BUFFALO, N.Y. — To the man who walks head down, eyes to the ground, the city is a mess of sewer caps and gutters. The world he observes is one of concrete, of pavement cracked by time and weather.

To the man who looks up at the sky, gaze titled toward the heavens, the city is a place of endless beauty. He studies the sunset, sees the world blush. At night, his heart swells with wonder as he beholds the belly of the universe: stars splashed across an obsidian ocean, their light a thousand years old.

The vision of the city that imprints itself on a person’s memory and imagination hinges on perspective—the direction in which a man casts his sights, the location from which he makes his observations.

Like every city, Buffalo is many cities.

The metropolis is an art-deco wonder, with buildings of painted brick and carved terra cotta rising from crowded streets. Alternately, it is a graveyard of ruins, a melancholy landscape of crumbling, abandoned homes.

The city is not one or the other, but both—and much more.

Part I: At Home on the Urban Prairie
Part II: The Two Lives of Jewett Parkway
Part III: Chemical No. 5

PART I

TITUS AVENUE spans three blocks, bridging the half mile between Broadway and Sycamore Streets on Buffalo’s East Side. On the middle block, nine of 13 houses are appear to be vacant—a supernatural spectacle. Beneath a blue summer sky, they gape at the world around them, wide-mouthed, their windows devoid of glass, their insides exposed for all to see.

This is the kind of place that touches your soul. You pace the sidewalk, not knowing quite what to say. The empty buildings return your stare, making you feel as if you are the alien, the specter, the deviant.

Everything is quiet.

Then, a friend materializes: Down a short, gravel path that connects Titus Avenue with railroad tracks, Carol Davis, 43, approaches, a smile lighting her eyes. At 8 a.m., she is coming home from work. She staffs the night shift as a janitor at D’Youville College.

Davis lives with her father in the white house with the beautiful lawn—green and neat—on the corner. A native of Buffalo, she moved back last November after spending several years in Greenwood, S.C. taking care of her mother, who had a brain aneurysm.

The city of Davis’s childhood no longer exists. Time, neglect and violence have rendered the once-familiar landscape into something strange.

“Everything is gone. Everything,” Davis says, recalling her first impression of the East Side after her time away. “All over here on this street, everything just tore down and trash everywhere. It was sad. And I didn’t want to be here.”

Northland, Grider, Genesee—these are the boulevards Davis remembers from her youth. But she no longer knows them. Less than a mile from her Titus Avenue residence, someone shot and killed her half-brother Joseph in August 2003 in what the Buffalo News called an execution-style murder. A month after Davis arrived, her father’s long-time wife died of an infection.

Davis was distraught at first. But these days, she prefers to talk about the future. She is, she declares, a person who loves to laugh.

In South Carolina, she was a nurse aide. She is hoping to save money to apply for certification in New York. For the moment, however, she is happy to help her dad with household bills, glad that she can be at his side as he heals.

“I got baptized about three weeks ago,” she says.

She wanted, she explains, to be submerged—to be pulled down into the water, to be washed of her sins, to resurface, to feel new.

The conversation ends, and Davis closes the door.

In her warmth, the world outside seemed to melt away. Now, you are alone again with the yawning houses. In your talk, Davis had related that a family had recently moved in a few addresses down. But the neighborhood is silent, frozen as you survey the streetscape.

You try to picture Titus Avenue as it must once have been: clean, alive—smiling like Davis. But against the backdrop of atrophy and rot, your imagination cannot conjure the essential imagery.

You wish you could step backward into history to learn what happened here. It looks like people left in a hurry. In an upstairs room of one forsaken two-story, you glimpse a queen-sized mattress, upright but slouching against one wall. You climb through the missing, picture window of another dwelling to discover torn ceilings and half-painted walls. Someone had been renovating not long ago.

Where did they go? Where did everyone go?

PART II

JEWETT PARKWAY has two lives. In fact, East of Main Street, the road becomes “Jewett Avenue.”

A name change means nothing, you might think.

But as you set out on a half-mile walk, you realize that Jewett is a bridge between worlds. You see that the two halves of the street have distinct personalities. They are siamese twins: forever connected, but divergent in character.

East Jewett is a life-sized collage, a jumble of buildings in varying states of repair. Where the street meets Fillmore Avenue, a boarded-up brick box stands across from an empty lot. A thin tapestry of dying grass blankets the open space. The sidewalks are an urban beach, a sea of cracked pavement littered with bits of trash—the junk and dregs of man eroded into urban gravel by the passage of time and the forces of nature.

The scenery begins to morph as you head west. You pass a row of family homes and watch a two-man crew park a truck in the garage of a busy warehouse.

Then Jewett opens onto Main, a thoroughfare bustling with cars and buses. The scent of exhaust fills the air. Music explodes through the windows of vehicles stopped at the crossing.

The former Central Presbyterian Church, until recently home to a century-old Catholic school, rises on Jewett Parkway on the west side of Main. The building is a thing of beauty—a solemn edifice of cut stone, with red trim framing towering windows.

From here, five tree-lined blocks span the short distance to Delaware Park, where Jewett ends. Upscale houses stand on either side, postcard-perfect with gardens bursting with ferns and black-eyed susans. Spears of golden sunlight pierce through green canopies to shiver on shaded sidewalks.

It is beautiful.

How quickly the landscape changes in Buffalo. The city’s modern divisions are a haunting expression of history, the legacy of industrial decline, the consequence of failed planning. As factory jobs vanished and the population dived, whole neighborhoods fell apart while others flourished. The patchwork metropolis that resulted is what you observe as you walk down Jewett.

It is August. In a month or two, along Jewett Parkway and its tributaries, the leaves will turn and fall to earth, burying the pavement in a storm of yellow confetti. Winter will shepherd in a season of white, of icicles dangling from snow-topped roofs.

Through it all, residents will revel in the noises of the nearby zoo, falling asleep to the sound of sea lions barking, and awakening some mornings–delighted–to find the elephants trumpeting.

You can’t help but think: Do the people of west and east Jewett ever speak to one another? Do their worlds ever converge? Or are they destined to remain forever separate, even if conjoined?

PART III

CHEMICAL NO. 5. The words crawl across the front of the old firehouse in huge wooden letters, spelled out in a whimsical font. The red-brick structure has the body of a gnome: The steep, sloped roof resembles a pointed hat.

This building is a dream, a gem.

Constructed in the late 1800s, it rises on Cleveland Avenue in one of Buffalo’s most desirable neighborhoods. More than a century later, the three-story construction is now a home.

On a summer’s day, Sarah Yerkovich, one of the property’s owners, answers the door. She is happy to talk about the history of Chemical No. 5.

The second-floor living room, with cookbooks and old editions of National Geographic filling cubed shelves, was once a hay loft, Yerkovich says. (The old firefighting operation reportedly included a horse-drawn wagon.) The home has wooden floors, sky-high ceilings, tall French doors that look out to a courtyard. The window shutters, colossal and folding, are architectural wonders.

Chemical No. 5 owes its grandeur to Bruno Freschi, former University at Buffalo dean of architecture, who acquired the building in 1989 and converted it into a residence with his wife.

With a smile, Yerkovich takes you on a tour, walking you through an expansive dining room, a cluttered basement, a den painted a bright blue and sponged with clouds. Then, she escorts you to the door.

Outside, you hear the singing of birds. Their voices dance over the hum of cicadas. A block to the west of this picture of serenity, Cleveland spills onto Elmwood Avenue, a busy street of boutiques and eateries: a cupcake bakery, a store just for olive oil, a fabric shop lush with color, restaurants serving Greek, French and Vietnamese cuisine.

Inside one corner café, customers with nothing else to do on a weekday morning occupy a jigsaw of tables, sipping coffee, tapping away on laptop computers, reading books. From behind the window of a display case, a rich collection of pastries beckons. You imagine the heavy batter from which they must have taken form–the eggs, the sugar, the butter, the milk.

This is not a world of dreams. Everything is real.

EPILOGUE

THE TITLE of this story refers to author Italo Calvino’s novel of the same name. Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” employs rich language to describe a multitude of urban landscapes. But in the end, the reader is left wondering whether the cities Calvino has detailed exist at all—whether they are inventions of the imagination, or illustrations of distinct elements of the same, single city.

A city changes not only with place, but also with time. I reported this story in June and July. In the intervening months, the streetscape of Titus Avenue has shifted again. More vacant houses have been demolished, and Carol Davis has talked with her new neighbors about transforming one of the newly empty lots into a vegetable garden.

This story is only a snapshot of Buffalo. What tomorrow holds, no one can know.

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Mark Anderson edited this story.

architecture, broadway-fillmore, buffalo, chemical no. 5, cities, east side, elephants, elmwood, everything, parkside, strangers, urban planning Uncategorized