All Gone to Look for America (10 page)

I am lugging a heavy rucksack around Buffalo because there's no facility for leaving luggage, ostensibly for fear that the luggage in question might contain explosives. But here I am, unsupervised, unnoticed at the top of the city hall. Had I been a bomb-toting terrorist there is nothing to stop me blowing up the only building I have so far seen in Buffalo that doesn't actually deserve it.

Back down to earth, it's time to take a closer look at the great triple-towered monolith of the Statler. It is more than half a century now since there have been any hotels called Statler – the group was sold to Hilton Hotels in 1954 – but the name lingers in the subconscious, if only because Statler and Waldorf were the names of the two old hecklers in
The Muppet Show
. Ellsworth Milton Statler was one of those great American businessmen who had the ‘vision thing' at least when it came to making money and building an empire. He saw the 1901 Buffalo fair as an opportunity to prove American hospitality could reach levels other countries couldn't, by building the world's first hotel with a private bath or shower in every room. It was cheap: ‘A room with a bath for a dollar and a half' the slogan ran. His competitors predicted disaster. But it turned out to be so popular that he revolutionised the hotel industry with a new level of occupancy and would later boast that he never even touched the half a million dollar credit line afforded by his bankers.

Statler went on to found a chain of hotels across the US and in 1923 built a newer, much grander building in Buffalo which is the formidable edifice that still stands today. More or less, mostly less. In its time the Buffalo Statler was
the largest luxury hotel between New York and Chicago with 1,100 rooms and prided itself on supplying its guests not only with a bath in every room but free newspapers and ice, still in those days a luxury at home. He imported the marble for his grand rooms from Italy and guests included the transatlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh, Presidents Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Truman and General Chiang Kai Shek in the days when he ruled all of China.

Statler himself died in 1928. It is just as well he never lived to see the fate of his most beloved hotel. Its days as a luxury hotel ended in the early 1980s; sold off and renamed Statler Towers, it has been converted into flats and offices, the sort of offices that have signs advertising
WORKERS' COMPENSATION ATTORNEYS
or
FREE LEGAL CONSULTATIONS
, alongside
NO SOLICITORS IN THIS BUILDING
(one more proof that our ‘common language' is a myth). The
NO SOLICITORS
sign is next to one that says
NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS
, the sort of signs people put up in buildings routinely plagued by hawkers and people likely to urinate in the corners, especially when the strategically placed
reception
desk is unmanned. The one in the entrance to Statler Towers looks like it has been unmanned since 1954. The chandeliers still hang overhead, dusty glowing baubles, like a dirty diamond necklace round the neck of some bag lady. In 2006 the building was bought by a British businessman of Asian descent who reportedly plans major renovation. There is a lot to do.

But then there is a lot to do anywhere you look in Buffalo. Any 14-year-old computer gamer could explain it. All it takes is a couple of hours playing Sim City, one of the world's most addictive games, which over four evolutions and two decades has become so accurate that I suspect it is probably even used by city planners nowadays. At least when you see how cities all over the world appear worryingly to be following the American pattern, you have to look for a conspiracy somewhere. The grid system, the delight of city planners since Roman days, is fraught with danger when it produces lots that can be
individually
owned and developed – or not – with no obvious sensitivity to the lot next door. Play Sim City and watch how in your grid-aligned city, lots rise and fall relatively independently of one another.

Since the latter half of the twentieth century saw the steel and heavy
industry
which Buffalo's prosperity had come to rely on turn into the rust belt, the response has been knee-jerk as lot owners develop or raze on their own whim. All the municipal authorities can do is pour dollops of money into specific projects – a marina, a new stadium, urban expressways, even a small
downtown
public transport tram system – but not one of them has paid attention to the idea of a harmonious whole. A city that was once world famous for its
architecture, is today an example of how anything that
can
go wrong
will
go wrong.

Meanwhile, I still have half a dozen hours to kill before the overnight Lake Shore Limited will take me onwards to Chicago. On the dubious advice of the Canadian in the bar in Niagara, who claimed to be a regular visitor to Buffalo, I head first for the Elmwood district which he assured me was the liveliest part of central Buffalo. He was not wrong, except in describing it as ‘central'. This has a lot to do with perspective. When I ask directions to Elmwood, I am told it's just ‘five or 10 minutes down the road', but then nobody is even remotely imagining I might be on foot. By now I've begun to get a grip of the scale of downtown Buffalo's urban wasteland, and decide it's time to investigate public transport. Of course, what passes for public transport in most of America is taxis. Except that you can almost never find one. They don't cruise the streets in the hope of being hailed – except in New York – and the only way of getting one is either finding a rank (which you won't because it's called a ‘stand') or knowing the number of a firm and then being able to explain where you are, and probably how to get there. Taxis are for people who have momentarily mislaid their cars (most Americans would take that to mean people who are about to lose their cars: ‘momentarily' here doesn't mean something of brief duration but something that's going to happen ‘in a moment'. Confusing, isn't it?).

But I have already clapped eyes on the pride of Buffalo's public transport system: a tramway that runs up and down Main Street. For the central stops it is free. The main reason for this is that public transport, in the sense we understand it in Britain, is intended for two groups: the destitute, and
tourists
. As a result, the trams don't run all that frequently, every 15 minutes at best, and feel more like one of those little rubber-wheeled trains that ferry tourists around seaside resorts than a serious means of urban transportation. Even this far north, in what I would have assumed to be a typical ‘Anglo' city close to the Canadian border, the ticket machines show just how rapidly Spanish is becoming America's semi-official second language: ‘
Pulse por su idoma
,' the
LCD
display says. I choose
inglés
, feed in a dollar to get beyond the city centre and it spews out a ‘permit to ride'.

The tram, however, also only goes halfway towards where the minimalist city map suggests Elmwood might begin. That means getting back on shank's pony despite my sore feet, but that doesn't matter too much because this is Buffalo's best bit, chiefly because nobody has done anything to it for most of the twentieth century. You know you have reached Elmwood when the parking
lots start to fade away and little wooden houses dare to creep into view,
skulking
along the side of the road in the hope they won't be noticed and pulled down. Most of them have got away with it, enough for them to survive until the first ‘bohemians' moved in: middle-class kids with enough money to play at being artists, and who didn't depend on heavy industry jobs that were no longer there. They stand knocking back bottles of Corona on the terrace of the Cozumel Mexican bar-restaurant in the weak autumn sunlight.

I know I should be tucking heartily into that famous local speciality, ‘Buffalo Wings', but somehow a plate of fattened wings from bloated factory-farmed chickens that have become the staple diet for bloated factory-working humans is the last thing I feel like. Anyhow this isn't the place to have them; I should be in the Anchor Bar in bleak downtown where back in 1964 Teressa Bellissimo, wife of the owner, found her son Dominic and several pals from college
arriving
unannounced in search of something to eat. In a fit of inspiration she took the leftover chicken wings she normally boiled up for soup stock, deep-fried them and doused them with spicy tomato sauce. Or maybe not. At least two other bars claim the idea originated there – Buffalo has not enough claims to fame to let even that one go undisputed.

Instead, I settle for tacos, a ‘free' plate of tortilla chips and a chunky chilli and tomato salsa that almost tastes as if it might be homemade. Washed down with a pint of Yuengling. It could have been the alcohol, it could have been the pretty waitress with the big smile that it doesn't take too much self-delusion to believe might be there for me instead of her tip, but before long some
semblance
of humanity has crept up on me unawares. I wouldn't say I feel part of the human race again, or as near as I'm likely to get in Buffalo. The upbeat mood comes with me on the long tramp back into town. With the hours before my midnight train still stretching ahead of me like another empty parking lot, I'm going to try the Canadian's tips for early evening Friday night nightlife: the ‘Chippewa entertainment district'. The name alone had me hooked. ‘
Chippewa
' is one of those words that has been on my personal radar for more than two decades without me ever really having a clue what it meant. All because it features in the first line of Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot's ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald'.

Gordon Lightfoot is hardly a particular favourite of mine. But that one song, first heard sung by a Canadian student in a bar filled with nostalgic expats in the basement of a Moscow embassy in the latter days of the Cold War, has always seemed particularly evocative. Part of that comes from the sheer alien ‘otherness' of the place names, places that might as well be on the moon, and
yet obviously so deeply familiar to the narrator that they need no explanation. This haunting song tells the tragic tale of a shipwreck in which all 29 crew died. And yet if you'd never heard it the lyrics look like gobbledygook, something Homer Simpson would sing in the bath: Chippewa and Gitchi Gumee. But then words don't just have meanings, they have resonance. Take two exotic, apparently meaningless terms that resonate together as if they come from a common language, then throw in a familiar but evocative word like ‘legend' and you have a formula that grabs the attention and sung to a haunting melody in a low lit bar can send shivers down the spine.

One of the reasons I have never simply ‘googled' Chippewa is that part of me didn't really want to know any more in case the truth diluted the magic. But when the Canadian in the bar in Niagara used the word, the look on my face prompted him to spell it out: ‘The Chippewa – you know, the Injuns.' My obvious ignorance astounded him as much as it would have amused me had he said, ‘Paris, now tell me again, which country is that in?' People here know the Chippewa as well as the Sioux or Cheyenne. Maybe it's because they took the land from them. Gitchi Gumee, was their word for Lake Superior. Once you have seen the great cascades of Niagara, Lightfoot's lyrics about this great chain of lakes – Superior, Ontario, Erie – come into their own. After looking out from Buffalo's decaying city hall tower over the bleak, beautiful and empty expanse of Erie, with nothing but a few stationary sailboats, the vision of a great old freighter laden with iron ore, heading for Cleveland from ‘some mill in Wisconsin', seems more than ever a poignant evocation of what at the time of the disaster was already a fast vanishing world. The wreck of the
Edmund
Fitzgerald
only happened in 1975. It was a cruel last gasp.

‘But what have the Chippewa got to do with bars in downtown Buffalo?' I had asked the Canadian, vaguely wondering if like the Niagara casino local Indians they had done some sort of sale and leaseback arrangement. He'd shrugged, thought for a moment and said, ‘Not a lot. Hell, nothin' at all that I can think of.' He was right. No self-respecting Indian in his right mind would have been seen dead in the ‘entertainment district' of Buffalo.

Entertainment is always a relative term – think public hangings and
throwing
Christians to lions; there'll always be a market for it, but it's not
everybody's
cup of tea. The ‘entertainment' in and around the Chippewa district of downtown Buffalo is spot-on if you like bars that are pitch dark inside, even in the daytime, except for neon alcohol advertisements and where the music is so loud that you actually have to stand at least 10 yards outside to have a conversation, and order drinks in sign language. If that's what rings your bell
then Buffalo has a whole carillon on offer in a series of practically identical establishments about 20 yards apart. If not, that's tough.

So it's in a mood of renewed resigned despondency, with more than four hours yet to go before my train, that I tramp off once more – painfully aware of the pack on my back – in search of something a bit more congenial. Within half an hour I find what looks like the best bet. I should have guessed: this is where I came in, the Washington Tavern, the lonely-looking town bar standing amidst the wasteland on the edge of so-called Washington Square. Standing there, peering through the window and hoping not to be taken for one of the hobos from the bus shelter, wondering if this reasonable but dull-looking bar is really the best on offer, I'm suddenly accosted by a bloke who jumps out of a pickup truck. I've started to panic before I realise that he's just trying to be helpful. He is concerned, in a well-meaning way that in most European cities would verge on the suspicious, in case I might be lost. Which, of course, is not far from the truth. I surprise myself by responding in kind, telling him I'm just looking for somewhere convivial to kill a few hours before making my way to a train station I don't really know how to get to.