Two journalists rode along on a recent Tour de Neglect through Buffalo's East Side and have recently published their work. Buffalo's own Block Club and UK's The Guardian join the list, see below, of media outlets critically reviewing this bicycle tour.
Jennifer Conner, writing for the latest issue of Block Club, focuses on one of the tour's stops and writes about the people she met in historically one of the city's most challenged neighborhoods - In the shadow of the Sacred Heart. The census tract surrounding this neighborhood, once the most densely populated in the city, has lost more than 89% of its population over the years. Jennifer's work is richly photographed by Harper Bishop.
Ethan Powers, writing for The Guardian has a broader view. His article contains a few of my own photographs of the city's East Side as well as Molly Jarboe's photographs from the tour.
The city of Buffalo has an identity problem. One half has been reborn like a phoenix from a graveyard of industrial ash – experiencing an economic and cultural resurgence that has transformed many previously barren areas into bustling centres of commerce and entertainment. Yet the other half sits in a state of utter disrepair – its streets manifest a palpable level of poverty, blind to the recovery and optimism growing across town...read the rest.
Additional media reviews of previous Tour de Neglect bicycle tours are available here - #CNU22 Tour de Neglect Postscript. Buffalo News art critic Colin Dabkowski reviews an earlier tour here.
Please join us for the the next Tour de Neglect - Saturday October 18, 2014. We'll be leaving from the Hotel Lafayette at 10am and returning a few hours later. Details on FaceBook.
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2 comments:
That's really messed up. For a while my g/f and I lived just a couple minutes from there near the intersection of Main & Huron. Everything West of us the last couple years has started picking up some life but that whole east section is just rough.
There's a nonprofit in that area that's doing some good work, and some decent food joints, but other than that those blocks all around Clinton going up towards Bailey is just a graveyard of churches and broken down homes.
We had an architectural historian explain to us that everything that sits "behind" the Elmwood / Allen medical corridor has just been left to decay, or that little attention has been paid to it - that the city, in more than a few instances, is "architecturally racist" as he called it. Do you think that's true? Is that what we're seeing?
cds
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