Maxigumee

My winter break is more than a month long, but I originally planned to stay in Buffalo for just two weeks. I figured that because I just got an apartment and because I haven’t really been in New York during non-school times, it might be an excellent opportunity to explore and have some Me-And-New-York time. Like many ideas, this one turned out to be slightly more romantic when I imagined it in my head. In reality, I ended up sitting around my apartment all day with nothing to do and praying that I’d eventually be tired enough to just go to bed. With nobody back to school yet and the days a little too short for my liking, my motivation for exploration was kind of low. When my mother mentioned that she wanted me to come back to Buffalo to take some pictures of endangered churches, I jumped at the opportunity. Russell and Tom visited me towards the end of last week and were nice enough to bring me back to Buffalo with them.

I don’t want to get all sentimental and Chris-Daughtry-esque, but being home is definitely one of the best feelings in the world. I can visit for such a short amount of time that I never get to experience the things that irritated me enough to leave in the first place. I just get to curl up and relax inside my little Buffalo-Bubble. When I’m at home, it’s as if time and real world evaporates and I’m safe and warm for as long as I want to be. I really like this version of the whole “home” concept, with it being a place to return to rather than a place to live all the time. It’s a nicer idea and it’s nice to think that if I’m ever feeling sad, there’s always someplace to go.

ANYWAY.

So, for the first few days or so, I’ve just been kind of slothy. Oversleeping and overeating, sitting in front of the computer for hours. If I do this for too long I start to feel dirty, but in moderation, it’s almost a cleansing experience. After a semester of not being able to sleep or eat properly because of being so freaked out all the time from deadlines for impossibly complex projects, a huge exhalation like that is really nice.

Yesterday afternoon and today, my mother and father both took me to the churches I came back to photograph. Recently, the Catholic Diocese in Buffalo closed several of its churches due to lack of money and now they’re in danger of being demolished. One of the depressing things about living in Buffalo is that because there is such little demand for land and so little money, a lot of really great things just end up getting torn down. It’s also really unfortunate (but nonetheless unsurprising) that most of these things are in Buffalo’s poorer neighborhoods. The first church that I photographed was located in the heart of Buffalo’s East Side, which for somebody unfamiliar with the city, kind of looks like an atomic bomb dropped on it. It consists of neighborhoods that, because of the ever-declining population of Buffalo and the increasing number of impoverished people, look kind of like ghost towns, remnants of the city’s busier past.

I feel kind of hypocritical at times when I’m visiting areas like that. As much as I’d like to see the East Side all fixed up and gentrified, its abandoned streets turned into beautiful neighborhoods, part of me wants it to remain the way it is. A kind of encased museum of a post-industrial age. Artistically, I find myself drawn to places like Buffalo’s East Side and industrial Downtown because of their dilapidated aesthetic. I often feature Buffalo’s less economically well-off neighborhoods in my photoshoots, reasoning that they have more “character” than your average city street. Still, I feel kind of guilty thinking this way and I wonder if there is any way of preserving Buffalo’s industrial heritage and almost “cool” low-grade look while still improving the quality of life for its inhabitants. On top of that, I wonder how many people like me there actually are out there who find Buffalo’s industrial-chic kind of beautiful rather than one big eye-sore. Granted, not a lot of these places were actually built to be beautiful. I always find it very depressing whenever architectural plans are released for Buffalo’s latest and greatest building. The sleek, modern glass buildings are often welcomed by people as “exactly what this city needs,” but I feel that things like that are slowly disintegrating our city’s identity and diluting our culture.

I’m not sure how I got from talking about churches to this, but I should probably backtrack a little bit. Today, my father took my out to churches in various neighborhoods of Buffalo including Black Rock and some I haven’t even been to before. Although I’m not an especially religious person, I did feel as if I was on some sort of Jihad or Crusade for the greater good. It’s so mind-boggling that people would even consider demolishing churches as beautiful as the ones we photographed today.

Since the early hours of this morning when I was awoken by howling winds throwing trash cans down my street, the weather has been nearly unbearable. It was about forty-five degrees outside today, but with the wind, it felt like negative ten. After photographing for a few hours in the freakish wind, my father and I went to Wegman’s for roast beef sandwiches before heading out to do more. Basically, I had a very, very Buffalo day.