What remains of three city blocks. Most of the remaining houses are abandoned.

Buffalo, NY was a boom town 100 years ago.  The 1901 Pan American Exhibition was held in Buffalo to show off the world’s greatest new advancements including the now affordable mass produced light bulb, and a new generating plant down the road in Niagara Falls.  The Erie Canal had opened the Midwest and the western states to commerce, and the move westward was on.  New neighborhoods sprouted up all around Buffalo, especially on the East Side now brimming with immigrants from Poland, Italy, Germany, and Ireland.  Scores of churches were built, huge churches with great names like Saint Stanislaus, Saint Adalbert’s, and the amazingly beautiful Saint Ann’s on Broadway.

The city grew, and thrived through World War II.  Companies on the East Side, like Curtiss Wright, which made the famous P-40 Warhawk produced over 13,000 of the durable fighters during the war.    The steel industry thrived in Buffalo, as the need for the metal drove the war effort, and new businesses sprouted up all over the area to support it.  Machine shops, equipment dealers, suppliers all popped up on the East Side.  Industry loved the hard working immigrants on the East Side, and many factories were built there just for this reason.

Steel came left town for good, along with most of the rest of the United States during the 70’s and 80’s.  Well paying union jobs left forever too, as companies like Bethlehem Steel and Republic Steel closed their doors and laid off TENS of thousands of men.  As people left town for better opportunities, Buffalo became poorer and poorer, and people fled to the new suburbs in West Seneca, Cheektowaga, Tonawanda, and Amherst.  What was left were the poor, and the  elderly, who were too old to relocate.

There are dozens of abandoned churches in the neighborhood, many as large as Transfiguration RC on Sycamore Street.  Most are ethnically based from the original immigrants that built them, and are very large and ornate.

Crack and other drugs ravaged the remaining neighborhoods throughout the 80’s and 90’s, as poverty became the norm.  What was once a proud immigrant area, was now a battered wreck of broken down houses, burned out deathtraps, and closed storefronts.  In 2007, the city began demolishing houses in large numbers.  An article in the NY Times notes that Mayor Byron W. Brown started a five-year $100 million  plan to rip down 5,000 houses, about half of all the vacant houses in the city.  Buffalo ranks second only to St. Louis in the percentage of vacant properties per capita nationwide.

The only sign of life on this playground is the new nets on the basketball hoops.  There are only a few houses left in this neighborhood, and many have children.  A few haphazard playhouses and slides sit in yards, but not many.

The devastation continues and Mayor Brown recently expanded the demolition program.  Ask any Buffalo fireman what they think of being stationed on the East Side, reporting to arson after arson in dangerous vacant houses, and you will soon understand that these houses cannot stand.  But there is no rescue for them, no bailout for these neighborhoods.  Some new houses dot the area, but they are few and far between. Redevelopment projects that have started with several city blocks, and have created new neighborhoods and communities have fared well.

This is the last house on this block.  I counted 15 lots, or 15 missing houses, to the end of the block.

I cannot help but think of the people that lived in those houses, almost like ghosts they haunt me.  I can imagine the old neighborhoods filled with people, the streets bustling, the busy stores with ethnic names, flowers in the gardens.  That was what the streets looked like here just 30 years ago.  It seems like a lifetime now, with decay, fear, and sadness being the primary decorations on the East Side now.

As I was leaving the city, I saw these deer in what was only a few years ago hundreds of houses.

Suburban flight was in full swing by the time Buffalo’s inner city was rocked by riots, drugs, and changes to the economic climate of rust belt cities in the 1970’s. Many manufacturing jobs left forever, as steel, automotive, and other industries laid off tens of thousands of men from well paying union jobs. The area was jolted by over 15% unemployment. Once solid ethnic defined neighborhoods that had been terrific places to live for five generations, quickly degenerated into ghettos, as housing prices plummeted and empty buildings popped up nearby.

Poor families replaced working families in homes that were hastily divided into apartments by owners who left the city to live in clean new suburbs like Orchard Park, Amherst, Cheektowaga, and West Seneca. Families that did want to stay, eventually moved out though, as neighborhood businesses closed and most of the city’s urban center was overcome by poverty in the 1980’s.

By the 1990’s homes that had gone from family legacies to slum rentals stood now stood abandoned. Neglect, a 20 year economic slump in the economy, and a general lack of interest in living in the city left thousands of homes abandoned in huge areas just outside of the city center.

Driving into the city from the suburbs now meant driving through the East and South sides of the city, both decimated by two decades of poverty. There were almost no retail businesses left downtown, but most of all, it was just plain depressing, Main Street was lined with mostly empty storefronts, stores that were open sold knock off sporting goods and cheap jewelry. There are a lot of photos of the remnants of Buffalo’s Urban Decay at this site.

In the 90’s they came with the bulldozers. Empty houses, likely targets for squatters, arsonists, and crack addicts, were now razed, by the thousands. Entire city blocks were leveled. Homes that stood alone looked oddly out of place, like the survivors of a huge battle. Many of these fell to what I suspect was trauma, after being left alone without their neighbors.

These empty fields began to sprout new homes – suburban style. Vinyl siding, concrete driveways, front facing garage doors, and all the earmarks of the burbs wrapped their smaller citified cousins. At first the homes were sold to low income families, the only people willing to live in the former war zone. But as these neighborhoods grew, so did the size of the homes, and not long after, middle class and luxury developments started popping up nearby downtown. Buffalo is now in the throes of an urban residential boom.

As the sub prime mortgage crisis hits full stride, there are communities all over the country that are now seeing a remarkable side effect of developments full of McMansions standing nearly empty. They are experiencing the same familiar problems that rust belt inner cities felt in the 1970’s and 1980’s – owners renting to questionable tenants, gang activity, increased property crime and graffiti, and a huge increases in violent crime. That’s right – inner city demons exported to suburbia.

In it’s article The Next Slum?, Atlantic Monthly predicts a grim outlook for many of the newer suburbs built in the last 10-15 years:

“But much of the future decline is likely to occur on the fringes, in towns far away from the central city, not served by rail transit, and lacking any real core. In other words, some of the worst problems are likely to be seen in some of the country’s more recently developed areas—and not only those inhabited by sub prime-mortgage borrowers. Many of these areas will become magnets for poverty, crime, and social dysfunction.”

Well built houses from the 1800 and early 1900’s had to be gutted for their copper, woodwork, and other valuables before succumbing to the elements to fall down. Today’s particle board wrapped, vinyl sided exteriors are no match for the brick and solid hardwood of 100 years ago. Decay in the suburbs would happen very quickly, and be tough to stem in the larger, more expensive to maintain homes being built in the suburbs.

This will be an interesting trend to watch.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

Only because quoting the back of the book saves me an hour or so of rewriting it…

“Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most.”

Paul Farmer is genuinely inspiring, as you can see in this YouTube video talking about his foundation Partners in Health. PIH offers help to places of the world that nobody else is. Here are some ways that you can help.