Shufflin’ and Supposin’: On “Buffalo in 50 Maps”
Vicky Johnson-Dahl | Buffalo in 50 Maps | Belt Publishing | 2023 | 109 Pages
Vicky Johnson-Dahl wants to share the Buffalove. In Buffalo in 50 Maps, the drummer, ice cream maker, and director-at-large of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) reimagines her hometown data into new visual contexts. Johnson-Dahl’s maps and infographics cajole readers past first impressions of “brrrrr” and “chicken wings.” Instead, readers experience the city as concentric circles mapping the “Cheerios Smell” or “Josh Allen’s Passing Yards by Season.” Check out the “Parade Routes” and “Tree Density.” Did you know that Rick James, Funk Legend, is buried at Forest Lawn?
My own Buffalonian consciousness was first raised in 1979, in Mrs. Dorrah’s fourth-grade class at Vestavia Elementary, Northport, Alabama. The class was circled up. Everyone’s parents had written their birthplace on a piece of paper, which we took turns holding up and saying out loud. The exercise was pretty boring, given everyone had been born at Druid City Hospital, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Then came my turn: Children’s Hospital, Buffalo, New York.
Everyone turned around and gawked, like those old “When E.F. Hutton talks… people listen” commercials. I felt othered, but also proud of my unique origin. That’s right, I wasn’t from around here, and what’s more, my side won the Civil War. Suck it, hayseeds.
Of course, there’s more to Buffalo than its location north of the Mason-Dixon line. The first mapped colonial settlement was called Fort Suppose, and I can’t help but feel the area has been striving for this elusive destination ever since. The city’s name comes from Buffalo Creek, derived from the Seneca, but no actual buffalo have roamed the area since the 1790s. What’s more, the ungulates weren’t buffalo (a species native to Africa and Asia), but bison. Even the Broadway song, “Shuffle off to Buffalo” is more than a catchy tune about honeymoon sex in a railway car. The lyric evolved from the Hamlet quote, “Shuffle off this mortal coil.” In other words, to die, to give up.
My parents gave up on Buffalo in 1969, a year after I was born. The story goes that Dad, armed with a fresh Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo, went to interview at the University of Alabama. He left a blizzard to find sunbeams and firework azaleas. Mom was nervous about leaving home, but Dad convinced her that a state “where the skies are blue” could be a good idea. The ice skates and wool longjohns went to molder in the attic, along with our Catholic faith and Northern Vowel Shift.
Over time, explaining that I’d been born somewhere else got old. When asked where I was from, I learned that no one wanted to hear about how I’m from Buffalo but not really, or from Alabama but not really. So I picked a side: grits over hashbrowns. I extended my drawl. Bought a punch bowl. Monogrammed a set of white towels. Now Buffalo in 50 Maps has me thinking about the side I left behind. The book is organized around four city slogans, Queen City of the Lakes, City of Good Neighbors, City of Light, and City of No Illusions—taking the reader through a communal memoir that mirrors that of my family.
Johnson-Dahl’s first section, “Queen City of the Lakes,” traces Buffalo’s development from a public square in 1804 through the opening of the Erie Canal in 1883, which caused rapid growth through 1953. Buffalo’s first motto reflects an optimism that perhaps inspired both sets of my grandparents to move there.
My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a New York City lawyer who grew wealthy through investments. My grandfather, Joe Ferguson, was the family disappointment. Joe made the most of the roaring twenties, so much so my great-grandfather cut him off. Joe decided to start over in Buffalo where he met and married my grandmother, Betty Davies. Betty, a good Catholic, gave birth to four children in seven years, after which she died of surgery attempting to repair uterine prolapse. Overwhelmed and underemployed, Joe placed his four children, (the oldest being my father, age six) in the German Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum on 54 Dodge Street.
“I can’t say if my father was an alcoholic,” my father said when I interviewed him. “But he was a regular at the Roseland Grill. Sometimes he took me along. ‘Good ole’ Joe!’ they’d yell.”
Good or maybe not so much, I never had the chance to judge for myself. Joe Ferguson died in 1964, age sixty-one, four years before I was born.
My mother’s father, Frank Deutsch, survived the Depression by teaching himself the accordion so he could play weddings in Polish Village. He married my grandmother, Leona Bilgere, and they had my mother, Diana Marie Deutsch. Manufacturing jobs were in abundance then, and Grandpa Deutsch took one at Western Electric. The salary supported his family in a double on 54 Northumberland Avenue in Delavan Grider, where he lived and worked the same job until his retirement. My Great Uncle Frank lived with his parakeets on the ground floor.
Enter Section Two: “The City of Good Neighbors.”
Johnson-Dahl uses this section to relate ethnographies titled “Black Owned Businesses,” “LGBTQ+ History,” and “Population Age.” For Mom, the City of Good Neighbors meant her European immigrant middle-class community, where children played jacks on the sidewalk, skipped rope, and sipped malteds through straws at the counter. As a child, I experienced the tail end of Mom’s idealized “Leave it to Borys” childhood, where kids got in big trouble if they lifted a pencil. Through the 70s, my family still made a biannual Christmas pilgrimage to the northern home country. Google Maps calculates this distance at 954 miles and 15 hours; the trip probably felt longer in an orange VW bus—budda budda budda—and this kid asking about snow and Santa every five seconds.
My Alabama White Christmas dreams came true when Dad and I tobogganed in Delaware Park, designed by the famed Central Park landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmstead. Mom treated me to a malted at her childhood corner drugstore, right before it closed. Grandpa would bring home freshly sliced salami from an Italian deli wrapped in wax paper, which blew my Oscar Meyer bologna mind.
My family has one surviving Yankee food tradition: rutabaga, served boiled and mashed with butter, salt, and pepper. For reasons unknown, even the most deeply southern Piggly Wiggly will have one waxy, bowling ball of a rutabaga that takes a machete to chop. Compared to delicious southern sides such as ham hock beans and squash casserole, the bitter root vegetable is a tough sell, but every holiday Mom insisted, “You gotta have the rutabaga.” Certain words resurrected her flat “a”: “Gotta,” “rutabaga,” “ma,” and “Waatch out Paaaaat!,” which came out, with her hands flapping, when she didn’t approve of Dad’s driving.
Johnson-Dahl uses Section Three: “City of Lights” to show how Buffalonians get around, including drive times to a Bills game and a graphic that maps “jaydriving,” the recent practice of crashing cars into buildings. The 1901 moniker comes from the fact that Buffalo, thanks to Nikola Tesla and Niagara Falls, was the first American city with street lamps. This power ushered in an era of industry.
Alas, The City of Lights didn’t shine as bright or as long as everyone would have liked. The generations following Grandpa Deutsch’s did not enjoy his job security. Developments in electricity transmission made Buffalo’s proximity to Niagara Falls increasingly irrelevant. The St. Lawrence Seaway ended Buffalo’s tenure as a transportation hub. Jobs became mechanized.
In 1950, Buffalo reached a population high of 580,000 before urban renewal triggered an exodus to the suburbs. The population dropped 50,000 by the end of the decade, and the trend continued. In the 70s, 100,000 middle-class Buffalonians left, and my grandparents followed in 1980. They moved to Tuscaloosa to chuck the beaver coats and be near my mother, but also to flee a neighborhood in steep decline. By 2010, Buffalo’s population dropped to 261,310.
Which takes us to the last slogan, Section Four: “City of No Illusions”
Grandpa Deutsch, to strip the sugar, blamed “the Blacks” for his neighborhood’s broken glass and boarded-up windows. “They” were the reason for the closing of local businesses and rising crime rate. As a fourth grader, I felt smug about Union victory. As an adult, I have learned that fighting to end slavery isn’t the same thing as welcoming emancipated people as neighbors. With the Second Great Migration from 1940 to 1970, Buffalo’s African American population rose from five to twenty percent. The new arrivals were greeted with policies designed to keep them from entering the middle class.
Redlining maps how government agencies set mortgage rates according to the racial makeup of various neighborhoods, making it difficult for Black Americans in particular to purchase property. Public money was directed away from public transit into federal highway funds, a move that favored white flight commuters. The Kensington Expressway, built in 1967, sliced through predominantly Black neighborhoods, destroying property values in its wake. Grandpa Deutsch blamed African Americans, but he should have blamed his city government; his home in Delavan Grider landed on the wrong side of the asphalt. Current real estate “Zestimates” on Zillow for the neighborhood run around $80,000. That is, if the houses still stand. “Vacant Land” maps 15,000 parcels of razed buildings, including 54 Northumberland (where my grandparents lived), which has a Zestimate of $2000. Google Street View shows a parking lot with two cars and a dumpster filled with old tires and bicycles.
The “Former Catholic Churches” portion of the book maps Mom’s childhood place of worship, St. Matthews. Mom’s high school, Mount St. Joseph Academy, closed in 2009. The Buffalo Children’s Hospital where I was born closed in 2017. The more I research, the more I’m reminded of The Pretenders song where Chrissy Hynde sings about how she went back to Ohio, but her city was gone. Akron, 212 miles southwest of Buffalo, is a similar Rust Belt story.
But Johnson-Dahl doesn’t want me to dwell on the past. She’s more interested in how her city can chart a future, and the latest demographic trends support her positive thinking. For the first time in seventy years, the 2020 U.S. census showed a significant population increase of seven percent, a growth fueled by an influx of immigrants and refugees—Bangladeshi, Burmese, and Yemenese, among other good neighbors. New urban planning investments have created parks, public art projects, and repurposed abandoned buildings into affordable housing. The new Buffalo Syllabus seeks to uplift its community with digital resources gathered by Black scholars and activists.
Johnson-Dahl writes in her introduction, “Welcome to Buffalo. Someplace real.” Maybe I’m more Buffalonian than I ever knew because I’ve always chosen real over easy. I buy old houses in mixed-income neighborhoods, more at home with the wail of sirens than the purr of a riding lawnmower. Give me a family-run joint with formica tables over small plates and single-origin truffles. And yes, I’m one of those grumpy people who loathe the Magic Kingdom. I’d rather visit a ghost town and search for a rusty washboard.
Today, when asked where I’m “from,” the easy answer remains, “I grew up in Alabama,” but that’s not the whole story. I’m leaving out Mom’s Catholic schoolgirl uniform that hangs in my closet and Grandpa Deustch’s accordion. I’m leaving out the rutabaga, and the flat “a” word that leaps out of my mouth if I’m cut off in traffic.
Ten years ago, I was driving along I-90 in upstate New York on my way to a wedding. I snapped a pic of the green exit sign for Mom. “Buffalo!” I messaged. Within a minute she texted back, “You can have it.”
50 Maps has me thinking I should claim the city my mother gave me. Buffalo clocks in at six hours, 392 miles from my current home of Athens, Ohio. I’ve been researching AirBnbs, which are—no surprise— more common west of the Kensington Expressway. On the inside, these places look like Anywhere, USA—the same IKEA furniture and greige paint. And while I’ll probably sleep in one of these box store beds, I’ll shuffle east to Northumberland and see what’s new in the old neighborhood. I can’t help but suppose there’s a way to go back and look forward, envision how two sides can make whole.