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?
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.
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.)
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.)
