• Spotted knapweed: furzy lavender flowers, pinecone-shaped buds (Peterson: “this one lines our roadsides and field edges in many places from June to August.”)
• Goldenrod: pillar of blade-thin leaves, supporting a head of pin-sized yellowish buds. (Peterson: “It blooms from July to September along roadsides, in fields and in clearings.”)
• Chicory: purplish crown. (Peterson: “This alien that grows as commonly in the sterile ground along our road shoulders is much too pretty to be dismissed as a weed.”)
• Yarrow: crown of tiny, fire-stemmed daisies. (Peterson: “Yarrow is another of the many dozen plants that now grace the roadsides and field edges throughout much of eastern and central North America.”)
• Flattened can of Genesee Cream Ale, its logo bleached to near-illegibility.
• Tim Hortons coffee cup.
• Tangled gray cable, embedded in dirt like a root.
• Mayweed: tiny daisy heads on barbed stems. (Peterson: “From Europe and [has] found our roadsides congenial.”)
• Toadflax: called “butter-and-eggs” because of the yolk at the center of its yellow petals.
• Steel rail.
• Crickets in my right ear, traffic in my left ear.
• A dolly, once painted green, with horn-shaped handles.
(Because of these unsupervised weeds, Buffalo has the highest pollen count in the nation, yet another side effect of deindustrialization.)
An arboreal generation must be synchronous with a human generation, because the trees had grown to adulthood. They were tall enough to screen my view of the mill, making it an interleaving of sooty bricks and greenery, but they were not as tall as the chimneys and peaked towers. To reach the largest tree, I walked over a sewer drain and across an asphalt platform—the employee parking lot, I guessed. My shoes crushed chunks and crumbs of red brick, pebbles of asphalt and slag. A whitetail deer bounded through the goldenrod, toward the shelter of a long, low building.
The tallest structures on the site—the tallest in Lackawanna, and taller than all but the most aspiring in Buffalo’s Art Deco downtown—were the eight white windmills of Steel Winds, a wind farm on the grounds of Lackawanna Steel. On this hot afternoon, when the lake was as smooth as a wading pool, their white blades were still, like the wings of gulls poised in flight. When the propellers turned, they looked like the arms of yoga students, performing endless side bends. Steel Winds has become a symbol of Buffalo, shown during national broadcasts of Bills games. (The Bills games in Buffalo, that is. The Bills play twice a year in Toronto, leading to local suspicions that the team is planning to sneak out of the country. In the 1960s, Buffalo was the fun city of the Golden Horseshoe, as the western bell-end of Lake Ontario is known. Toronto? A fussy-lipped outpost of Presbyterianism. Now Toronto, with its Caribana Parade and its Chinatown, is the fun city, while Buffalo turns a shade grayer each year. Buffalo’s bookstores sell copies of Eye, Toronto’s entertainment weekly.)
The blades collected Bethlehem Steel’s only remaining resource: the wind off Lake Erie. The ground was too polluted to build on. The beach looked gray. It was a terminal shore—at the end of America, and the end of its life. Where the cliff face had been cut away, the strata were shot through with sparkling threads of metal. In the ore slip, tires and timbers washed against the stamped metal wall. The littoral slope, seeded with grass so it wouldn’t fall into the lake, was scattered with slag pots, a residue of steelmaking that looked like enormous metal tarts and leached arsenic into the soil. An accidental sculpture garden, the slag pots were monuments to steelmaking. Hundreds of feet overhead, pinwheeling blades squeaked on their axles. Each windmill generates 2.5 kilowatts a day—enough to power one thousand houses in Lackawanna, Buffalo, and Hamburg. One of the largest urban wind farms in the world, Steel Winds pays the city of Lackawanna $20,000 per turbine, per year. They can’t replace the mill, which funded 75 percent of the municipal budget, but they’re more lucrative than a 1,600-acre brownfield. It’s been so successful that the project’s owner, First Wind of Massachusetts, has since installed six more turbines. Steel Winds can now illuminate, toast bread, grind coffee beans, charge cell phones, operate computers, and transmit The Big Bang Theory to 14,000 homes—more than remain in Lackawanna. At the rate Steel Winds is expanding and Buffalo is contracting, it will power the entire city by 2030.
After a car maker or a steel mill wears out a factory, extracts all the tax breaks a treasury will bear, and accumulates more obligations to its workers than the stockholders will bear, it flees town like a deadbeat husband, leaving a worn-out, exploited patch of land no one else will touch. An industrial city follows the same life cycle as a prizefighter or a prostitute. Its native beauty, the freshness of its earth and water, the youth and strength of its people, are used up and discarded. Then it’s on to the next town.
Since Bethlehem Steel left, Lackawanna’s number one claim to fame is the Lackawanna Six, a cell of young Yemeni-Americans who trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Their recruiter, Kamel Derwish, was born in Buffalo but spent much of his childhood in Yemen. Derwish returned to New York in 2000, shortly after the bombing of the USS Cole, in Aden harbor. The attack was celebrated by Lackawanna Muslims as righteous revenge on an American warship violating Arab waters.
Lackawanna had one of the first Muslim settlements in America. The first Yemenis arrived in 1912, although the colony didn’t take root until the 1950s, when Eastern European steelworkers felt American enough to insist that someone darker clean the vats and stoke the furnaces. Drive around Lackawanna today and you’ll see the Yemenite Benevolent Association, the Lackawanna Halal Market, and the Lackawanna Islamic Center, a mosque inside an old Ukrainian Catholic church.
Derwish came home to a Lackawanna less prosperous and more dilapidated than the steel village of his earliest years. The young men of the First Ward, Lackawanna’s Arab quarter, were the sons of steelworkers and autoworkers but had slid down the employment ladder into jobs as telemarketers, social workers, car salesmen, and cheese factory employees. Born in the United States, they were worried not about assimilating, as their fathers had been, but about losing their Muslim identities. A harmless teenage gang called the Arabian Knights turned into the cell that gathered in Derwish’s apartment to eat pizza and discuss how the Koran should dictate their personal behavior, as well as their views on world events.
Derwish “spoke with purpose,” wrote Dina Temple-Raston in The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six and Rough Justice in the Age of Terror, “and in a town where aimlessness was the norm, that in itself made him unusual.”
In the spring of 2001, Derwish persuaded six young men to follow him to an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. There, they were personally greeted by Osama bin Laden and taught to fire Kalashnikov rifles, so they could fight for the Taliban. Their adventure in jihad lasted two months. Arrested a year and two days after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Lackawanna Six were the first native-born terrorist cell prosecuted during the Global War on Terror. Sentenced to between six and ten years in prison, their case brought suspicion on Muslims in the United States in general and Western New York in particular. Yet, years after they traveled to the Middle East, you can still see girls in black hijabs studying at the Lackawanna Public Library. Steel was not the most durable product of the mill by the lake. More durable are the tribes who gathered here to forge it.
IN THE EARLY 1950S, New York Governor Thomas M. Dewey decided to build a cross-state superhighway, roughly following the course of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, the aquatic turnpike made obsolete by the railroad and the automobile. To oversee the New York State Thruway Authority, Dewey named urban planner/neighborhood wrecker Robert Moses, who would have built a highway over Eleanor Roosevelt’s tomb if the first lady had lain beneath the quickest route from Lower Manhattan to Albany. In Buffalo, Moses ran his highways right along the water. Interstate 190 is a cliff’s edge above the Niagara River. The Buffalo Skyway is a
highway on stilts, a concrete roller coaster climbing and dipping through the air over Lake Erie. At the time, Buffalonians didn’t mind. Their waterfront was a slum of dilapidated wooden shanties, saloons, and brothels for beached sailors. The lake and the river were alimentary canals for the steel mills and tanneries. Who wanted to live alongside such moral and chemical pestilence?
Bonnie Eschborn was a little girl growing up in the Riverside neighborhood when Moses drew his highway on a map of Buffalo. Riverside Park was the last urban space designed by the renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted built a white-block casino and a classical bathhouse for the swimming pool. Stone steps terraced the grassy slope declining to the waterfront.
The highway interposed six lanes of asphalt between Olmsted’s work and its namesake feature. It also provided a quick route out of town for workers at the Chevy engine plant in Tonawanda, just across the city limit from Riverside. Autoworkers had been Riverside’s burghers, but with an interstate running past their plant, they could now live in the South Towns, the new suburbs down the lakeshore from Buffalo.
Eschborn was the founder of Rediscover Riverside, a group devoted to reuniting the neighborhood with the river. Among her ideas was rerouting Interstate 190 inland, along an unused rail corridor. Eschborn met me in Riverside Park, beneath a miniature stone lighthouse.
“Before the highway, everybody used the park, everybody,” she said as we embarked on a walk around Riverside. “Now we’re totally disconnected from it. After the highway came through, I don’t remember even doing anything on the riverfront. The waterfront was always the focus of where jobs can be. My mother said when they were building the thruway and knocking down the shanties, people were thrilled. Back then, there was no emphasis on being close to the water. I think people were happier that they could go places fast.”
Before the highway, Riverside was populated by blue-collar Poles and Italians, “who competed to grow the lushest garden on the block. There were bars on every corner doing home-cooked meals and a lot of businesses here, a lot. Not too many people who work at the plant live here anymore. Now what we have is the newer, younger, undesirable drug addicts. People come out at two in the morning, screaming. If I walk in my neighborhood, I’ll get attacked by pit bulls.”
Riverside’s remaining businesses are a tattoo parlor, a liquor store, and a deli (the Western New York term for a minimart) trading in fleece baby blankets, oversized T-shirts, submarine sandwiches, and chicken fingers. (The Red Bird Variety Store—“Novelties, Gifts, Seasonal”—was gated over, a five-buck store that couldn’t make it in a dollar-store neighborhood.)
“This we don’t like,” Eschborn commented, “delis owned by Arabs. Not that we have anything against Arabs, but they bring in crime and drugs. We want to push that back where it came from: East Side of Buffalo.”
The only remnant of the old neighborhood is Tony’s Barber Shop. A union placard and an American flag hang by the chair where Tony cuts hair with scissors and a straight razor for ten bucks. Old men page through the Buffalo News and complain that the president is planning to spend $5 million to build the Muslims “a musk, or a mosque, whatever they call those frickin’ things.”
Buffalo had tried to drive out the lowlifes by building a highway along the waterfront, but now lowlifes were the only people willing to live in an inner-city neighborhood cut off from the water.
We got into Eschborn’s sedan and drove toward the falls, stopping at a park in Tonawanda, where the highway swerved east of the Niagara, leaving a pod-shaped salient of riverfront. A bicyclist pedaled a macadam path. A yoga flyer was stapled to a kiosk. Cicadas reached the peak of their bell-curve buzz, uninterrupted by traffic.
“This is what we had,” Eschborn lamented. “We can turn part of the thruway into this. These houses are one hundred thirty thousand dollars. I’d be lucky to get sixty for mine. Riverside is a lost community. It’s fifty-four streets nobody knows about. Nobody cares about it.”
After Eschborn dropped me back in Riverside Park, I walked down to the Niagara. I was followed by a woman in an Adidas T-shirt, green plaid pajama bottoms, and dirty sneakers, her breath sweet with bourbon. Becky had been sitting on a bench until she saw me wandering through the park. We crossed a skyway. The heat of auto exhaust radiated through the concrete.
“I don’t like the thruway,” Becky said. “I never did since I was a kid. My mother hated the sound of the thruway. She hated the noise.”
We descended a ramp to a twenty-foot stripe of greenish-yellow grass between the thruway and the river. Overhead, above a concrete wall, cars strafed past like low-flying turboprops. Down below was a tiny lighthouse—a lamp propped on a pole painted with graffiti as high as the taggers could reach. Around its base, empty bottles and chunks of timber were encased in surface scum. In modern Buffalo, this was a riverfront park.
“It’s peaceful down here, ain’t it?” Becky said. “We come down here a lot to relax. Some people get mad and yell at our music, though.”
It’s been said that Robert Moses’s “dead gray hands are still strangling the city of Buffalo.” If so, this is where he dumped the body.
DOWNTOWN BUFFALO also wants its waterfront back, but like Riverside, it doesn’t have much space to work with. The docks and granaries crowd the water’s edge, leaving behind flaking brick towers overspanned by the Buffalo Skyway. The skyway separates the water from the HSBC Arena, where the Sabres play hockey, and Niagara Square, site of Buffalo’s twenty-something-story city hall, an Empire State Building of municipal governance.
Buffalo is trying to rebuild its “inner harbor,” the mouth of the Buffalo River. This was the birthplace of Buffalo, the nautical intersection where the Erie Canal ended its 363-mile run from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. Once that ditch was dug, Buffalo was transformed, in 25 years, from Niagara frontier village to the largest inland port in the nation. Eventually, it became the transfer point for more western migrants than Ellis Island.
I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal.
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
She’s a good old worker and a good old pal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
We’ve hauled some barges in our day
Filled with lumber, coal and hay
And we know every inch of the way
From Albany to Buffalo
—THOMAS S. ALLEN,
“LOW BRIDGE, EVERYBODY DOWN”
That same artificial estuary could also be the site of Buffalo’s rebirth, figured Erich Weyant of the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation. After the corporation was founded in 2005, U.S. representative Brian Higgins obtained $350 million to rebuild the inner harbor from the New York Power Authority, which had, fittingly, once been chaired by Robert Moses. The NYPA had made millions from power generated by Niagara Falls, so Higgins negotiated a relicensing agreement that returned the money to his hometown.
“Buffalo’s been disconnected from its waterfront for fifty years or more by public improvement projects, infrastructure, thruways,” Weyant told me on an afternoon walk along the river mouth. “In the past twenty or thirty years, people have wanted to return to the waterfront. We’ve got a mix of low-and moderate-income housing down here. People are now thinking of water as recreational rather than industrial.”
We walked through the dank shadow of the skyway, which cut a strip of sunshine out of a summer afternoon. Once we stepped back into the light, Weyant led me to a stunted boat slip with limestone walls. This was the original terminus of the Erie Canal. During Buffalo’s sudden urbanization, the canal was rerouted to Tonawanda, but this remnant, buried and forgotten in the 1920s, was rediscovered during waterfront excavation. The land was peeled back 320 feet—intended to be 1/5,280th the length of the original canal, but a bit short. One hundred and eighty-five years after it had been the focus of downtown Buffalo, it was the focus of Canalside, a tourist trap invented to reunite Buffalonians with the city’s reason for existence. We passe
d onto Central Wharf, a wooden boardwalk where seagulls dove for French fries from an outdoor restaurant. It had an unpopulated Coney Island–in-September feel. Most of the attractions were still aquatic—a naval museum with three retired World War II vessels, a kayak livery, sailing classes—but Weyant envisioned a freshwater replica of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
“We want to build a faux canal system, to give people an idea of what it was like to have water downtown,” he said. “We want to have a Buffalo maritime museum, so people can visit historic boats. We want a cobblestone-street district, and we’re hoping to put in a retail/restaurant mix. We’re also working with cultural groups to tell the story of Buffalo. We could have an exhibit on the Underground Railroad.”
I asked Weyant what he thought of Bonnie Eschborn’s dream of diverting the highway from Riverside.
“It’s been discussed for years,” he said. “But that’s a huge—our project is three hundred fifty million dollars. I can’t even imagine what that would cost.”
“If they built it today, though, do you think they’d put it where it is now?”
“Back then, the waterfront was an area of murder and bloodshed and human trafficking and prostitution,” he said. “But look at what Boston did with the Big Dig—it’s all submerged. With people looking at the water as something to use, it would have been placed differently.”
On a boat trip up the Buffalo River, I saw what the Saint Lawrence Seaway had left behind. It was a gray summer morning, but a cloudy day in Buffalo is a dozen shades of gray. Lake Erie had boiled up a pie-bald quilt of lint, static, bruise, gruel, and black powder smoke. Despite missing the exit three times on my attempt to descend from the skyway to the waterfront, I was early and waited fifteen minutes before a boat sidled up to the jetty. Dipping a toe onto the idling vessel, I jumped aboard. The boat gouged a frothing J on the river and roared upstream, ahead of a ginger-ale wake. A kettle-corn odor settled in my nose.
Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 29
