Residents in Buffalo, New York clear heavy snow on Dec. 27, 2022. The historic winter storm Elliott dumped up to four feet of snow, leaving thousands without power and more than 40 confirmed dead in the city and the surrounding suburbs.John Normile/Getty Images
It has been a dreadful few months for Buffalo. The western New York city has endured tragedy after tragedy. A mass shooting targeting Black people – and motivated by a racist conspiracy theory – at a Tops Friendly Markets location last May killed 10 people. More than 40 people died as a result of a catastrophic holiday snowstorm in December. Then there was the shock of the on-field collapse of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old who had launched a toy drive during the pandemic for children in need.
This has been heartbreaking to watch – and distressing to consider these events cumulatively. For Canadians in or from Southern Ontario, Buffalo’s era horribilus has hit home in a particular way. For many Torontonians, Hamiltonians and other Golden-Horseshoe types, Buffalo is special: our unofficial twin city, our closest U.S. connection.
For people of a certain age (ahem), there were very few television channels on our childhood dials – and they were actually dials. The three major U.S. networks came to us via Buffalo affiliates. We grew up with news about incidents in Cheektowaga, Tonawanda, Lackawanna, and Erie County.
Eyewitness News on ABC affiliate WKBW-TV was a powerhouse broadcast, anchored by Irv Weinstein. The late-night newscast famously began: “It’s 11:00. Do you know where your children are?” A trusted presence behind large glasses, Mr. Weinstein read the news from 1964 until 1998. In Toronto, he was a local hero – even though he wasn’t local.
Toronto kids spent mornings watching Dave Thomas on Buffalo’s Rocketship 7. Later, the Commander Tom Show gave us an after-school childhood companion. At some point, we realized that Commander Tom was also Tom Jolls, the weather guy at night – part of that blockbuster local news team with Mr. Weinstein and sports guy Rick Azar that ruled the ratings for decades.
On channel 17, Buffalo’s public broadcaster, pledge drives were led by a woman with very short blonde bangs named Goldie Gardner, who also became Toronto-famous.
We watched Buffalo’s competitive Bowling for Dollars and Strikes, Spares & Misses (a bowling show for women with a pun I didn’t get at the time). We saw commercials for Tops and Bells supermarkets, and the amusement park Fantasy Island (“Fun – wow”).
A PSA for the city itself declared “Buffalo’s got a spirit / Talkin’ proud, talkin’ proud” – an elbows-out musical pronouncement from a city in decline. Not that we knew of its troubles. To us, Buffalo was a big, American deal.
When I first travelled there in person, it was like a kid raised on U.S. media going to Hollywood. The stores and street names I knew only from TV were right there, in person. Not Giorgio Beverly Hills or Sunset Boulevard, but Walgreens, JCPenney and Niagara Falls Boulevard.
For Toronto teenagers with drivers’ licenses hot off the presses, road trips to Buffalo were rites of passage. It’s hard to believe how easy it was to just drive over the border to buy stiff Levi’s red-tab jeans at The Gap – a store not yet in Canada – and load up on other only-in-America clothing options at the Walden Galleria and Boulevard Mall.
In the Queen City, we frequented chain restaurants that hadn’t yet made it north of the border. We dined on loaded potato skins and mozzarella sticks at TGI Friday’s. We sampled Italian cuisine at a new, highly anticipated restaurant called the Olive Garden.
Then, as we got older, we discovered the Anchor Bar, birthplace of the Buffalo wing.
With Toronto lacking an NFL team, there were a lot of Buffalo Bills fans in the 416 of my youth. And thanks to the struggling Toronto Maple Leafs of the Harold Ballard era, there were Sabres fans too – a less controversial alternate team than, heaven forbid, the Canadiens.
As we matured, we grew aware that Buffalo had a lot more to offer beyond chicken wings and bargains at Target. It has a rich cultural fabric.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, with its extraordinary 20th-century collection, has been a place of pilgrimage for many art-hungry Ontarians. Love him or hate him, legendary Canadian artist Robert Bateman has called a 1962 trip to the Albright-Knox his “Road to Damascus moment,” when he was inspired by seeing Andrew Wyeth’s work. (Closed for renovations, it is to reopen in May as the Buffalo AKG Museum.)
Buffalo was also an important city for the iconic architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed several projects there, including the extraordinary Martin House complex, which is now open to visitors.
Of course, all of this nostalgic musing comes from the perspective of an outsider; it is a picture of a city experienced through a television screen and weekend cross-border jaunts. The real Buffalo is a place where people live and work, commute, buy groceries, cheer on the local sports teams. Buffalonians have suffered too much, and are grieving. Many of us Canadians grew up admiring your city from afar, and we send you love, Buffalo. We are there with you, in spirit.
Marsha Lederman