(no subject)
Aug. 25th, 2008 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Article in NY Metro about leaving New York for a new life in Buffalo
Saw this in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tyellas's LJ, and started to respond there, but wrote an essay, so I stuck it here instead.
What a cute, patronizing little article. It's very New York. My grandmother was from New York, Manhattan to be exact, back when people actually lived on Manhattan and could afford to both live and work there. (She was born in 1917.) She had a poster on her wall, a New York Magazine cover. It had a map of the world, one of those 3/4 perspective birds-eye view maps. It started off with a big map of Manhattan, with the cross streets marked. Then there was a lump that said "New Jersey". Then there was a lump that said "California." Then there was a lump that said "Asia".
Pretty good depiction of how New Yorkers see the world.
I did almost exactly what is detailed in that story. I was living with my boyfriend in Westchester County, just north of the Bronx, and lost my job. He wanted to go back to school. He was making $60,000 a year but really wanted to finish his degree.
So we packed up and moved back to Buffalo. (He's from here, and his then-recently-widowed mother still lives here in the house her parents bought when they came over from Old Country.)
I love it here.
The area has been bleeding people for so long that you would think nobody could be left, but I haven't found that to be the case at all. One thing that article never mentions? It is still, to this day, and has always been, the second-largest city in New York State after NYC. It's a distant second, but it's still a huge city, with a massive ring of suburbs. It used to be larger-- it now has the exact same population it did during the World's Fair in 1901, when it was on the upswing-- but that means, there are still a lot of people here.
I'm happier here than I've ever been anywhere else. People have time to be polite. We're not quite Easterners; we're Great Lakes, so our accent is a little different, our manners are a little different, our timing at stoplights is a little different.
We have time to talk to people. We are accepting of outsiders. We are friendly to tourists, because while we get a lot (Niagara Falls, hello?) we're not overwhelmed with them. We are friendly to strangers, because we automatically assume that we're somehow related to them or know somebody who is. (I was let into a nightclub the other night, even though I'd forgotten my ID, because I knew someone the bouncer knew. Me! I knew somebody!)
I joined a roller derby league here. In New York, I would not have even made tryouts. (We had visitors come up from the Gotham Girls, to help ref one of our bouts, and they mentioned that they pretty much have tryouts for their tryouts.) In Buffalo, I took nearly six months to master the basic skills, and still made it onto a team. (Though as the league grows, that's less and less true, to my sorrow. As we ramp up to national competition, we no longer have time to train the completely unskilled; also, as we get more publicity and attention, we tend to attract more people who can already skate.)
And yet, we have much better attendance at our bouts, and much better sponsorships and support from the community; the Gotham refs were drooling over the support we get. The Gotham Girls are fifth (out of hundreds) in the nation, while we are unranked. They could crush us anyday. They have several of the best roller derby players currently rolling, some of the best players ever to strap on wristguards.
But we have more fans, bigger attendance at our bouts, sponsorships from local businesses, support from local media.
We're a relatively bigger fish, in a smaller pond. More to the point, we're a reasonably-sized fish, in a reasonably-sized pond. Buffalo is not a small pond. But New York isn't even a pond at all, it's an ocean, or possibly even a waterfall.
(There isn't even a roller rink in NYC. There is not one suitable skating surface in NYC. GGRD practices on a portable floor set up in an old warehouse, for which privelege they pay two or three times as much as we do; for a full season, they had to practice outdoors on concrete because they just had no other options. Normal schmoes, or friends who are interested in maybe trying out but need to learn to skate first? Shit out of luck: there is not one place in NYC where you can rollerskate.)
Buffalo doesn't have incandescently great Thai cuisine, but that's OK; you can't roll down a street without hitting at least two excellent wing joints, a fantastic Italian place, a decent ethnic restaurant (either Polish, or more recently sushi), or a funky crunchy granoly vegan place (depending on the neighborhood), so I'm not really feeling the lack too acutely. I eat much better here than I did in New York because I can afford to do it more often.
I know of what I speak; I was the food reviewer for the local weekly for two years. Would THAT have ever happened in New York? Hells no.
I miss New York once in a while, but I don't really; it was an hour-long train ride away at best. Here, I can afford to work my shitty job or no job at all, and I have a garden, and I still don't need a car, and most importantly, I have my roller derby team.
And everything is only ten minutes away not because the city is collapsing inward-- that doesn't actually happen to cities, usually the sprawl just increases around the empty ring of the deserted downtown, so I don't really understand the causation the writer was trying to imply-- but because the city was designed before automobiles, and has only had a few disastrous post-war renovations to destroy it with freeways etcetera. Poverty preserves. That's the point they forget to make. Those places, like Buffalo, like my hometown of Troy NY, who had a big boom and then collapsed: our architecture, our infrastructure, our neighborhoods remain fossilized, quaint and old and shabby, but not torn down for modernization because we barely have enough money to collect the garbage and plow the snow, let alone tear down old neighborhoods to put in a freeway. (Well, except the once. Yeah, sorry, East Side.)
Troy's revival is more or less complete-- you can no longer snap up a nineteenth-century townhouse downtown for a song, and go in and find the original woodwork untouched and some of the original furnishings, priceless antiques now, stored in the basement.
Buffalo is a bit newer-- it was burned to the ground during the War of 1812, so almost no buildings from before that time exist. Troy had its heyday in the early nineteenth century, so the architecture is a little older. Buffalo is mostly late Victorian, but magnificently so. There was some real money here, and a lot of craftsmen. There are whole blocks of derelict Victorians, porches sagging and leaded-glass windows boarded up with plywood.
Friends bought a mansion on Linwood Ave, walking distance from the Elmwood Village neighborhood mentioned in the article-- five stories, high Victorian, seven or eight bedrooms, original quarter-sawn oak paneling and hardwood floors on three stories. How much did it cost them? Less than $125,000. They had to replace the heating system and get the place professionally cleaned, but by no means did they have to gut it.
I live in a tidy two-bedroom bungalow on a quiet street in a nice neighborhood, with a front and back yard, garage, unfinished second storey, laundry room, and plenty of closet space. Three hundred dollars a month.
It's a far cry from my third-floor walk-up, on-street-parking, no laundry, no yard, half kitchen, miniature apartment in Westchester: $1500 a month.
One thing I will say: Buffalo smells way better than New York City did. Sometimes it's stinky, yes, but the main factory downtownish that gives off odors? General Mills. It smells like Cocoa Puffs downtown every Tuesday morning. Gives you the munchies something fierce.
Saw this in
tyellas's LJ, and started to respond there, but wrote an essay, so I stuck it here instead.What a cute, patronizing little article. It's very New York. My grandmother was from New York, Manhattan to be exact, back when people actually lived on Manhattan and could afford to both live and work there. (She was born in 1917.) She had a poster on her wall, a New York Magazine cover. It had a map of the world, one of those 3/4 perspective birds-eye view maps. It started off with a big map of Manhattan, with the cross streets marked. Then there was a lump that said "New Jersey". Then there was a lump that said "California." Then there was a lump that said "Asia".
Pretty good depiction of how New Yorkers see the world.
I did almost exactly what is detailed in that story. I was living with my boyfriend in Westchester County, just north of the Bronx, and lost my job. He wanted to go back to school. He was making $60,000 a year but really wanted to finish his degree.
So we packed up and moved back to Buffalo. (He's from here, and his then-recently-widowed mother still lives here in the house her parents bought when they came over from Old Country.)
I love it here.
The area has been bleeding people for so long that you would think nobody could be left, but I haven't found that to be the case at all. One thing that article never mentions? It is still, to this day, and has always been, the second-largest city in New York State after NYC. It's a distant second, but it's still a huge city, with a massive ring of suburbs. It used to be larger-- it now has the exact same population it did during the World's Fair in 1901, when it was on the upswing-- but that means, there are still a lot of people here.
I'm happier here than I've ever been anywhere else. People have time to be polite. We're not quite Easterners; we're Great Lakes, so our accent is a little different, our manners are a little different, our timing at stoplights is a little different.
We have time to talk to people. We are accepting of outsiders. We are friendly to tourists, because while we get a lot (Niagara Falls, hello?) we're not overwhelmed with them. We are friendly to strangers, because we automatically assume that we're somehow related to them or know somebody who is. (I was let into a nightclub the other night, even though I'd forgotten my ID, because I knew someone the bouncer knew. Me! I knew somebody!)
I joined a roller derby league here. In New York, I would not have even made tryouts. (We had visitors come up from the Gotham Girls, to help ref one of our bouts, and they mentioned that they pretty much have tryouts for their tryouts.) In Buffalo, I took nearly six months to master the basic skills, and still made it onto a team. (Though as the league grows, that's less and less true, to my sorrow. As we ramp up to national competition, we no longer have time to train the completely unskilled; also, as we get more publicity and attention, we tend to attract more people who can already skate.)
And yet, we have much better attendance at our bouts, and much better sponsorships and support from the community; the Gotham refs were drooling over the support we get. The Gotham Girls are fifth (out of hundreds) in the nation, while we are unranked. They could crush us anyday. They have several of the best roller derby players currently rolling, some of the best players ever to strap on wristguards.
But we have more fans, bigger attendance at our bouts, sponsorships from local businesses, support from local media.
We're a relatively bigger fish, in a smaller pond. More to the point, we're a reasonably-sized fish, in a reasonably-sized pond. Buffalo is not a small pond. But New York isn't even a pond at all, it's an ocean, or possibly even a waterfall.
(There isn't even a roller rink in NYC. There is not one suitable skating surface in NYC. GGRD practices on a portable floor set up in an old warehouse, for which privelege they pay two or three times as much as we do; for a full season, they had to practice outdoors on concrete because they just had no other options. Normal schmoes, or friends who are interested in maybe trying out but need to learn to skate first? Shit out of luck: there is not one place in NYC where you can rollerskate.)
Buffalo doesn't have incandescently great Thai cuisine, but that's OK; you can't roll down a street without hitting at least two excellent wing joints, a fantastic Italian place, a decent ethnic restaurant (either Polish, or more recently sushi), or a funky crunchy granoly vegan place (depending on the neighborhood), so I'm not really feeling the lack too acutely. I eat much better here than I did in New York because I can afford to do it more often.
I know of what I speak; I was the food reviewer for the local weekly for two years. Would THAT have ever happened in New York? Hells no.
I miss New York once in a while, but I don't really; it was an hour-long train ride away at best. Here, I can afford to work my shitty job or no job at all, and I have a garden, and I still don't need a car, and most importantly, I have my roller derby team.
And everything is only ten minutes away not because the city is collapsing inward-- that doesn't actually happen to cities, usually the sprawl just increases around the empty ring of the deserted downtown, so I don't really understand the causation the writer was trying to imply-- but because the city was designed before automobiles, and has only had a few disastrous post-war renovations to destroy it with freeways etcetera. Poverty preserves. That's the point they forget to make. Those places, like Buffalo, like my hometown of Troy NY, who had a big boom and then collapsed: our architecture, our infrastructure, our neighborhoods remain fossilized, quaint and old and shabby, but not torn down for modernization because we barely have enough money to collect the garbage and plow the snow, let alone tear down old neighborhoods to put in a freeway. (Well, except the once. Yeah, sorry, East Side.)
Troy's revival is more or less complete-- you can no longer snap up a nineteenth-century townhouse downtown for a song, and go in and find the original woodwork untouched and some of the original furnishings, priceless antiques now, stored in the basement.
Buffalo is a bit newer-- it was burned to the ground during the War of 1812, so almost no buildings from before that time exist. Troy had its heyday in the early nineteenth century, so the architecture is a little older. Buffalo is mostly late Victorian, but magnificently so. There was some real money here, and a lot of craftsmen. There are whole blocks of derelict Victorians, porches sagging and leaded-glass windows boarded up with plywood.
Friends bought a mansion on Linwood Ave, walking distance from the Elmwood Village neighborhood mentioned in the article-- five stories, high Victorian, seven or eight bedrooms, original quarter-sawn oak paneling and hardwood floors on three stories. How much did it cost them? Less than $125,000. They had to replace the heating system and get the place professionally cleaned, but by no means did they have to gut it.
I live in a tidy two-bedroom bungalow on a quiet street in a nice neighborhood, with a front and back yard, garage, unfinished second storey, laundry room, and plenty of closet space. Three hundred dollars a month.
It's a far cry from my third-floor walk-up, on-street-parking, no laundry, no yard, half kitchen, miniature apartment in Westchester: $1500 a month.
One thing I will say: Buffalo smells way better than New York City did. Sometimes it's stinky, yes, but the main factory downtownish that gives off odors? General Mills. It smells like Cocoa Puffs downtown every Tuesday morning. Gives you the munchies something fierce.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 03:25 pm (UTC)I love Buffalo, and you know how much I love and respect Western New York as a whole.
That article would have had a better thesis if a native New Yorker had moved to Buffalo. Otherwise, it's "People from non- or less-urban areas decide to get a better value and quality of living away from NYC."
That's not news.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 03:31 pm (UTC)I would've been more interested if anybody at all in the article had not already had some connection to Buffalo.
Most people who move here are from here. They've just gotten over themselves. (Though, as the comments on the article illustrate beautifully, there are pleeeeenty of Buffalo natives who cannot WAIT to slag off their hometown. Some of them never leave, but just stay, complaining, forever. So boring.)
But I think for some New Yorkers the whole idea of someone voluntarily leaving and BEING HAPPY afterwards is revolutionary. Let them take it in baby steps, honey.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 03:44 pm (UTC)I trash Buffalo good-heartedly, because I was born there, and after some traveling re-settled and grew up there. But, moving back to Buffalo for me is admitting i couldn't make it in the big bad world on my own... because Buffalo is Home.
Rochester is actually a very white-collar version of Buffalo; which is probably why i'm so comfortable here...
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 04:01 pm (UTC)garb questions...
you used me as a garb reference... (which still amuses me to no end)
*grin*
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 04:03 pm (UTC)I knew that. I swear.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 05:44 pm (UTC)Yes, we should make a point of meeting there. Pennsic as a first event ever was a great idea in terms of getting me enthused, but a bad idea in terms of actually meeting people in an organized and contextualized fashion. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 06:55 pm (UTC)Holy run-on sentance Batman!
Date: 2008-08-25 04:12 pm (UTC)Re: Holy run-on sentance Batman!
Date: 2008-08-25 05:08 pm (UTC)I'm not saying it's pretty-- I was driving through Riverside/Black Rock the other day, and Z said, "Man that's bleak," at all the industrial stuff on the northern end of what was Niagara Street (don't know if it changes names up there, I think it becomes Military?).
But uh, where else has she even been?
Re: Holy run-on sentance Batman!
Date: 2008-08-25 05:31 pm (UTC)when i was in HS we did a segment on Architecture and (since we weren't that far) walked up to Delaware and visited a bunch of the old buildings inside and out. Fantastic, and it was because of that trip (Loved the Red Cross building,wanted it to be my new house) that i learned to appreciate historic buildings
Re: Holy run-on sentance Batman!
Date: 2008-08-25 05:43 pm (UTC)My uncle works for the New York State Dep't of Historic Preservation. When he heard I was moving to Buffalo he went on and on about what a beautiful city it was, how much wonderful architecture there is now... I was raised appreciating historic architecture, so it's very nice for me to live here. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 06:11 pm (UTC)As for rollerskating though, did you mean practice space or just learn-to-skate space? Because I was in NYC on Sunday a few weeks ago and they had shut down this road near/around Central Park, a nice blacktop smooth road, for rollerbladers and bikers, both of whom were using it to great abandon. I'm not sure if it's just for a few hours on Sunday like the one in Boston, or if this is a permanent thing.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 09:42 pm (UTC)1) Playing the sport requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure and support staff
2) Before you can play, you have to put in an incredible amount of work to learn how to do it, and you must keep this work up in order to stay in the proper condition to do it safely (we require a minimum time commitment of about fifteen hours a month, every month)
3) There aren't that many roller derby leagues/facilities, so rink time is severely limited; most clubs have trouble even getting enough skate time for their A team, much less any others
The closest you can get is having a Fresh Meat team and having less-formal expo bouts. Or, I guess, letting people practice with you, and having that be their only experience. That hasn't worked out in the past, though-- they slow down the pace of drills, distract the skaters from the prep they need to do for bouting, and generally are unhappy themselves, as well.
But, in short, roller derby really isn't comparable to any sport that you can play on a field or in a multi-purpose space.
And no, you can't just play it a little. Either you play it seriously, for keeps, or you don't; the worst injuries are always, almost without exception, sustained during practices when the skater in question was not completely focused on play. Just Playing For A Bit Of Fun is the #1 way of getting yourself a career-ending tib-fib fracture or something of that sort.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-25 11:25 pm (UTC)And the 'poverty preserves' argument? Makes me think of Havana. Beautiful city that likely wouldn't have stayed that way if there'd been money to tear down old homes and build concrete and glass skyscrapers.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-26 12:54 am (UTC)Sigh.
We've done our share of boneheaded destruction-- recently, the oldest grain elevator in the world was torn down, with no asbestos abatement or permits of any kind, to make way for a casino that now is not going to be built, leaving a giant gap in the waterfront skyline and showering the housing projects with toxic dust. (Thank you, Seneca Nation!) But there are a lot of nice untouched neighborhoods.
This (http://estrip.org/elmwood/journals/index.php?u=matthew) is the photo journal of one of my friends, who takes tons of photos of local stuff. He and his... well, it's complicated, I guess you'd say "husbands"-- they're a gay triple, not couple-- co-own a gorgeous Victorian mansion downtown. It used to be the Episcopalian rectory, and was built in 1898. He's fairly artistically-inclined, and so has been focusing on restoring and furnishing it in a plausibly-authentic manner.
I live in a fairly soulless neighborhood, but two or three blocks over it's prewar and interesting-- little brick houses from the '10s and '20s, mostly, with cute little gardens.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-26 06:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 02:48 am (UTC)