Bits and Pieces

The rest of the places in Buffalo this weekend that weren't quite big enough for their own posts WILDROOT -- the product that made 50s hair the greased-up mess it was. Just by nature of what the factory made, and a precipitous drop off in demand once greasers were out and bowl cuts were in, Wildroot closed after just 14 years of operation, in 1963. A few later attempts were made to bring the product back, then to attach the Wildroot name to other hair products, but the association with crew cuts and grease was just too much for the…

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Fixing A Hole

Now that I've lived downtown for three months, it was only a matter of time until I started exploring my immediate surroundings at the Midtown hole. Thanks to a shitty economy and even worse planning, Midtown has hit bottom after a 30-year slide from innovative (one of the first indoor malls, and a thriving business district until the late 70s) into desolate (rising crime and falling population) to promising (new construction, or at least demolition of the old, closed mall), and finally to stagnant, in its present half demolished, completely unbuilt stage. This was Midtown (and the rest of the…

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Capitol Offense

There are days meant for just getting the hell out of here... this weekend was certainly one of them. The combination of dealing with grad school, Laura and being indoors all winter put me over the edge; I had to do something besides another weekend with Her, and I had to do it NOW! So, as soon as Laura was safely on the bus to class for a Friday morning (and she'd just stayed with me, so I had to make sure it looked like nothing was out of the ordinary), I packed my bag (consisting of mostly beer) and…

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Filthy Clean

Revisiting the American Laundry Machinery power plant, during the day and with a camera, for once! It isn't the biggest or most interesting place but at least I got out somewhere finally. As far as I know, this place was open for most of the 20th century, and they made industrial washing machines. I don't know much else about them except that they moved to Cincinnati at some point, and there is another abandoned power plant just like this one there. I didn't feel like climbing this, but apparently there's a view from the top of all these I-beams What…

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How The West Was Lost

Through the days of the Erie Canal, Buffalo rose from a western outpost founded in 1802, into the 8th largest city in the United States by 1900, on its essential position as a market city and trading port to the frontier West. With the rise of the railroads, naturally this position translated into being a hub in that system as well, and just before the Depression the tracks along Lake Erie were the busiest in the world, with close to 200 passenger and 500 freight trains passing daily toward Chicago and New York. The previous station, located on the present…

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Spoiled Oil

Now that I've stopped spending every minute of free time I can find at Occupy, it's time to get out exploring and following some of the new ideas for our new group, the biggest change of which is to try to explore every Monday instead of taking up people's weekends. On the one hand this keeps us close to home, but it also opens the group up to many more people. We had a group of about ten for this place, an oil refinery that spent a few years repurposed as offices before closing in about 2000. Its demolition has…

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