Buffalo: A Pleasant Surprise for the Jacksonian Traveller home page

Buffalo: A Pleasant Surprise for the Jacksonian Traveller

by Tom Lowe

December 24, 1999

For most Mississippians, Buffalo, New York, might as well be on another planet. Before I visited several months ago, Buffalo brought to mind blizzards, the rust belt, Niagara Falls, and not much else. I should have known better. I have friends from college who are members of the world-class Buffalo Philharmonic, and no second-rate city supports that kind of an institution.

This being my first visit, I cannot compare present-day Buffalo to Buffalo in its heyday, thirty or forty years ago, but evidence of the city's former glory, its decline and its revival are apparent to even the casual tourist. The downtown area, no longer a vibrant retail center, is nevertheless endowed with a number of first class buildings and churches, including a well-preserved office building designed by the Chicago firm of Louis Sullivan. And the city has gone to great pains to revive downtown life with a theater and arts district, all served by an excellent public transportation system. Restaurants are plentiful and the food is almost always good and reasonably priced.

Another pleasant surprise was the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, exclusively modern, with an impressive collection of painting and sculpture from the impressionists to comtemporaries, including Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse, Derain, Monet, Renoir, and Warhol.

Albright-Knox Museum

Across the street from Albright-Knox is Burchfield-Penney Art Center which, at the time I visited, was featuring Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass.

A few years ago, my wife gave me a necktie based upon Frank Lloyd Wright's stained glass. When I returned to Jackson from Buffalo, I was pleased to note that the design was based upon stained glass from the Martin House (see below for photograph of the Martin House) which was part of the exhibit at Burchfield-Penney.) To the right is a detail from the necktie:

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