All Gone to Look for America Read online

  Then the conductor calls out the already familiar ‘All aboard’ and I’m on the train again, rattling past freight yards and warehouses and along the banks of the river rushing towards its precipice. All bound for Buffalo. What a mistake that would turn out to be.

  NIAGARA FALLS TO BUFFALO

  TRAIN: Maple Leaf

  FREQUENCY: 1 a day

  DEPART NIAGARA FALLS, NY: 12:35 p.m.

  ARRIVE BUFFALO EXCHANGE ST, NY: 1:10 p.m.

  DURATION: 35 minutes

  DISTANCE: 23 miles

  5

  Buffalo’s Bill

  IT SAYS ALMOST EVERYTHING you need to know about the city of Buffalo today that the thing it is most famous for is chicken wings in sticky sauce. Taste doesn’t come into it.

  Once upon a time, arriving in Buffalo by rail was a truly memorable experience: alighting – possibly from the first class splendour of New York Central’s 20th Century Limited – in a magnificent art deco terminal that saw 30,000 passengers a day pass through. Buffalo boasted one of the country’s most splendid city halls, several of the influential architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s groundbreaking buildings, the grandest hotel of one of the world’s great chains and the first in the world to offer a bath in every room. Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who had designed New York’s Central Park, laid out its heart and immodestly proclaimed it the ‘best planned city as to its streets, public places and grounds in the United States, if not the world’. I was looking forward to it. I’d seen Bruce Almighty. Jim Carrey and God both hung out here. It couldn’t be that bad, could it? I had no idea. No idea at all!

  Arriving in Buffalo by rail today is still a memorable experience: like being thrown off a truck underneath Spaghetti Junction. The great railway terminal is derelict awaiting a slow process of restoration for office use. In the meantime it has been used as a set for low-budget horror films. The present ‘downtown’ station would be more suited to comedy: a tiny square brick bungalow on a traffic island dwarfed by overhead freeways. The address says I’m on Exchange Street but whatever was once exchanged here has long since been given away for nothing. The only thing that stands out amidst the sprawl of interlaced urban highways is the giant concrete bulk of the Buffalo Bisons baseball stadium.

  I’m already developing a bad feeling therefore as I plod past it, backpack weighing heavily, in search of somewhere to drop the damn thing for a few hours while I go in search of Buffalo’s beating heart. It may have only been a short hop from Niagara, but the next train out westwards is 12 hours away and doesn’t even stop at the downtown station but at a ‘depot’ in the distant suburbs called Depew. The bus garage – a sprawling, featureless shed populated by sparse groups of people surrounded by possessions packed into plastic bags and canvas hold-alls (which don’t!) – offers no more storage facilities than the Amtrak station (which wouldn’t be big enough to store more than a couple of 10-year-olds’ schoolbags).

  ‘Not since 9/11, sir. I don’t think there’s anywhere,’ says the large black lady falling out of her too-tight flowery blouse behind the information counter. It is an answer that I am to realise has become ubiquitous: ‘Blame it on the terrorist’ – justified perhaps but also an excuse for withdrawing a service – the same excuse used by George W. Bush for the Patriot Act, the greatest infringement of America’s liberties since the revolution. But what do I know: I come from post-Blair Britain. Nonetheless it seems strange to find America has abandoned left luggage. All those movies with keys left in airport lockers will have to be rescripted. Unless you have a hotel you have no alternative but to carry it with you. Which is what I end up doing.

  The only trouble is I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve found a map on the side of the bus station, but like all American maps I’ve seen so far, it seems deliberately designed not to convey any useful information: just thin straight black lines on a grid. So I do the only thing that seems sensible: head for the centre of it. The first street sign I find tells me I’m on Washington Square, which is a windswept paper-strewn pretence of a municipal park with concrete benches and bus shelters housing hobos. On one side sits the Washington Tavern, a neat nineteenth-century two-storey pub, stripped entirely of its urban context.

  The buildings on either side have been pulled down – affording a fine view of the neo-Gothic college building beyond – across an achingly empty parking lot. I have never seen a city with so many parking lots – multistorey lots right next to tarmac lots around the corner from stretches of wasteland with wooden huts to identify them too as parking lots. Hardly any of them have any cars. This is a city with streets wider than most British motorways and enough parking lots to provide spaces for the entire output of the Japanese motor industry, and next to no traffic. Maybe the cars are all parked away in yet another series of vast subterranean lots whose existence is cunningly concealed. Maybe there are just no people any more. The pavements are as empty of pedestrians as the roads are of cars.

  The occasional grand nineteenth-century building – a school, a college, a church – stands in what might be deliberate isolation were it not so painfully obviously just the absence of anything else, a spot where something has been pulled down and nothing put up to replace it. The splendidly-named Lafayette Tap Room – another grand old Victorian-style city pub building that would not look out of place in Brixton or Birmingham, is isolated from the community it surely exists to serve. Whoever they are. Wherever they live. This, I realise, is what Jane Jacobs was addressing in the book Laurence told me about in the White Horse Tavern back in Manhattan. Her Death and Life of Great American Cities was published nearly half a century ago, but nobody in Buffalo has got round to reading it yet.

  A large man in a checked shirt with a baseball cap pulled down firmly over his eyes is leaning against the bus stop, though not in any obvious expectation of a bus turning up. He doesn’t look the friendliest of types, but he is the only type available. I’m just a little worried that my question, ‘Is this the city centre?’ will sound inane, but the answer is hardly less so: ‘Well, I guess. Sort of.’ This is my first indication that I have just asked a question which many Americans, not just here in Buffalo, will find disturbingly hard to answer. But after 20 minutes of following my nose in circles in a vain search for social or architectural signs of the city centre, there is no other conclusion but that I am already in it, in fact have been all along.

  That dark, faceless block-length slab that looks like a freezer factory or supersize storage radiator, I now identify as a mall: a sterile – and little used, it would seem – indoor shopping facility. A small sign over one of the few pedestrian entrances – the chief mode of access is via a gaping parking facility – says ‘Main Place’. The heart sinks. And then a glimpse of something that offers at least aesthetic consolation: the city hall with its great yellow stone tower and colourful art deco mouldings on its lofty parapets almost glows in the early autumnal sunshine. Until you get up close.

  This is Niagara Square. Once upon a time it really was Buffalo’s ‘beating heart’. Olmsted made it the centre of his city design with leafy avenues radiating out in eight directions – from each corner and each of the four sides – lined with mansions of the well-to-do who would set an example of gracious living to inspire their fellow citizens. In 1901, with Frank Lloyd Wright himself living and working in town, and the city host to the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo was on a roll. The railroads were steaming ahead and with the completion of the Erie Canal, Buffalo was a transport nexus, a city light in heart as it entered the century it would leave so miserably. Niagara Square was linked by a long avenue of greenery to the exposition fairground which was attended by President William McKinley himself.

  The superstitious could be forgiven for seeing that as the pivotal moment in Buffalo’s history, the apex of its grandeur and the moment things began to go wrong. As he greeted crowds outside the Temple of Music McKinley was shot twice at point blank range by an anarchist. One of the inventions on display at the
fair was the new-fangled X-ray machine. Unfortunately the doctors were too scared of the new technology to use it to locate the bullet which had lodged in his body. As the local hospital didn’t have electric light and they couldn’t have candles in the operating room because of the ether which was used to keep the president unconscious, aides employed frying pans to reflect sunlight for the surgeons to work. They got the bullet but a week later the apparently convalescing president had his first cup of coffee and promptly expired.

  The granite obelisk surrounded by four vigilant lions in the centre of Niagara Square was erected in McKinley’s memory and the square enlarged to accommodate it. Around it today are signs boasting of Buffalo’s architectural heritage, oblivious to its desecration, and flags of ‘sister cities’. One is Lille in northern France, not one of the greatest French cities but a jewel in comparison; another is Siena, whose city councillors really ought to reconsider their twinning list. The third is somewhere I’ve never heard of in Ukraine. That just might about fit the bill.

  The decline which has hit Buffalo over the past half century could not have been imagined when McKinley met his fate, nor the subsequent decades as the city’s prosperity, based on steel and industry grew and grew. The splendid city hall in front of me was its crowning moment, finished just as the Roaring Twenties turned into the Great Depression. The revolving doors’ faded brass and scuffed skirting are clearly original.

  Inside, the lobby positively glows with an amber and ochre radiance from the vast mosaic in native Iroquois Indian motifs that covers walls and ceilings. Above the entrance is an allegory of peace as a goddess reconciling warriors bearing British and American flags, a reminder that even in the 1920s Canada, just ‘a spit away’ across the Erie River was still considered the frontier to what had for so long been ‘the evil empire’. To the side of the main door is an equally powerful symbol of modern Buffalo: a gimcrack kiosk selling fizzy drinks and cigarettes for the municipal workers, a gaggle of whom stand puffing on the steps outside.

  When it was opened, the main attraction of Buffalo City Hall was the 28th-floor observation platform, which offered a view of the founding fathers’ original symmetrical cityscape. I decide it has to be worth a look. To my surprise there is no security guard or even municipal flunky to point the way or ask for an entrance fee, just an old sign painted on the wall by the empty central lobby desk indicating the lifts to the right are for floors 15–26, ‘and observation platform’. Enticed by the idea of piloting one of Mr Otis’s original wood-lined vertical escalating machines myself, I step in and press the button for 26, the highest floor available, with only the slightest trepidation as the thing shudders and takes off like a steam rocket, the floor indicator disconcertingly remaining firmly fixed on ‘1’ until it resumes counting again at ‘15’. This is an ‘express’ lift.

  Emerging on floor 26 my other question is answered by a sign that says OBSERVATION PLATFORM FLOOR 28: STAIRS ONLY. The only remotely welcoming door amidst all those thick with a thousand coats of dark brown paint, unmarked and firmly closed, leads to a stairwell with peeling emulsion in hospital green and an open door in a security cage marked EXIT. I can only assume it is also an entrance.

  My assumption turns out to be correct. Three floors up – from floor 26 to 28 – the stairwell opens into a bare brick-lined circular room with eye-level windows on all sides marked TO SAVE ENERGY DON’T OPEN WINDOWS. And there can be no doubt that Buffalo’s city fathers are serious about saving their energy: all but one set are locked shut, as indeed, disappointingly are the doors leading to the observation platform running round the outside. Obviously someone has decreed that not even the perspex sheeting, completely enclosing the outdoor deck, is sufficient to deter would-be suicides. I can imagine there might be a lot of them.

  The eye-level windows offer enough perspective over the city to see that the original town plan has been brutally overridden by the grid-and-lot tyranny of erection and demolition. There are a couple of faceless modern tower blocks in the middle distance, an incalculable number of parking lots and, near at hand, the great slab of the Statler hotel building, in its heyday one of Buffalo’s great treasures yet so obviously a major contributing factor in the destruction of the elegant nineteenth-century street plan. To the north stretches a panorama of magnificent natural beauty: the vast expanse of Lake Erie reflecting the autumn sun in dark blue placid waters. Along the shoreline is a marina, filled with the yachts of the wealthy, yet devoid of waterfront life: cafés, promenades, people. Buffalo sits this side of a six-lane freeway along which cars rush, everyone in a hurry to get somewhere else. Buffalo sits on the edge of one of the world’s great lakes, and shows it its arse.

  In the vain hope of catching the genuine 360-degree view I had hoped for, I try the other four doors, one in each corner, even though none obviously offers access to the viewing platform. All turn out to be firmly locked except for one which to my surprise wrenches open, only to reveal bare brickwork, a bucket and some fuse boxes. I close it hurriedly in case my intentions might be misinterpreted, not that there is anyone to see me. Or is there? Footsteps are rapidly ascending the staircase below. Have I been rumbled? It’s not as if I’ve done anything I shouldn’t have, as far as I know, except perhaps open that door, maybe just coming up here in the first place. Then a large man with a loud voice emerges from the exit door. I’m hugely relieved to find he is talking to someone behind him and pays me no attention at all. ‘Here we are,’ he all but shouts to a young woman behind him. They round the corner to the doors leading out to the observation platform. I wonder if they might have a key I unknowingly had failed to request from some appropriate authority, and then I hear a weary sigh. And they sweep past me with dark faces to head downstairs again. ‘Fucking typical, just fucking typical,’ says the man to no one in particular. It’s hard not to agree.

  I am lugging a heavy rucksack around Buffalo because there’s no facility for leaving luggage, ostensibly for fear that the luggage in question might contain explosives. But here I am, unsupervised, unnoticed at the top of the city hall. Had I been a bomb-toting terrorist there is nothing to stop me blowing up the only building I have so far seen in Buffalo that doesn’t actually deserve it.

  Back down to earth, it’s time to take a closer look at the great triple-towered monolith of the Statler. It is more than half a century now since there have been any hotels called Statler – the group was sold to Hilton Hotels in 1954 – but the name lingers in the subconscious, if only because Statler and Waldorf were the names of the two old hecklers in The Muppet Show. Ellsworth Milton Statler was one of those great American businessmen who had the ‘vision thing’ at least when it came to making money and building an empire. He saw the 1901 Buffalo fair as an opportunity to prove American hospitality could reach levels other countries couldn’t, by building the world’s first hotel with a private bath or shower in every room. It was cheap: ‘A room with a bath for a dollar and a half’ the slogan ran. His competitors predicted disaster. But it turned out to be so popular that he revolutionised the hotel industry with a new level of occupancy and would later boast that he never even touched the half a million dollar credit line afforded by his bankers.

  Statler went on to found a chain of hotels across the US and in 1923 built a newer, much grander building in Buffalo which is the formidable edifice that still stands today. More or less, mostly less. In its time the Buffalo Statler was the largest luxury hotel between New York and Chicago with 1,100 rooms and prided itself on supplying its guests not only with a bath in every room but free newspapers and ice, still in those days a luxury at home. He imported the marble for his grand rooms from Italy and guests included the transatlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh, Presidents Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Truman and General Chiang Kai Shek in the days when he ruled all of China.

  Statler himself died in 1928. It is just as well he never lived to see the fate of his most beloved hotel. Its days as a luxury hotel ended in the early 1980s; sold off and renamed
Statler Towers, it has been converted into flats and offices, the sort of offices that have signs advertising WORKERS’ COMPENSATION ATTORNEYS or FREE LEGAL CONSULTATIONS, alongside NO SOLICITORS IN THIS BUILDING (one more proof that our ‘common language’ is a myth). The NO SOLICITORS sign is next to one that says NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS, the sort of signs people put up in buildings routinely plagued by hawkers and people likely to urinate in the corners, especially when the strategically placed reception desk is unmanned. The one in the entrance to Statler Towers looks like it has been unmanned since 1954. The chandeliers still hang overhead, dusty glowing baubles, like a dirty diamond necklace round the neck of some bag lady. In 2006 the building was bought by a British businessman of Asian descent who reportedly plans major renovation. There is a lot to do.

  But then there is a lot to do anywhere you look in Buffalo. Any 14-year-old computer gamer could explain it. All it takes is a couple of hours playing Sim City, one of the world’s most addictive games, which over four evolutions and two decades has become so accurate that I suspect it is probably even used by city planners nowadays. At least when you see how cities all over the world appear worryingly to be following the American pattern, you have to look for a conspiracy somewhere. The grid system, the delight of city planners since Roman days, is fraught with danger when it produces lots that can be individually owned and developed – or not – with no obvious sensitivity to the lot next door. Play Sim City and watch how in your grid-aligned city, lots rise and fall relatively independently of one another.

  Since the latter half of the twentieth century saw the steel and heavy industry which Buffalo’s prosperity had come to rely on turn into the rust belt, the response has been knee-jerk as lot owners develop or raze on their own whim. All the municipal authorities can do is pour dollops of money into specific projects – a marina, a new stadium, urban expressways, even a small downtown public transport tram system – but not one of them has paid attention to the idea of a harmonious whole. A city that was once world famous for its architecture, is today an example of how anything that can go wrong will go wrong.