Buffalo, where’s the love? Queen City, Nickel City, City of Good Neighbors — the fact of the matter is, we have a lot to offer, and it’s your turn to show your fellow Buffalonians just how much you love Buffalo. Send your concept videos to Artvoice, and the best videos will be produced with professional audio/video equipment by the Artvoice Web Team, with you in the director’s chair! Your video can be about anything you love about Buffalo and the surrounding area. Because you know what? Buffalo, we love you.

Create a two minute (or shorter) video about Buffalo. It can be about anything — your favorite hang out, your favorite people, or perhaps Buffalo’s architecture really catches your eye. There are no restrictions on the type of video you may create — narrative, music video, storyline, documentary, anything at all. Upload your video to youtube.com and let us know about it at artvoice.com/videocontest.

Visit the contest page for rules, prizes, and full details!

All around Hoyt Lake in Delaware Park, one can see signs that the seasons are changing. Shakespeare Hill offers the following warning. (click on any image to enlarge)

Another sign cautions against a different winter pastime, no matter how tempting the big open lake may appear.

Here’s a recent sign reminding you who to thank for the Delaware Park Pathways: David Paterson, Governor; Carol Ash, Commissioner of New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and State Historic Preservation Officer; Byron W. Brown, Mayor. All part of a 1986 Environmental Quality Bond Act Project. In the background, it looks like the lake is ready for a cleanup. The sign, however, appears to be in excellent shape.

And last but not least, my favorite. The most beautiful, colorful, and positive among the bunch. Also possibly unauthorized and illegal, so get out and enjoy these tell-tale signs of spring before they’re gone.

…that in 2007, 76 percent of building permits issued in Erie and Niagara Counties were for projects outside the region’s urban cores and first-ring suburbs?

According to this study by the EPA, just seven percent of building permits issued in Erie County were for projects within the City of Buffalo.

Thanks once again to everyone who came out to Mardi Gras 2009! To our Queens of Mardi Gras, bands and performers, parade participants, bars and clubs, and everyone else involved – thank you for making this year another great success.

We’ve put together a photo gallery so you can either reminisce, or see what you missed. This first group of photos are care of Artvoice photographer Rose Mattrey. We’ll be adding some more Mardi Gras 2009 media soon.

Start the slide show!

University of Toronto professor Richard Florida

This weekend I got around to reading Richard Florida’s piece in The Atlantic, “How the Crash Will Reshape America.” In it, the University of Toronto professor suggests that the current economic crisis has the potential to remake the country’s economic geography in the same way that the crash of 1873 and the Great Depression did. At the very least, Florida says, it will accelerate already existing movements.

Buffalonians might take some pleasure in Florida’s prediction that the Sun Belt, to which so many from this region have fled, will not fare well in the new order. Unfortunately he does not imagine that cities like Buffalo will benefit from the miseries of Phoenix:

Sadly and unjustly, the places likely to suffer most from the crash—especially in the long run—are the ones least associated with high finance. While the crisis may have begun in New York, it will likely find its fullest bloom in the interior of the country—in older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past and in newer, shallow-rooted Sun Belt communities whose recent booms have been fueled in part by real-estate speculation, overdevelopment, and fictitious housing wealth. These typically less affluent places are likely to become less wealthy still in the coming years, and will continue to struggle long after the mega-regional hubs and creative cities have put the crisis behind them.

The Rust Belt in particular looks likely to shed vast numbers of jobs, and some of its cities and towns, from Cleveland to St. Louis to Buffalo to Detroit, will have a hard time recovering. Since 1950, the manufacturing sector has shrunk from 32 percent of nonfarm employment to just 10 percent. This decline is the result of long-term trends—increasing foreign competition and, especially, the relentless replacement of people with machines—that look unlikely to abate. But the job losses themselves have proceeded not steadily, but rather in sharp bursts, as recessions have killed off older plants and resulted in mass layoffs that are never fully reversed during subsequent upswings.

In November, nationwide unemployment in manufacturing and production occupations was already 9.4 percent. Compare that with the professional occupations, where it was just a little over 3 percent. According to an analysis done by Michael Mandel, the chief economist at BusinessWeek, jobs in the “tangible” sector—that is, production, construction, extraction, and transport—declined by nearly 1.8 million between December 2007 and November 2008, while those in the intangible sector—what I call the “creative class” of scientists, engineers, managers, and professionals—increased by more than 500,000. Both sorts of jobs are regionally concentrated. Paul Krugman has noted that the worst of the crisis, so far at least, can be seen in a “Slump Belt,” heavy with manufacturing centers, running from the industrial Midwest down into the Carolinas. Large swaths of the Northeast, with its professional and creative centers, have been better insulated.

Florida has made a career of a central thesis that I will oversimplify thusly: Those regions able to attract large numbers of the most talented, educated, and creative will create strong economies, because innovation is the key product in today’s markets. However one feels about that idea, this paragraph from Florida is sobering:

Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented.

Vote on which Buffalo projects should be funded with federal stimulus money.

I know, it’s cold outside. But once you’re inside the Buffalo Convention Center at this year’s Buffalo Auto Show you’ll be warm as toast! And take some comfort in knowing that some manufacturers who didn’t even bother setting up at the Detroit show last month (arguably the biggest and most important auto show in North America) — Nissan and Land Rover come quickly to mind — are waiting to show you their stuff in downtown Buffalo. Come to think of it, the group formerly know as “The Big Three” (GM, Ford, and Chrysler — heretofore known as “The Three”) all recently announced that they’re not showing up at this Fall’s Tokyo Motor Show. None of them. Not at all. That’s huge.

But anyway, check out this year’s Buffalo show. Give those poor salespeople some hope.

Let’s say you have a club that meets every so often to discuss political matters. Let’s also say that sometimes your views clash with city hall.

What would you think if you received a notice from the Department of Permit & Inspection Services Rental Registration Program telling you that you were in violation of 264-4a of the City of Buffalo Charter and Ordinances, and that if you didn’t take action within 5 days you’d be open to an inspection and/or court action and a possible order to vacate all dwelling units involved? Additionally, you could be subject to a $75 fine.

That’s what just happened to the First Amendment Club.

If you received a letter like that, wouldn’t you want to call the number they tell you to call to address this urgent matter?

Sucker! It’s just another example of those whacky tricksters down at city hall, setting up a phone prank like the problematic 311 line.

Check out what happens when you call by clicking here.

I guess that’s one way to encourage people to drive over to city hall and feed those spiffy new parking kiosks.

Rumors had been swirling that troubled Wachovia Bank was being eyed for a federally backed takeover by Citigroup, but instead it looks like it might be purchased by Wells Fargo for $15.1 billion, without government assistance. And what everyone in town wants to know is this: What’s the Buffalo connection?

Well, it all started back on May 20, 1818, in the small village of Pompey, New York, south of Syracuse. The boy born there on that date would have to support himself from the age of 13 on, working for a man named Daniel Butts, carrying village mail. Later, he worked as a grocery clerk.

In 1845, when he was still 25, railroads and canal boats only traveled as far west as Buffalo. That was the year an express carrying business running from Buffalo to Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago was born. Daniel Dunning, Henry Wells, and our hero, William G. Fargo, formed Wells & Co. Later, the company would morph into a little enterprise called American Express.

When gold was discovered in California, Wells, Fargo and another partner in American Express named John Butterfield saw an opportunity to make a bundle transporting freight from the booming west to the business centers of the east. They formed a separate business in San Francisco called Wells Fargo & Company in 1852. From then until 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed with the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, Wells Fargo enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the transport business, running deliveries throughout the wild west while simultaneously creating a dramatic American image that has been used by Hollywood from its very beginning—the stagecoach. It remains the Wells Fargo corporate symbol.

Fargo built a huge mansion on 5.5 acres of land in Buffalo, bordered by Jersey, West, Pennsylvania, and…Fargo streets. Presidents and other luminaries like Mark Twain visited there. Inside, there was a fully functioning barber shop. One can imagine Fargo sitting down every morning to receive his daily shave, freshly steamed towels on hand.

Here's a photo of the place as it looked in 1900, shortly before it burned to the ground.

And here's a picture of the hall...

Fargo went on to become mayor of Buffalo from 1862-1866, during part of the Civil War.

Of course, the Wells Fargo that’s purchasing Wachovia is more than a few steps removed from this great American tycoon, but hey, it’s a connection all the same.

You can visit and pay your respects at his impressive obelisk in Forest Lawn Cemetery. His family rest in section AA. He has rested there since 1881.

Weather predictions of showers for Saturday night proved wrong and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery was jammed packed for their Rockin’ at the Knox annual fundraiser concert. This years headliner was the whacky “new wave” party band of the eighties, The B-52s, and the band’s stage energy was as high as a beehive hairdo.

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