I posted this a few weeks ago as a comment to Melissa’s entry on Lynch and Buffalo, and I’m not sure if people have seen it (I often overlook comments myself). As I’m still relatively new to the city, still mapping it out (so to speak), I’d be very curious to hear more about other people’s mental maps. I’m posting this again hoping that someone may want to follow up. It would be interesting to compare notes.
I liked your posting, Melissa. I think we should all follow your lead and sketch our Lynch-ean (?) maps of Buffalo: it would be interesting to compare the maps drawn by those of us who are not from here (and have been here for different lengths of time), and the ones drawn by those who are actually from Buffalo (is there anyone in the class?). So here’s my map.
Until last spring, I had only gone through Buffalo on my way from Toronto to NYC. Along that route, the city itself, the city as a whole I mean, functioned for me like some kind of landmark. I still remember very distinctly the first time I saw the Buffalo skyline from the Peace Bridge in a late winter afternoon, under a grey snowy sky: since then, every time I drive back from Toronto, the twin statues of liberty with their blinking torches (on the roof of the Liberty National Bank) work for me like something of a landmark within a landmark, or perhaps the apex, the focal centre of the wider and more complex landmark represented by the city itself.
As my in first trips to (and through) Buffalo were done by bus, the Greyhound terminal is the first node that comes to my mind, along with the intricate system of highway exits around the downtown area.
Since I moved here, two more nodes have emerged: the segment of Main Street where the streetcar goes underground, and the area around the South Campus where, if traveling by public transport, you transfer from the subway to the UB shuttle and, if traveling by car, you leave Main Street to get onto that rather boring stretch of the 263 that leads to the North Campus.
I guess the main paths are for me Main Street, Elmwood and Delaware (interestingly, they are all south-north streets, which I guess has to do with the fact that my main line of movement is from Allentown, where I live, to the University). Like Melissa, I also seem to perceive Main Street as some kind of edge, although more of the “seam” than of the “barrier” kind, as I often go jogging “on the other side”. The west side (west of Richmond, say) is still very blurry for me. I sort of know that somewhere “over there” there’s the river, and the lake, but the whole area feels still like a wide, rarefied edge.
The white dome of the Electric Tower (Niagara Mohawk Building) and the nearby golden dome of the Buffalo Saving Bank (M&T Center) are for me two major downtown landmarks. The main landmark around the area where I live is probably the building on the southwest corner of the intersection between Allen and Elmwood (the building with Jim’s SteakOut place on the ground floor). The intersection itself is probably what I regard as the main node in the area.
As far as districts are concerned, I still don’t have a clear picture. I certainly perceive downtown (as delimited, roughly, by Seneca, Elmwood, Tupper, and Michigan) as a very defined district. And then there’s a whole series of fuzzier areas that I somehow consider districts, even though I have no real sense of their limits and tend to think of them as shapeless portions of space irradiating from stretches of street that I’m somehow familiar with: Allentown, the area round the ‘Elmwood strip’, the South Campus, and Hertel between Main and Elmwood. Delaware Park itself (and a few streets around it) seems to constitute further, distinctive district.
I’m curious to see how this whole map will change in a year’s time. I wonder, for instance, whether the Greyhound terminal will slowly cease to be a node for me at all (the memory of its depressing interior is still very vivid, but I haven’t been in there for almost a year now) and how districts will start taking more defined shapes. Which makes me think: was Lynch interested at all in how the mental maps of the people he interviewed changed over time? What could be learned from a diachronic comparison of this kind?
