Buffalo Soldiers On

From Dave Brigham:

Buffalo, New York's second-largest metropolis, is troubled. A rust belt city like Detroit, Buffalo has a high poverty rate, and scores of abandoned houses, churches, institutions and manufacturing complexes.

Search for "Buffalo New York abandoned" online, and you'll find countless sites offering photos of the devastation that the loss of manufacturing and a recession have wrought on the city.

Retronaut, a site I stumbled across a while back, has some cool, if disheartening pictures of Buffalo's Church of the Transfiguration.

In 1994, the church was sold by the local diocese to private citizens who intended to turn it into housing and a community center. Unfortunately, years were lost to lawsuits and by last year, the Buffalo News reported in an editorial that the site is "unkempt. Grass grows tall; there is graffiti on the exterior of the building and some of the basement windows are missing, making for easy entry."

Very sad. But all is not lost in the Queen City.

Preservation Buffalo Niagara, according to its web site, works "to identify, preserve, protect, promote and revitalize historically architecturally significant sites, structures, neighborhoods, commercial districts and landscapes in western New York."

Last year, the preservation group served as local host for the National Trust for Historic Preservation's National Preservation Conference. For more on what preservationists are doing in Buffalo, read "Reinventing Buffalo" from the National Trust's magazine.