Daydream City

At some point in childhood - often in the classroom, on the playground or at the school cafeteria - every kid learns his or her first harsh lesson about how the real world works.

Because I'm from Buffalo, my comeuppance came in an unexpected field: urban planning.

I lived on Humboldt Parkway, a famous Buffalo street with a six-lane highway - the Scajaquada Expressway - built right down the middle.

One day, I asked my parents why our street was called "parkway" if it was built on a highway; and furthermore, who would build a highway down the middle of a street in the first place?

They told me the highway wasn't always there. Humboldt, they said, was once a grand street with a block-wide swath of green in the middle that ran several miles from Delaware Park to Humboldt Park.

Then in the '60s, without regard for the thousands of people that lived in the neighborhoods along the street, New York State built a highway through it.

On the state's planning map, Delaware Park, a majestic and meticulously crafted city park, was marked as "open land," ripe for construction.

You can't miss the highway. It slithers down the street and through the park like a noisy, writhing snake. When we first moved in, there were motorcycle races at night. And every few months we heard a crunch of metal and a shattering of glass as two cars collided.

Yet every day I saw the highway, I also saw the old parkway. Every day I crossed the bridge over the highway to catch the bus, I also saw a stretch of green lawns and an unbroken line of trees.

When I sledded and ran in Delaware Park and the highway came into view, I thought "what if?" and it vanished like a ghost. The green lawns grew back and trees sprouted from the ground.

Every Buffalo native who is the least bit familiar with the city's history grows up in two cities: the city that is and the city of his or her imagination.

The towers, and streets and highways are only partly real. We also live in the daydream city - the place that was and the place that might have been.

Since World War II, Buffalo's made an urban planning mistake for every gallon of water in Lake Erie. Highways were built through the city's parks and along the Niagara River. A garish pedestrian mall was built on Main Street for a subway that's barely more than 10 miles long.

A new football stadium was built in the suburbs instead of downtown. Governments were unprepared for the collapse of the city's industries, so they watched helplessly as factory after factory shuttered its doors.

Most students, even if they're from out of town, learned early in their freshman year of Buffalo's most infamous planning blunder. In the '60s, the state passed up the chance to put UB's new campus in the heart of the city, along the waterfront. Instead they built it on an Amherst swamp.

When they learn of all these mistakes, and consider that Buffalo's population is half of what it was in 1950, some people say Buffalo's a dying city.

It's easy for a newcomer to look at the empty factories, the vacant shops, and the wind-swept pedestrian mall and conclude that the city is beyond redemption.

But those of us who grew up here see a different city. Every streetscape tells only half the story.

So many students from out of town wonder why we Buffalo natives have so much affection for our city. We say it's because Buffalo is actually vibrant and sophisticated. We've got great food, great culture and great people.

And we're honestly impressed every time we discover a great city - like Toronto, Boston, or New York - that has realized its potential.

But we love Buffalo because its faded hopes live deep in our imaginations. We fill in the gaps of its lost potential and broken dreams and make it ours.

And though we're seduced by the beauty of the city that might have been, in some fine and fleeting moments, we're stunned by the beauty of the city that is.