Category: On Buffalo and The 716

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716 Day!!!

Today is July 16, 7-16, or…716 day! Which means it’s time to celebrate the 716!

Here is a bunch of photos that I have taken since the last 716 Day. Long live the 716!!! It was hard to pick which ones to use…I limited myself to two photos from any Flickr album I have devoted to images taken of or at a 716 location. (So, no Ithaca or Toronto or Letchworth photos here, among other places!)

I truly believe in the beauty of this region and the loveliness of its people, and I hope my photos capture that.

Lord, I love this area….

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I’ll take “Questionable Decisions” for $1000, Ken

One minor waterway that makes its way through the Buffalo region is Scajaquada Creek. It’s a small stream that rises somewhere in Lancaster, NY, and flows westward through Lancaster, Cheektowaga, and Buffalo before finally draining into the Niagara River near where I-190 and NY198 split. Owing to its urban nature and the fact that occasionally there are sewage overruns, it’s not the cleanest run of water around. And in Cheektowaga, the stream was actually diverted years ago into an underground culvert that’s about three miles long. It only emerges again in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. What’s it like inside that tunnel? The best way to find out would absolutely be to actually kayak it, but surely no one would want to do that. That stream is gross.

Surely no one would…oh the hell with it, you already know where this is going, don’t you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEW6TXzjg9c

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Here it comes! (A somewhat annual thought on snow and The 716)

As I write this, it is Sunday morning, 9 November 2025. Outside it is cold and cloudy and rainy, but according to the local weather predicting folk, that rain will be turning to snow later today, for our first actual snowfall of the 2025-2026 wintry-weather season. Now, longtime readers will know that I, for one, love the snow and the winter and I welcome our wintry overlords, but as happens every year, social media is alive with WNYers saying things like “Ugh, here it comes!” and “Stop saying the S-word!” (as if “snow” is the weather equivalent of “Lord Voldemort”).

I’m not going to lecture people as to why they should embrace the snow, but…yeah, I’m gonna do that, actually. Buffalo and WNY have a lot of problems and there are many things that need to happen if this region is ever to truly rebound, and this one probably isn’t the most important one on the list, but I quite firmly believe that self-image matters, and the degree to which the people of a region communicate their love of their region matters. And like it or not, snow is a big part of living here. It just is. And I don’t think it sends a great message to the rest of the country if a lot of people living here seem to convey that for at least a quarter of the year (and, I’ll be honest, as much as a third of the year), they’d rather be living someplace else.

So once again, Buffalo, let’s embrace the snow. Let’s make it a positive part of our identity instead of making it sound like the “mushy peas” part of our year. Let’s embrace warm clothes and colorful sweaters and fuzzy hats and hot beverages and winter wonderlands, shall we? It’s coming anyway.

DISCLAIMER: I reserve the right to complain about any snow that arrives after St. Patrick’s Day. I have adopted March 17 as my personal cut-off point.

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“People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’….”

Ohio Street rail yard, Buffalo, NY
f[9.0, 1/160sec, ISO100

A few weeks ago I went down to the foot of Ohio Street in Buffalo, near its southern terminus at Fuhrmann Boulevard, near the Outer Harbor. My main purpose was to do some shooting of the amazing graffiti that adorns the Ohio Street overpass (I’ll feature that work in a future post, though I’ve already posted the images to Flickr), but as I was there some railroad activity. The overpass carries Ohio Street over the rail lines that service the cargo areas near the big grain silos downtown, a remnant of what once was in terms of freight transport in this region. They were moving lines of cars from one line to another, connecting and reconnecting the locomotive as needed. It was a fascinating process to watch, and in the photo above, that locomotive is actually pushing that line of cars down the track, not pulling them as it arrives.

Still, trains and locomotives are absolutely fantastic subjects, and if there’s one nearby and I have a photographic device on my person, I will get a shot of it!

(And the title of this post comes from here, which is the single greatest cover of an already great song in the history of popular music, a position against which I will listen to no argument.)

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