BCM 40
“The ground holds not only the city’s roots and bones, but also the materials that generated it.” “This one came from North Street, close to Allentown,” says Kuntz. He shows me a sand-clay mix that feels smooth and cool when I bury my hand in it. The shores of the inland sea, which stretched from Ontario to Alabama, deposited sand. “If you dig in Allentown, it’s sand,” Kuntz tells me. “You have to dig wide to get deep when you have that much sand.” Kuntz has an eye for how Buffalo’s hidden topography moves what is above, tipping houses, sinking them, moving water in mysterious ways through basements. He describes whole neighborhoods where a row of houses has been sunk because they sit astride a buried former waterway, now silted in, or another house whose walls are all falling outwards because of the shifting ground. He himself came to this realization of the hidden topography as he was planting a ginkgo tree one day. “I was digging through solid clay with a bar, and I was ready to stop but the tree really needed another couple of inches. So I took one more whack with the bar and it went right through and sank in something soft,” he says. He had broken through the last layer of clay and hit sand. He realized that the lower level of his house had punctured the clay layer and was percolating water along with the sand, hence a perpetually flooding bathroom. “Now I always look at the strata when I am digging,” says Kuntz.
The Buffalo River curves its arm around Silo City before exiting into the harbor. As of the 1970s and ’80s, the Buffalo was an invisible river. The shores were owned by industry and access was almost nonexistent; it was possible to grow up in the area without ever setting eyes on or dipping a toe in the river. The water winds its way over and under Buffalo’s topography and is the source of life for the city, which began to grow in the 1820s as the end point of the Erie Canal. The Canal was both the connecting point and the point of transience. Buffalo was where the network of waters to the west converged with water and train travel to the east. Buffalonians already knew who they were, but now they believed, in themselves and in their city, which thrived on the flow of people, ideas and, of course, money, some of it above ground, some below. The network of the
Underground Railroad flowed through the city, with the Niagara River as the last border. Whereas the river seems like a vehicle to downtown commercial activity, the people fishing seem to amplify the sense of water and nature. They are so calm and attuned to the water. Unity Island used to be known in Seneca language as Deyowenoguhdoh, or “Divided Island,” because of the stream that cut through the middle. The island itself has been filled in, covered in landfill and built up as a wastewater treatment facility. Long piers extend from each end of the island, barren fingers of concrete that point north and south. Yet like the many migratory birds who visit, people flock to the island and find their peace there. Byron Johnson is one of them. “I come out here because I can get away from everybody,” says Johnson. He and Lionel Rogers are the faithful, out on a gray chilly day following a storm that has churned up the bottom of the river. They are at the very end of the pier, which is the most epic place to stand, just one narrow tongue of concrete that is either where the city ends or extends. With the river wide open on the left, Black Rock Canal idling on the right and Grand Island straight ahead, somehow standing there has the effect of a fisheye lens. Johnson, 29, has taken Rogers under his wing to learn to fish, something new he is picking up at 30. While we talk, Rogers reels in a rock bass the size of his hand. He carefully unhooks it and throws it back, but not before one of the spikes cuts him. He casts off again. To me, fishing looks like divination, a telegraph line to the underwater world. “I’m a water person. I have to live near the water,” says Johnson. “Couldn’t live elsewhere.” I ask Johnson if he has learned to read the river and he says he doesn’t, then dives deep into a discussion about how the current works where we stand and why he picked his spot. He always fishes at the same one or two places, as do many who come here. “One guy, he bikes out, drops off his tent, sets up ten poles, and then comes out at two or three in the morning,” says Johnson. “His girlfriend comes down. His dog, he just camps out.” Both Johnson and Rogers speak to the peaceful vibe of the fishing community, a vibe fully born out by Tonya Farley and family who are camped out by the nearby pond. BCM 40 47
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Farley sits in a chair with her pole. Her husband fishes 50 meters down, and the children play or watch. The adults are not the only ones who catch anything. The children trap and release frogs, minnows, turtles and crayfish. Farley’s son skips around in a raincoat, pajama pants and rubber boots, looking delighted with his evening at the river. Farley fished with her dad when she was little and now comes out with her family several times a week to different spots on the river. “The people who fish down at this pier are diverse, all races, all ages. Calm. No judgment. People walk in, look in your bucket, ask ‘What did you catch?’ It’s good for the community. People share their worms, their minnows. There are other kids who come out and they all play together. It’s relaxing.” Unlike Byron Johnson, Tonya Farley and her family rarely eat the fish, although she understands why people do. “People can get sick [from food poisoning] from other meats, and eating fish is pretty healthy compared to some foods, plus it feels more natural,” says Farley. However, she has a lot of concern about the potential contamination. She is aware that industry has affected the river and at some of her spots she notices debris circles where trash eddies and collects on the river. She is from North Tonawanda and worries that air pollution will start to pollute the waters, too. Both Johnson and Farley can rattle off a list of river species: black bass, yellow perch, muskie, catfish, steelhead, and the sturgeon, which Johnson describes as “prehistoric, like a dinosaur, up to 15 feet long,” doubling their actual size in true fisherman fashion, though seven feet long is still impressive. Farley tells me that the bass will spawn in a week, always around the same date, when the river temperature is right. Buffalo could have a calendar of river activity: when the ice floes break up and go down the river, when the dead fish fill the Black Rock Canal, when the fish spawn, when the waterfowl pass. It is a calendar the fishers are faithful to, as they are faithful to the peace of the river. Many of the folks fishing off the pier are recent refugees to Buffalo, one of the many streams of change in the city in recent years. From 2010 to 2014, 14,665 refugees were estimated to have arrived to the city, a number solely responsible for reversing the population decline. To go back to the Erie Canal, to the influx of railroad and waterways, these streams water and nourish the city. They flush out 50 BCM 40
stagnant waters and bring new ideas. At its best, Buffalo is open and embraces. At its worst, Buffalo dumps toxic shit in the water. It does make for a beautiful sunset—a fiery conflagration—but a little toxicity takes a long time to clean up. Water is transition and change, it is a sea of humanity of which we are all part and parcel, and it is connection.
When I turn the corner from a north-south avenue onto an east-west street I often find myself fighting against the wind to walk or bike. I can’t say I think about the wind, or the air, except for when it is adversely affecting me. If children are rooted in the earth, adults are of the air, with all of our noise and smoke and influence. Air is big-picture; everything rises into it. Big buildings punctuate the space and politicians fill it with talk, either meaningful or all hot. Ideas float by, to be grabbed at or observed, maybe pulled down for further exploration. If who we are is also rooted in the ground, then air is the most silent influence that gets into our breath and lungs, for better and worse. Erin Heaney, director of the Clean Air Coalition (CAC), sees what’s up there. “Sometimes the act of intentional looking, even if you have lived somewhere your whole life, is really powerful,” says Heaney. The members of the CAC are about people in Buffalo and the surrounding region who are living in communities impacted by air pollution. While I can appreciate the elements of earth and water with time in my garden or a walk to the river, and though I do appreciate breathing, harder to grasp is the element of air. CAC has organized opportunities for this intentional looking through various means, such as sending people out with cameras to document what is undermining or supporting health in their community; tours; oral history projects that are aggregated and presented back to the neighborhood; and interactive presentations of maps of air pollution releases. “The way we have set up our culture and economic system is to isolate folks,” says Heaney. “So people tend to experience air pollution problems as individuals. We have seen that the only chance we have at pushing back against big polluters is when people realize it is not an individual problem. That’s when we begin to build movements.” Heaney speaks to an elemental difference in people’s idea of home. “Many people’s first reaction when they hear there
“We perceive the air most often by its negative impacts, but we can’t afford to let it be defined by its pollution. We have to see the stink that is in the air of our society.” is poor air quality is, ‘Well, why don’t those people just leave?’ And people respond that home is an important place to them and this is part of their home. Also, people feel like pollution is part of [home’s identity], that this is just part of what it means to be in Buffalo.” For people with means and privilege, home can be just an idea. It can float, it can move at whim, a stark difference to the idea that home is rooted, that home is entwined with who we are, is entwined with a particular piece of soil. Not so the birds. In the realm of the air, wings are king. Buffalo skies are teeming with them, with 100,000 birds a day that touch down in fall and winter, many of them on their way to or from the West Indies, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Latin America, Greenland. Buffalo sits in the Niagara River Corridor Important Bird Area, the first such internationally recognized area. An IBA has to have two features: one, it must be vital to migratory species; two, it must be under threat. To stay in the domain of wings for longer, of ideas and pollination, we will drop into the pollination location of Dreamland, home to an art gallery/music venue/community space/other, where on this particular day maps of pollinator routes overlaid on a city map line the walls of the gallery. They are the work of Molly Burhans, MS student in ecological design at the Conway School in Massachusetts. The maps are part urban planning, part National Geographic map, part wildlife guide, with beautiful outward flowing lines that represent pollinator routes in the New England city that commissioned the study. Burhans began her ecological studies in the byways of Buffalo, her first classroom. “The ecosystem we live in is how I find my home. It roots me to a place. I can intellectually explore [it]. It becomes…not a library, but an educational space,” says Burhans. Her maps overlay the visibly urban and the vital but unseen creatures of the air, and the maps are also the end product of a process by which city residents envisioned a healthful future for themselves and their pollinators. “Urban ecology is a co-creative space. You can’t avoid it being defined by its urbanity; you can’t just say that human infrastructure is not going to be there. You have to make space to have healthier ecosystems,” says Burhans.
She elaborates that residents ended up locating an untold wealth of green space with which they could improve the health of the pollinator community. Buffalo has 120 parks, 10,000 vacant lots and 400 community gardens, not to mention undefined space along utility lines and in the margins of rails, rivers and highways. The City of Buffalo, in the environmental section of its Comprehensive Plan, declares “one of the functions of planning is to preserve resources for future use when immediate action is not feasible. Implementation can be incremental, but the vision can be long-term.” The city is clear: the vision has to be long-term, and we should be deliberate rather than hasty in our collective use of un-built city space. In our deliberate vision we could imagine connections to be made, such as designing channels of access to the waterfront for every neighborhood across socio-economic backgrounds, or right-sizing the expressway into a parkway. We might put resources into a community-led, just transition from former industrial sites to sustainable use. Where connection begins, possibility abounds. We perceive the air most often by its negative impacts, but we can’t afford to let it be defined by its pollution. Vision carries a double action: to generate and to perceive. We have to see the stink that is in the air of our society and locate its sources. And we have to generate the air that we want to breathe, with succulent ideas and right speech, with open windows and not closed doors. Any one point in an ecological system is a connecting point, containing each of the other elements and relating to them. Any one person is an ecological agent, who by attending to the relationships around them strengthens their place in the world. Who are you? Are you a person who looks into the roots of things, who peers into the earth where others may or may not look to find out what is there? Do you shape the clay and share the story of those roots? Maybe you attune to the waters, and bring that peace back home each day. Do you connect, do you make visible unseen currents of power, or generate vision that others can take hold of? The wonder of our home and of our ecology is that we have a place in it and that we are all needed. Everything we need in order to know that is at our fingertips. BCM 40 51
Leadership Buffalo’s 4th Annual Recruitment
open house Learn about LB & Meet Alumni I Grand Opening of New Offices
July 30th I 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. @ The 500 Seneca Street Atrium Free for prospects and paid LB Members, $25 for non-paid LB members
Event Sponsors:
RSVP by July 24: www.leadershipbuffalo.org/calendar I 716-849-2626 I LB@leadershipbuffalo.org
Camp Good days
Camp Rules: Make friends. Be silly. Bring love to life. Camp Good Days has provided special times for kids and families impacted by cancer since 1979. Our summer camp sessions and year-round events are all at no cost to families, making Camp an easy choice during very difficult times. Please consider joining our Camp family. We rely heavily on the compassion and support of hundreds of local businesses and volunteers. Learn more about the many ways to get involved: CampGoodDays.org
SHORT FICTION
The Good Life He imagined the filth that must be down there and how just a few feet above was this beautiful and clean place. How the membrane between good and bad seemed razor thin in all things. by BRIAN MIHOK
R
iding a bicycle served as an in-between for Stuart. Pure exercise with just enough purpose. The biggest obstacle to a virtuously active lifestyle was Stuart’s lack of mechanical know-how. He knew there must always be drag in opposition to a desire. Some sort of test against its strength— for example, to want a sandwich is tested by the will to drive to the store if there is no bread. More appropriately, to pay for a tune up was the drag against having a bicycle in working order. A bike ride it seemed was the perfect patch to the flattening tire of his health. The man at the bicycle shop was young and fit. Stuart suspected he biked for an entirely different reason. For Stuart the rides served two purposes. First, to move as many of his muscles as he could without bringing on the spiritual ennui of workouts. Second, so that he could say, more to himself than to anyone else, that he exercised. That he was not sliding down the Great Hill at a gradually increasing speed with every night in, every extra plate of noodles, every long session of building up the courage to socialize. Most
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nights resulted in excessive comfort of his youngish muscles and joints, and this comfort seemed only to ease him further into a resting place that would end in an acute myocardial infarction in his sixties. A moment when his heart would give out and he might, in his lights-out moment, think of the long ago imaginary bicycle rides that could have thwarted the entire debacle of his life. Most thoughts like this occurred to him in his house, his place of rest, of summoning excess. So much rest that the very sight of it sometimes made him tired. Stuart was a full battery that had sat in a charger for too long. The man at the bicycle shop did not put Stuart’s bike through any mechanical triage. He said tune-ups were $60 and the bike would be ready in three days. Stuart—who had a secret hope that the man might take the bike and tune it up right then, sending Stuart on his way, healthy bicycle and future intact—took the ticket from the man and convinced himself instead that three days was reasonable. Stuart drove home the long way, which allowed him to stop for lunch at a place that served the best tacos in town.
illustrations by JULIE MOLLOY He ordered fish tacos and sat by the window. It was then, between the first and second tacos, that Stuart suspected something about himself. Suspected rather than realized because he did not yet believe it to be true. The bicycling, the need to tell himself he exercised, the reasonable three days for the tuneup, the excuse to take the long way home so he could eat at this place, were all symptoms of a need to think on the lighter side of possibility. It was a hopeful but deranged kind of optimism. To see the potential in all things and feel comfort in such goodness no matter how small. The world was an infinite set of tradeoffs, every happening, every choice a presentation to be sifted into good and bad, regardless of the predominance of either. He wondered if this was a survival mechanism he could blame on his childhood. Or perhaps his mind was simply obsessive and tilted by nature. He thought about his house. How he really didn’t want to go back to it. How he didn’t really associate it with home. Instead it was a building in this town where he kept his luxurious things. His house was a giant memory foam mattress. The very idea of relaxation was sickening. Also as an overlay was a mysterious loyalty he felt sometimes. This feeling was not connected to a place. He felt it for the house in the beginning, years before, but now when he walked in the door there was a powerful silence, as if a high-pitched tone screamed out at all times. He could get nothing done in the house but also could not bring himself to do much else. The bicycle stood for something to do with the loyalty but he could not name what it was. He finished and wrapped his trash into a ball and heard tires screeching, a metal smack and broken glass trickling. At the intersection there were two cars. One had rear-ended the other with enough force that the impact had completely compacted the trunk of the first car. Stuart reached for his phone and waited a moment to see if the damage to the cars was the worst of it. The drivers walked slowly to the crunch point. No ambulatory care appeared urgently needed and bystanders on the sidewalks were bunching. Some had their hands on their heads. The drivers spoke to each other calmly, like old acquaintances flabbergasted after coming upon a dead cow. Stuart looked up and down the street to the traffic piling up. The roads here were dangerous thoroughfares with constant congestion. The crash, the parking lot, the entire design of the roads sickened Stuart a little. He wondered about progressive places that must have outlawed cars or roads like these by now. Maybe Denmark or Greenland or Massachusetts.
Three days later he picked up his bike and when he got back to the house he didn’t bother going in. Instead he took it out of the hatchback and went for a ride. The muscles in his quads burned when he had to peddle up even the slightest inclines. Still, it felt right as if the summer would begin its song in key. He invited Alison over for dinner and they made asparagus and lentils with fennel and lemon. Stuart met Alison at work. She was an Information Specialist, though Stuart did not know what that meant. Alison made jokes about using jelly beans instead of fennel, and Stuart caught himself watching her cut the ends of the vegetables. Would you like to go on a bike ride with me sometime? Stuart said. I haven’t been on a bicycle since middle school, Alison said. There’s an obvious joke I can make, he said. Okay, Alison said. Okay, tell the joke? Or okay, you’ll go? Stuart said.
That night Stuart lay in bed alone and was pleased with Alison’s kindness. He realized how unpleasant the prospect of a bike ride is if the last time you were on a bike was at least two two-term presidents ago. In fact, she was kind the entire night and it made him feel affection for her. She had brought over a bottle of wine. She laughed at the jokes he made that were funny and smiled brightly at the jokes that weren’t. She put her hand to his face and kissed him appropriately at the end of the night. The next best thing to being kind yourself is surrounding yourself with kindness, Stuart figured. If he was with someone kind it might serve as a perpetual catalyst for his own positivity and compassion. As if loving a kind person was better than not allowing yourself to love an unkind person. In the moment between waking and sleep when the mind is willing to follow any path to any end, Stuart went on a trip with Alison to a foreign country. Nobody in the country spoke any words they recognized. Stuart and Alison were hungry but were only offered water. Alison kept motioning to the people while Stuart sat silent and frustrated, refusing to help further. Alison said, Tooth, I think we’re in business. Tooth? Stuart said. Tooth? Alison said. No, I said food. The next morning Stuart went to the kitchen to run some water for coffee. He stared without purpose through the window but awoke a second time when the tarp, which he used to cover his bike, was unfurled. After he put on his slippers he went outside and pulled back the tarp to reveal BCM 40 57
his bike lock, unbroken but also unlocked. Apparently his attempt to clasp the lock together was a failure the night before. His bike was gone and he looked around in case it was one of those dumb thieves like on television who steal from their neighbors. The morning was cold so he folded his arms, refusing to go back inside. Going back in would complete the event and even though Stuart could accept just about anything, what he couldn’t was denying a moment its proper time—its actionless movement from one second to the next, so that when the seconds were through there were no other options but to move on. He waited, goosebumps rising on his calves, and when he had waited long enough and nothing had changed, he looked around, breathed softly and walked back up the steps to the side door. The pitch inside the house hurt his ears. He looked at the couch and couldn’t bring himself to sit on it. The picture window in the living room was large enough that the couch could make it through with plenty of clearance. He imagined it falling from the second floor onto the front lawn, splitting into a bulky couple of pieces. The adrenaline in his veins made the very idea of sitting seem preposterous, but Stuart knew the energy would pass. I want the life force, he said out loud and thought of himself as an engine having puttered all these years on leaded fuel. He wanted to be revved, to barrel down an empty street looking for the mystery of home. He wanted to be loyal to something important. He wanted rapture. A pain went sharp to his mouth. He sent his tongue searching but it did not find anything. His finger followed and when he pulled it out he saw nothing on it but saliva. His tooth, though, was pounding. The strange hope he had pondered about earlier in the week allowed him to think the pain would pass. Most pains signify nothing, he thought. But even his natural ability to reason the unreasonable could not deny extremism, and this pain was extreme. He began to worry and looked up the number of a dentist. The woman on the phone asked if it was an emergency and Stuart said he did not know, that that is why he was calling. The woman seemed confused but agreed to fit him in tomorrow.
On the little brown table in the office were four magazines, but Stuart didn’t bother with them. He sat in the quiet room a few minutes until realizing he probably had to sign in. He went back to the magazines after writing his name and continued to not look at them. The room had the smell of sterility but all it reminded him of was disease. 58 BCM 40 34
Then the hygienist came in and said how are you today? like she meant you are here now and this is what we say to those that are here now to let you know that we know you are here now and showed him to a different chair in a back room. The dentist came in and also asked how he was and Stuart showed him his mouth and the dentist inspected Stuart’s throbbing tooth. I don’t see an abscess or any decay, the dentist said. The dentist ordered X-rays and hid behind a lead wall while radiation bombarded Stuart’s upper body in yet a different chair. After a few minutes, back in the exam room, the dentist put up a sheet on the light board. There’s something inside it, he said. Something? Stuart said. Looks like it. You have two choices. Leave it in or take it out. If it stays put you can try to fight it with a prescription, the dentist said. Fight what, Stuart said. Whatever it is, the dentist said. Stuart paid $20 for his visit and left. On the way home he stopped at the park to sit beneath one of the big oak trees and watch the traffic. Sometimes the city sewers made the air smell rotten and it was smelling rotten right then in the park. He imagined the filth that must be down there and how just a few feet above was this beautiful and clean place. How the membrane between good and bad seemed razor thin in all things. Not as if they were the same, though maybe sometimes they were, but that they were each on their side of the membrane waiting to infect the other. To turn the other in an opposite direction because good and bad only travel in opposites. Everything from the last week was a mixture in his head: the exhaustion of relaxing, the bicycle rides, Alison’s kindness, his desire for the life force. He was on the edge of an era in his life, about to leap over the gap to another. The future was dim with haze and low sounds he couldn’t quite make out. He needed to fill his prescription. He needed to get a new bike. He needed to be like those progressive places without cars and roads. Always moving forward. Thinking ahead. He needed to long for something real but didn’t know what it should be. The sun came out and lit up the grass white and green. Above anything else, Stuart realized, he wanted to be good. He wanted to do good things. To help people. To learn. To do what was needed. To sure up the great divider and say, look, this is the boundary and I am on this, the side of everything that lives forever.
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Local
summer sweetness at the Co-op
807 Elmwood Avenue, Bualo, NY 716-886-2667 | www.lexington.coop
Open to everyone 7am-11pm daily 60 BCM 40
LAST ENCOUNTER
Front, L to R: Patrick Finan, Ryan McMullen, Miles the Doodle, Julie Molloy, Margaret Finan. Back: Brandon Davis, Tim Staszak, Ben Siegel, Steve Soroka, Dave Horesh, Pat Sandora-Nastyn. Photo by Rich Mattingly.
Block Club magazine is made by its community. Our team has always been small, agile and diverse of talent. As we say goodbye to the magazine, we look forward as we shift our time to our branding and strategy clients. The work that made this magazine happen—six times a year for four years, four times a year for four—has required an extended family of contributors. Together, we told stories that we found interesting and compelling, and thought you might, too. We are proud to have paid our contributors for their hard work; in return they offered their tenacity, creativity, scrutiny and passion, ensuring the highest quality for our readers and reputation. Thank you for all that you gave to our pages: Shea Akers, Ann Marie Awad, Lauren Barnett, E.R. Barry, Lydia Beebe, Harper Bishop, Katie Boyd, Stephen Boyd, Mark Brickey, Beth Manos Brickey, Woody Brown, Jordan Burby, Aimee Buyea, Jim Byrne, Mark Byrnes, Candace Camuglia, John Chiappone, Leslie Church, Emily Churco, Max Collins, Jennifer Connor, Danielle Cook, Luke Copping, Greg Corbi, Chelsea Craddock, Kelly DiDomenico, Tom Durante, Eric DuVall, Michael
Farrell, Joan Fedyszyn, Bruce Fisher, Michael Flatt, Chris Fritton, Nick Gordon, Ariel Gore, Brian Grunert, Erin Habes, Amy Halterman, Chris Hawley, Michael Horsley, Charlotte Hsu, Will Ingalls, Lori Joyce, Geoff Kelly, Deion Kim, Peter Larson, Scott Mancuso, Alix Martin, Lauren Newkirk Maynard, Dana McKnight, Jennifer McQuilkin, Nick Mendola, Brian Mihok, Sarah Ruth Offhaus, Clifton Page, R.B. Pillay, Abigail Purcell, Kevin Purdy, Courtney Remm, Elisabeth Samuels, William Sandora-Nastyn, Dave Saracino, Peter Scheck, Lizz Schumer, Taylor Schupp, Kyle Schwab, Tyler Schwab, Amy Senese, Christa Glennie Seychew, Laura Sikes, Dani Simon, Patrick Simons, Justin Sondel, Shasti O’Leary Soudant, Alexandra Sperrazza, Megan Swanson, Alan Sylvestre, Lauren Tagliaferro, David Torke, Marie Walsh, Adam Weekley, Chastity West, Laura Zorch and anyone else who has ever pitched in to help. Last, but certainly not least, we’d like to thank you, our loyal readers, valued advertisers and die-hard supporters. You made every page worth printing. Keep wanting better, and please, keep in touch. Much love, Block Club. BCM 40 61
The Hodge : sofa The Essex : side table
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