Homecoming in Retrospect

Same As It Never Was

Born and raised in Buffalo, I left the city in 1989, eager to get out of Dodge and start my life.

I didn’t go anywhere great, or even good. In fact, where I went was kind of shitty — Watertown NY, an old mill town an hour north of Syracuse where I had been offered my first reporting job at a small, but excellent daily newspaper where for five long years I paid my dues and learned how to grind. Watertown is another story. It’s a good story. Fascinating, really, in a multitude of bizarre ways. But it’s a story for another day.

When I left Buffalo, the city was far past its last gasp. Economically, it was still reeling from the nearly 8,000 good-paying jobs lost in the early 1980s when Bethlehem Steel ceased most of its operations here. The closure brought with it a devastating and far-reaching ripple effect, resulting in the loss of thousands of more jobs at area companies that supplied and depended upon the plant for their own survival.

To say the city had fallen on hard times is an understatement. Tumbleweeds were blowing through downtown and the population plummeted as thousands of residents packed their bags and sought work elsewhere — mainly down south.

In May of this year, I took an early retirement and moved back to Buffalo after a 33-year hiatus. And it’s clear, this is not the same city in which I was raised, or left behind.

The Cuomo administration’s “Buffalo Billion” initiative dumped a billion dollars of public-sector investment into the city, as part of an effort to resurrect it from ruin. That triggered even greater investment from the private sector and, voila, the perpetual hard-luck city on the lake was finally on its way to rebirth.

Construction became rampant. So too did rehabilitation, redevelopment and re-investment. New restaurants, bars, lofts, apartment complexes, and breweries began to spring up all over the place. The New York Times and major media in Canada started to give Buffalo good press, going so far even as to call the old rust-belt city, “hip.” Millennials moved here. People returned downtown, en masse. Real-estate prices soared. For the first time in my 54 years, Buffalo was actually “cool.”

Yet, here’s the thing about Buffalo: Hard times are never far away. And the problems that have always plagued the city are impossible to ignore — no matter how much money is spent trying to get people to turn their attention elsewhere.

Two weeks after I returned to Buffalo, a racist maniac armed with an AR-15 walked into Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo and unleashed mayhem, killing 10 people and wounding a handful of others. As we know now, the site of the attack was no coincidence. The killer selected this neighborhood because it had the largest per-capita black population in the state within a relatively short driving distance from his home in the Southern Tier.

A few weeks after the massacre, I drove down to the site where a makeshift memorial was erected in honor of those who were slain. The visit not only served as a solemn reminder of yet another senseless act of violence in America, it also served as a reminder that no matter how many billions Buffalo pours into itself, the city will never truly be resurrected until all of its people are given the opportunity to rise again.

Poverty and racial disparity have long been Buffalo’s two black eyes, and while downtown is not the same as it was 33 years ago, very little has changed on the East Side.

With all the money that has poured into Buffalo in recent years, it seems very little has reached the Jefferson Avenue area. And though leaders have pledged since the massacre to bring new investment to the East Side, it seems there’s no explanation as to why the neighborhood was excluded from participating in the rebirth that’s taken place around it.

Whether Buffalo bears any blame for what happened on May 14 is a difficult, sensitive and explosive issue. To be clear: this was an attack carried out singularly by a madman, fueled by hate, delusion and an insatiable thirst for carnage. But, the neighborhood he selected did not develop by chance. It is the direct byproduct of several decades of redlining and neglect.

Since I’ve been back home, it’s encouraging to see so much rebirth. But, it’s also been disheartening to see the same old pockets of the city filled, still, with familiar populations of the walking dead.

I left Buffalo when it flatlined. Now, there’s resurrection.

But, this city won’t ever fully rise from the dead until it rises from the dead entirely — an equitably.