Letters to the Editor
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‘Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?’
Two points about Professor Glaeser’s expansive essay on shrinking Buffalo [Oped, “Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?” October19, 2007].
One, the creeping historical revisionism that the Erie Canal was not essential to New York City’s expansion. This attitude probably springs from civic unease about continuing credit for a now long, irrelevant canal.
The canal made New York great in reality and, perhaps even more importantly, in perception.
The city’s port was stagnant and its population declined between 1810 and 1816, the year before canal construction began. Soon after completion in 1825, the city controlled more than two-thirds of American imports as capital and immigrants also flooded in.
It was during construction of what quickly appeared would be a successful project that the word “empire” was first used to describe the state and its leading city.
Had the canal not immediately established permanent national commercial networks between the city and the previously inaccessible continental interior, railroads would have made rivals of a dozen other Atlantic seaboard cities 10 years later. Two, regarding the future of Buffalo, which curiously shares with New York City the same original name — New Amsterdam — and with Manhattan enduring mystery over the meaning of its name, Buffalo will rise once it forgets the Erie Canal.
Like modern Greece fumbling in the long shadow of ancient greatness, Buffalo still defines itself by past glory.
Buffalo was mothered by the canal but 200 years later still lives at home, even though the canal has been dead for nearly a century.
New York City has never much bothered with living in the past, and manages to reinvent itself and its times every 50 years or so.
So, Buffalo, you are not half the city you used to be, you are a quarter of a million people with work to do.
GERARD KOEPPEL
New York, N.Y.
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