I’m not that old that “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” means much
too me, but I’m old enough to recall my father and relatives on his side of the
family always making some comment that they thought was very clever about
“shuffle off” whenever Buffalo was mentioned . I had to Google it to figure out
its significance. It was a song in the 1933 Broadway show “43nd Street” that
was popular for half a century later. I’m sure I heard it multiple times when
my parents were watching the Lawrence Welk Show on TV.

My impression of Buffalo has always been of a decaying Rust
Belt city, a smaller version Detroit at the opposite extremity of Lake Erie. It
was at one point during the late 1800s one of the top 10 most populous cities
in the country, big enough and economically important enough to hold a major
World’s Fair in 1901, “The Pan-American Exposition”. Nowadays you mostly hear
about Buffalo for its occasional gigantic snowfalls, the famous Lake Effect
snow. Buffalo now has less than half its peak population and a metropolitan
area with a declining population for about four decades.

That sounds pretty grim, but the reality isn’t so bad. The
blight seems to be on the more industrial south side of the city, and I found
the north side where the sights I wanted to see are located to be very pleasant
all the way south to the center of town . Like other cities that had their heyday
a century or so ago, Buffalo has disproportionately significant cultural
institutions for a city its current size and has parks and neighborhoods laid
out by Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of Central Park who considered
Buffalo’s Delaware Par to be his greatest masterpiece. I found the older
historic neighborhoods of Buffalo’s north side to actually be very appealing,
and I suppose they must be quite affordable if you’d be willing to consider
living in America’s snowiest significant city.

One of Buffalo’s sites relates to the 1901 World’s Fair.
Toward the latter part of the fair’s five month run, President McKinley was in
town for it and was assassinated by an Anarchist. He survived for 10 days after
the shooting and looked as though he might recover before succumbing. Vice
President Theodore Roosevelt was sworn-in as president in the living room of
the Ansley Wilcox House, a mansion on Delaware Avenue where Roosevelt was
staying with his rich Buffalo friends while in town, a site that now makes up
the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural national Historic Site, one of the rather few
national park system units in Upstate New York . I managed to catch the last
tour of the day at the house.

Another famous cultural figure whose masterpiece is located
in Buffalo is architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I’ve toured a number of the houses
he designed across the country and have to agree that the Darwin Martin House
Complex in Buffalo is one of his largest and most impressive residential
designs, considerably more so than some of his more famous ones in the Midwest.
The house was built for a wealthy Buffalo businessman and his family and fell
into disrepair over the years, parts of the property even developed as garden
apartments in the 1960s. The Darwin Martin House was only later acquired by the
state of New York and made into a unit of the state parks system. Some of the
last parts of the restoration are still in progress, which mostly means some
parts of the house that can be toured remain unfurnished until work is completed.
It’s another one of those places I hadn’t heard about until recent years
because it hasn’t been all that long that it has been in a state where it’s
open to be visited . I’ve found quite a few places like that in my travels
across the U.S. in recent years. Work on recreating the past goes on!

The third significant sight I wanted to see in Buffalo is
the Albright-Know Art Gallery, considered to be a quite good art museum. About
all I knew of it before was that it is Buffalo’s and western New York’s premier
art museum. Interestingly, though, unlike many civic museums, the Alright-Know
doesn’t attempt to collect art from all ages and eras. Rather, it focuses only
on art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present essentially modern stuff,
so much so that it has sold off works that were in its collection either
through donations or earlier acquisitions that are not consistent with that
mission. The gallery’s earliest work is a landscape painting by Albert
Bierstadt dating from the 1850s, but the focus of the museum’s collection is
from post-impressionism through modernism through the abstract expressionism of
the late 20^th century.

I got the feeling that there’s much more in the collection
than is on display in the relatively small modern wing of the museum . The
original neoclassical 1905 building is mostly given over to special exhibitions
nowadays and less than half of it was open when I was there because of
installations. That was given over to a major exhibition of works by abstract
expressionists Clyfford Still and Mark Bradford. Denver was chosen as the
location for a museum of Clyfford Still’s works that remained in his possession
at his death, but the Albright-Knox Gallery has the second largest collection
of his paintings, usually not on display. Overall, I enjoyed the museum even if
I wasn’t expecting what’s essentially a Buffalo version of the Museum of Modern
Art.