dragonlady7

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So Buffalo is a big enough city to have a small, rotating cast of eccentrics. (Helps that rents had stayed low enough for them to afford the city, too.) Most of the ones I was familiar with have passed along– The White Lady, The Shoe Licker– but a perennial fixture just passed on.

On the corner of Allen St and Elmwood Ave https://www.google.com/maps/uv?pb=!1s0x89d31329b4c594ed%3A0xf671045fb9aba073!3m1!7e115!4s%2Fmaps%2Fplace%2Fallentown%2Bbubble%2Bman%2F%4042.8994583%2C-78.8771838%2C3a%2C75y%2C205.42h%2C90t%2Fdata%3D*213m4*211e1*213m2*211sd5mPm6eBvEwb8gkIaXXHlA*212e0*214m2*213m1*211s0x89d31329b4c594ed%3A0xf671045fb9aba073%3Fsa%3DX!5sallentown%20bubble%20man%20-%20Google%20Search!15sCgIgAQ&imagekey=!1e2!2sd5mPm6eBvEwb8gkIaXXHlA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi5yY70h8T1AhVRnuAKHR_6CCwQpx96BAgvEAM, in a residential/commercial neighborhood of Buffalo famous mostly for its quasi-bohemian bars and such, is a lovely old building. It’s three or four stories high, brick, with decorative flourishes like you only find in old architecture.

The lowest floor holds a Jim’s Steakout, a venerable local fast food joint that makes the world’s best chicken finger subs. This location is also renowned for how good the staff are at dealing with drunks. Buffalo’s bars stay open until 4am, and Jim’s is (was) open 24h, and thus it’s often the final stop for the sorts of people who stay up late enough to close a bar in a town like this.

The uppermost floor is an apartment. And in that apartment, for at least seventeen years, has lived a person, known largely as the Bubble Man.

Often in the afternoons, he would open the upper sash of the window facing the Allen St side of the intersection, and he would hold a wand of bubble mix in front of a fan pointing out the window.

Soap bubbles would cascade to the ground, falling like snow, three stories down, showering the picturesque (often grimily so) neighborhood with this incandescent whimsy.

It really added a surreal kind of beauty to the neighborhood. He didn’t necessarily do it during festivals or crowded times. It’s a very busy intersection, always has a lot of traffic, so I guess any time he did it, people would see. I never knew if he did it because he liked it, or because he felt compelled. Nobody I knew had ever spoken to him. But looking him up just now, I find he was a relative of the Steakout owners, and that he was ill himself, and that he blew the bubbles because he liked seeing people react to them.

Here’s a local TV station’s writeup https://www.wivb.com/news/local-news/buffalo/buffalos-bubble-man-of-allentown-dies-at-age-75/ . (Your picture was not posted)