You may have seen the T-shirt available in recent days that added the words “Cloudy Eclipse” to Buffalo’s Mount Rushmore of sports heartbreaks – “Wide Right,” “No Goal” and “13 Seconds.”
Many in the region Monday were thrilled by their overall total solar eclipse experience, which included the sudden afternoon fade from light to darkness, while many others viewed the once-in-a-lifetime event under the narrative cloud that has long hung over the Buffalo psyche.
You know the one: Buffalo = crushing sports losses, mounds of snow and chicken wings.
There is also another narrative, hinted by a downtown mural that reads “KEEP BUFFALO A SECRET.”
In that narrative, a revitalized Buffalo emerged four decades removed from the devastating effects of shuttered steel plants and 30 years from the last of the four straight Super Bowl losses by its beloved Bills.
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Think the waterfront and parks. Arts and cultural attractions and homegrown artists. Buffalo as a magnet for immigrants renewing neighborhoods. Our enduring reputation as a “City of Good Neighbors,” evident after the mass shooting nearly two years ago at a Tops supermarket.
There are the pleasant summers that make up for our winters, and homes that cost less – sometimes several times less – than those in other cities.
“When I first started my job, there was a tremendous civic inferiority complex – a pervasive pessimism and negativity with a sense that Buffalo couldn’t accomplish anything,” said Ed Healy, vice president of marketing at Visit Buffalo Niagara, who started with the tourism organization in 2001. “If you still feel that way about Buffalo, you haven’t been paying attention.”
Buffalo’s reputation has changed “tremendously” during those years, measured by the positive press the city now regularly receives all around the country, he said.
That includes access to the waterfront, something pretty much off-limits to Buffalonians when this century began.
“Members of the media come and are sometimes skeptical of Buffalo, or burdened by some of the stereotypes and clichés,” Healy said. “But inevitably they leave blown away by what we have here.”
‘It doesn’t get any better’
Take the city’s late 19th- and early 20th-century architecture that gleams in our midst. It wasn’t that long ago that dozens of historic buildings downtown were vacant or in disrepair. Now it’s hard to find one unrestored.
Three colossal landmarks that sat unused and in decline for decades – the Richardson Olmsted Campus, Trico and the Statler – are under renovation, and a developer was recently announced for a fourth, the Central Terminal.
“In my line of work, it doesn’t get any better than this,” Richard Moe, then-president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, told The Buffalo News in 2007. “To come here and in one day see the best of Upjohn, Sullivan, Richardson, Wright, Saarinen and Olmsted – nowhere else, nowhere else in the United States, with the possible exception of Chicago, do you see the rich array of 19th- and 20th-century architecture that you have here in Buffalo.”
Delaware Park attracted its usual crowd of runners, walkers and early-season golfers on Monday. But there were also visitors like Seth and Laura Bailey, who drove six hours from Middlebury, Conn., to experience the eclipse with their 19-month-old daughter, Lylah Moon.
The city has numerous arts and cultural destinations, beginning with the recently completed expansion, restoration and renovation of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, one of the world’s greatest repositories for modern and contemporary art.
When it comes to producing theaters, Buffalo punches way above its weight.
“I have been in larger cities when traveling around the country that seem to have fewer smaller, independent theaters,” said Anthony Chase, an assistant dean at SUNY Buffalo State University and theatre critic starring in the one-man show, “My Life in the Audience.”
It’s also little wonder that Buffalo is now a destination for filmmakers, with a second movie studio readying to open on Niagara Street.
“Buffalo has a kind of power, the power of the authentic place,” architecture critic and author Paul Goldberger has said.
We also get to watch the films when they’re done, which is the case with “Cabrini,” now showing at the restored North Park Theatre and the renovated Amherst Theatre.
Even the city’s grain elevators have been given a second life, symbolized by the Connecting Terminal, viewed from Canalside and the Skyway, that sparkles at night with an array of colors.
Inequality remains persistent
It’s not all rosy, of course. Buffalo for decades, and particularly on the East Side, has suffered from high levels of poverty, low graduation rates, segregated housing and limited public transportation.
“I don’t know what it looks like for the Black community to get the same opportunities for economic stability or revitalization,” said Jillian Hanesworth, a poet who grew up on the East Side.
Hanesworth said there have been some tangible improvements, including improved parks in that part of the city, and the recent announcement that a new rapid transit bus line is coming to Bailey Avenue.
There has also been more public and private investment on the East Side in housing, infrastructure and historic properties than we’ve seen in decades.
What could give a better view for a once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse than Buffalo's waterfront?
“We have seen a lot of changes around the city and on the East Side. and we’ve seen a lot of community members lead these changes, and that’s beautiful to see,” Hanesworth said. “But even so, we have a long way to go in order to make our community as equitable as it has the potential to be.”
Hanesworth, 31, doesn’t share the pain emblazoned on the T-shirt broadcasting the eclipse and Buffalo’s sports failures.
“People like me who were born in the early ‘90s know the history of the steel plants and the Buffalo Bills,” she said. “We know it, but we don’t feel it. We didn’t feel the disappointment when the Bills lost. We didn’t feel the financial weight of the steel plants closing and people losing their jobs. We didn’t feel the division that came with white flight as it was happening.
“We feel the scar but we didn’t feel the injury,” she said.
Historian Mark Goldman said younger people don’t feel saddled by the past.
“This generation of Buffalonians realizes the well-being of our soul and spirit as a community is no longer dependent on the weather or the performance of our sports teams,” Goldman said. “While we all revel in a Bills victory and embrace the beauty of a balmy summer’s day, sports and weather do not define who we are.”
‘Buffalo is an underdog town’
The Rev. Steve Biegner – pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Eggertsville, and a Bills season ticket holder – figuratively lives and dies with the team every Sunday.
“As a person of faith, people often ask ‘Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?’ It feels like that as a Buffalo sports fan,” he said. “But the reality is, following sports brings more joy and hope and great moments with family and friends than anything else we do. When the Bills are hot, nothing (else) is really happening between 1 and 4:15 on a Sunday afternoon.”
Biegner said he recognizes the pessimistic outlook shared by hardened Buffalo sports fans.
“We are used to being the underdog, and Buffalo is an underdog town,” he said, “so we are very out of sorts when we are actually predicted to be good.”
Biegner said his son Drew, 23, who grew up in Clarence, knows little about the Super Bowl losses, and couldn’t identify that era’s Bills greats Marv Levy, Thurman Thomas, Bruce Smith or Jim Kelly in a police lineup.
“As a lifelong Buffalo fan, it was painful to have my son grow up idolizing the antichrist and his minions in New England,” Biegner said with a laugh, declining to say whether coach Bill Belichick or quarterback Tom Brady was the greatest nemesis.
It also bears mentioning that the Bills have been to the playoffs five straight years and quarterback Josh Allen, one week shy of turning 28, is expected to give Buffalo a shot at a Super Bowl win for several more years to come.
That’s something many other NFL cities could only hope for.
Dual narratives
Shira Gabriel, a University at Buffalo psychology professor, said the two ways of looking at Buffalo – call it half-full and half-empty – can be true at the same time.
“With Buffalo, there are dual narratives,” Gabriel said “There is the ‘Wide Right,’ ‘No Goal’ narrative about this city, but then there are also a lot of people who share this idea of us as a growing, vibrant, artistic amazing place to live – the ‘Keep Buffalo a Secret’ narrative that I think is also real and gaining traction.
“You can hold both at the same time,” she said. “My guess is most people in Buffalo believe both of those things, at least to some degree.”
The same can be said of those in Buffalo during the eclipse.
Other metro regions and states, including in Texas, had cloudy weather, too.
Healy, of Visit Buffalo Niagara, said he met people Monday at SUNY Buffalo State who came as far away as North Carolina, California, New Jersey and Canada to see the total eclipse.
“They were all having a great time, and were really impressed with Buffalo,” Healy said. “Even though they were standing under overcast skies, I kept hearing, ‘I can’t wait to come back. There’s so much to do here.’”