We have a mulch bed with a bush in it right outside our front door, and in recent years, milkweed has taken up residence there. Many folks would rip out the milkweed, but not us! We know it’s a haven for pollinators and for Monarch butterfly caterpillars. (See two years ago!) We didn’t see any caterpillars last year, but lo! we had one this year.
He was there for a few days, and then we lost track of him. We assume he found a nice place to make a chrysalis, and has by now completed his metamorphosis into a Monarch butterfly. We hope.
(I very well may be misgendering this caterpillar, right? Hmmmm.)
In addition to that caterpillar, the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens has this summer dedicated one of its rooms to butterflies. We visited this exhibit twice, and here are a few of the denizens there:
I really like that last shot. It’s not the sharpest image I’ve ever taken, but I like that it captures the gossamer threads of the spiderweb beyond the butterfly.
Finally, one of my favorite subjects in the region is this Buddha statue in the Botanical Gardens’s tropical display room. I take pictures of this Buddha every time I’m there (well, both Buddhas, there are two, but this one is the larger). Granted, it’s getting harder to get creative with shooting the same thing every time we visit, but…still, I do it. Here the Buddha isn’t even the focus of the image. I like the way this one turned out.
The towers of downtown Buffalo, NY, and the Buffalo Skyway in the foreground.
The other day I posted this shot to the Buffalo-centric Reddit, and it got some praise (yay!) as well as generating some discussion of Buffalo’s downtown and whether Buffalo is a beautiful city or not. I didn’t get too far into those discussions, but it should be pretty obvious from my general content here that I fall squarely in the “Buffalo is beautiful” camp, even if Buffalo is an often maddening place.
One interesting side discussion happened, though, when a user quipped that you could take the three tall buildings pictured here–Seneca One Tower, Main Place Tower, and the Liberty Building–and stack them up to make one super-tall and there would still be 73 buildings in NYC taller than that. Someone asked how they had time to look that up, and the person who made the quip admitted that they made it up.
But it feels true, as someone who lives here and has been there.
Well, I was not one to let an intriguing idea pass me by, so I did the math and looked things up.
Seneca One Tower is 529 feet tall. Main Place Tower is 350 feet tall. The Liberty Building is 333 feet tall. (I took these heights right off Google, so I’m assuming they’re correct, or at least very close. I did not do any serious verification.) Add that all up, and you get a supertall building that’s 1,212 feet tall.
Off I went then to Wikipedia, which contains a nice and useful list of NYC buildings by height. It turns out that there are only eight buildings in NYC that would be taller than a supertall made by sticking the Liberty Building on top of Main Place Tower, and then sticking that on top of Seneca One. The shortest of the eight buildings is none other than the Empire State Building.
I looked this up out of curiosity, not out of any desire to mock the person who made the quip…and it did point out something about downtown Buffalo that I think profoundly illustrates something key about the local economy and what things have been like in Buffalo for decades. On Buffalo’s own list of tallest buildings, we see that Main Place Tower and the Liberty Building are, respectively, fourth and fifth locally for height. (Two and three are the Rand Building and Buffalo City Hall.) Seneca One, originally called Marine Midland Center for Marine Midland Bank, was built in 1972…which means that while there have been newer buildings erected in downtown Buffalo since then, the skyline’s maximum height has not budged in more than fifty years. It’s a symbol, in a lot of ways, of the largely static nature of Buffalo’s local economy since the steel and manufacturing dried up in the 1970s.
Am I clamoring for new construction? Well, downtown could certainly use it. Obviously right now there is no need for anything taller than Seneca One, but downtown Buffalo is a mishmash of wonderful old buildings on mothballs, newer buildings on their own plazas, and way more parking lots than the city really needs.
But yes, I would like to see some new towers being built in a Buffalo that had enough economic activity to fill them. That would be a nice thing to see.
Last week I did one of my favorite things, on the last day of my August vacation: I went on a long photo walk in the city of Buffalo. I spent a chunk of that walk in downtown Buffalo proper, and one shot I took that I particularly like is this one, of two men on a crane lift working on something on one of the buildings. I had to look up the building, actually: Convention Towers, on the south end of the Buffalo Convention Center. At the end of the street, dominating the background of the photo, is the edifice of Buffalo City Hall.
This is the jpg as it came right out of the camera; I have not yet done any editing on this photo. (Or any of the day’s photos…right now I’m behind on all my editing!) So, a better version of this will be forthcoming. For now, here it is! (And for the embiggenable version, go here.)
Here’s a video about a local photographer, Pat Cray, whose work I’ve been following for a year or so now, since I discovered it. He does Buffalo-centric street photography, which suits me perfectly: I love Buffalo, and I love street photography. I will be buying his photo book!
Marv Levy, the great football coach who guided the Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls from 1990-1993 during his Hall-of-Fame career, is 100 years old this day.
Those Bills teams hold a strong place on my emotional life, even now that the last Super Bowl appearance is more than 30 years in the past, and at this point we’re nearing the entire run of Coach Levy’s time with the team being 30 years in the past. Those Bills teams were my touchstone for home when I was in college, nearly 1000 miles away from home; when I got homesick, there were the Buffalo Bills. Watching Levy on the sideline, occasionally laughing and more often shouting (and there were times when his lips were very easy to read). Levy’s erudition was always a matter of note and humor around the team; he was noted for including lengthy discourses on historical battles in his gameday pep talks. He would give a long story about a battle and then he’d sum it up by noting that the guy who lost the battle “couldn’t win on the road”. But he also clearly knew some much shorter words, and was not afraid to use them sometimes, even if he was on camera.
Levy also attended Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is an hour and a half south of Waverly, Iowa, where I went to school at Wartburg College. I don’t recall Coe being one of the schools Wartburg played on a yearly basis…but we drove right by Coe several times a year when passing through Cedar Rapids while on the long drives between home and school.
No, Levy never did manage to get the team over the hump to win the Super Bowl. Did that say something about him as a coach? Maybe a little…but as those years and those teams have passed farther and farther into memory (and some of those players have even left us entirely), the question of “Why did they lose all four!” fades farther into memory as well. All that really matters is the good times of watching those games. I remember the moment in the AFC Championship Game in January 1991, where the Bills earned their first trip to the Super Bowl by beating the Raiders 51-3. At the end, in the last few minutes, quarterback Jim Kelly (who had left the game already, since it was a blowout) was chatting with Levy on the sidelines…but in actuality, Kelly was the straight-man, the distraction to keep Levy from realizing what was coming from behind: the inevitable dumping of the Gatorade. Levy’s look of “Oh, come on, how did I fall for this!” is classic Marv Levy. (You can see the whole moment, including a slow-motion analysis by Dick Enberg, at the 1:55 mark here.)
The best tribute to Marv Levy that I’ve seen came a few years ago, courtesy of former wide receiver Andre Reed, who included this passage in his speech when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame:
There wasn’t a better teacher than our head coach Marv Levy. He was the definition of ‘speak softly, but carry a big stick.’ He became our father figure, very much of a father figure, and he became even more of a father figure to me when I lost mine. In 1996, when I lost my father, he told me just take as much time as you need. Marv, I’ll always remember those words, your compassion you gave me when I needed it the most. You had to deal with so many egos, I don’t know how the heck you did it. [At this point, the cameras caught Levy on stage, muttering “Neither do I!”] Those big words you used, yeah, we needed dictionaries. We actually needed a thesaurus, too. But one thing we admired about you as a coach was that word respect. We respected the heck out of you. When you respect your coach, you’ll do anything to win for him. I love you, Marv.
I thought about titling this post with the quote that Levy is most known for, something he has made his trademark phrase, which he has used time and again over the years, especially when addressing fans at the stadium: “Where on Earth would you rather be than right here, right now?” But I suspect that chestnut is getting a lot of work today, so I decided to go with another at least quasi-famous Levyism. This one’s from when he coached the Kansas City Chiefs (another reason I can’t totally hate the Chiefs, even if they’re close to 2010s-era Patriots levels of annoyingness):
And finally, I don’t want to allow the 100th birthday of a great football coach to pass without also noting his other great skill, which makes one wonder if a great Broadway composer and songwriter was lost when he decided to go into coaching football instead:
Well…maybe not.
Anyway, Happy Birthday, Coach Levy! I’m glad you’re still right here, right now.
Via. No, I do not know how this happened. I assume the driver was backing a boat trailer up and…they exceeded the parameters of the assignment.
And if you did have a worse day than this person, I am so very sorry and I hope that everything turns around and you live soon in a land of milk and honey.
I haven’t edited this photo yet, seeing as how I jut took it yesterday morning, and I’m a couple weeks behind on my photo edits. But I wanted to share this one now because I really love this vantage point. This was taken on Fuhrman Boulevard on Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, down by Wilkeson Pointe (which is supposed to be open this year and sure doesn’t look close to being open, but that’s another thing for another time). I love how the Skyway dominates, but as it falls away, the city rises beyond. Unfortunately this vantage point is slightly marred by the presence of a chain link fence (I’m just now realizing that I should have taken my lens hood off and got closer…but in all honesty, I actually rather like the effect the chain link gives. It lends a bit of perspective, a suggested framing, to the image.)
I wanted to like this more than I did, but it’s worth watching, even if it’s way too frantic: it’s a short film comprised of drone footage of many of Buffalo’s architectural gems. I’ve been nearly everywhere in this film, and it does capture some of the most beautiful buildings and structures in this city. I don’t think the film needed this much fast-cut swooping around, though…but still. Here it is:
