All Gone to Look for America (9 page)

The hurricane deck lives up to its name. I have never, ever experienced such raw power up close. Not for one nanosecond did it occur to me to try and stand up there without as firm a grip as possible on the slippery handrails. It
was like standing in a rainstorm in the slipstream of a jumbo jet: deafening, drenching and physically challenging. And a hell of a lot of fun. I came back down with a huge grin on my face, dripping Niagara water and adrenaline in equal quantities.

Mark the ranger may only fancy one soaking a day at most, but I’m a sucker for punishment. Back at the top of the cliff I keep the socks and shoes in their plastic bag and canter off, yellow rain cape flapping in the breeze, to catch the Maid of the Mist. The Maid is by far the most famous way of getting up close to the Horseshoe Falls and has been operating since 1846 when it was actually a ferry service from the US to Canada. It was only when they built the first bridge a couple of years later and the ferry traffic began to dry up that they realised they could make more money not actually taking the tourists
anywhere
but as close as they could to the falls. The service collapsed during the American Civil War but a savvy Montreal firm snapped up the company and relaunched it in the 1890s, with new boats running from both the American and Canadian sides. The boats they run today look alarmingly like they might be the same ones.

The main way to get down to the jetty is by another lift, back on the main shore, and when I get to the bottom I find a large number of people in blue capes, looking disconcertingly like a middle-aged Superman fan convention. It’s worrying because I only have an hour and a half left before I need to get a cab back to the train station, the boats only leave every half hour and it doesn’t look to me as if that lot will all fit on a single boat.

I needn’t have worried, though. They do. And with room to spare, chiefly because they pack ’em in, and with most of them pensioners, they are content to cram onto the lower deck rather than face the elements in the open up top. That, however, seems to me to be the only point in doing the thing at all, and so here I am, yellow cape exchanged for blue – I didn’t want to spoil the colour scheme – up by the front railing on a rickety glorified tug boat that looks a hundred years old – it was actually built in 1976 – heading out onto the choppy waters aiming for the roiling heart of the Horseshoe Falls.

It’s a fairly ridiculous journey, not least because absolutely everybody is taking pictures of everybody else, taking turns to swap spots by the railings. Except that I’m not giving up mine. There’s only one of me and I can’t take turns and selfish as it might seem I want to be up front when we head into the maelstrom. For that is exactly what we seem intent on doing, as the captain is now confirming with a set of fairly obvious safety instructions – no hanging over the side, keep hold of your camera etc. – repeated in a language which
I am by now already programmed by the new American reality to assume is Spanish, but suddenly realise to my immense surprise is French. Obviously, of course, given that this is a Canadian vessel, even though from a brief survey of the passengers the only language that anyone might understand other than English is possibly Gujurati.

To my left I can see the wooden platforms, decking and staircases of the Cave of the Winds, and have to say that it all looks even more precarious from here, a child’s matchstick construction up against an elemental force. But however impressive the American Falls might be, and from the boat I can appreciate the sheer width of the span, there is something still more daunting about the virtually perfect ‘U’ of the Horseshoe particularly now that we have gone beyond the ends of the two arms, the air around us is a swirling drizzle and the boat is bucking like an Olympic swimmer trying to breast a tsunami. I can only imagine the helmsman down below forcing the craft to keep straight against the force of millions of gallons of water churning towards us from all directions. The Indians believed that there was a ‘thunder being’ called Heno who lived behind the Horseshoe Falls and right now it’s easy to see why. There is a lot of squealing and giggling going on. No theme park water ride I’ve ever experienced has come anywhere near close. And then all of a sudden the boat tilts ever so slightly to one side, causing a moment of near panic, but it’s only the helmsman swinging us away from the vertical and the onrushing water turns us around and we chug out of the maelstrom, with a collective ‘Wow!’ Anyone who thinks Niagara is a passive spectacle couldn’t be further from the mark. The whole experience is pure white water-white knuckle.

And that’s just the basics. Further downriver, I learn from a teenage
passenger
as we plough back towards the jetty, you can take a jet boat up the lower levels of the St Lawrence. It requires wearing a full wetsuit and signing away all rights of redress before fighting up through the appropriately named Devil’s Hole Rapids. ‘It was awesome,’ says this kid, beaming from beneath the hood of his still dripping blue cape. ‘Makes this seem kinda tame.’ Privately I think it’s lucky my train schedule doesn’t allow me the time to try it. I’ve had just about enough awe for one day. Adding ‘shock’ might not be advisable.

Back at the dock we file off and begin shedding our blue outfits, the
Superman
convention disassembling into its component parts. I can’t help
noticing
that most of the pensioners are wearing hats that look like baseball caps just slightly more squared off than normal and all of them say ‘Hank’. I am aware that this is a fairly common American name but it does seem just a bit improbable that it is shared by all of them. Unless of course this is the national
‘Hank’ association day out, a sort of annual bus tour for people with the same name, which at least would spare the need for all those silly badges. But when I venture to ask one old boy who doesn’t look quite as gaga as some of them, he looks at me with mild surprise and says with a smile that might or might not be ironic, ‘You mean you never heard of the USS
Hank
?’ Hank, it seems is not a bloke but a battleship, or to be more accurate, a destroyer. Hank the Destroyer, like Conan the Barbarian. Only different.

This should have dawned on me earlier but Hank is just not the sort of name you expect a warship to have, even an American one. It’s rather like a British warship being called the HMS
Dave
instead of
Warspite
or
Ark Royal
. It seems
Hank
has long since joined most of his former shipmates in
retirement
having seen active service in the Second World War and subsequently in Korea, which makes me realise just why these chaps look as grizzled as they do – they are seriously old. They seem none too sure about what happened to old
Hank
though: one couple seems to think it became a training ship in the late 1960s, another certain it was sold to Argentina, while one ‘half empty glass’ pessimist bravely ventures that it had ‘probably been broken up’ by now. That with just the hint of a tear in his eye. I can’t help but admire them though, these old buffers and their other halves, turning up year after year for a reunion of former shipmates. It’s the sort of
esprit de corps
old British county regiments were famous for before the bureaucrats broke them up in the name of ‘
restructuring
’. The sort of thing that keeps Captain Kirk and Spock turning up in
successive
Star Trek
films:
Hank, the Next Generation
.

But it’s time for me to get my life back on the rails, literally, with a quick cab ride out through the nondescript suburbs of Niagara, past diners and tyre stores and low-rise streets of wooden houses to the same siding we arrived at the night before. In the daylight the freight yard looks even more enormous, more than a dozen lines at least, enormous trains each with 40 or 50 wagons – ‘cars’ – stretching out behind them, dwarfing the five-coach Amtrak train stood there like a little silver slug beside so many long, dangerous snakes.

With 25 minutes to go before departure, the train is not yet ready for
boarding
so I join the motley couple of dozen passengers sitting around in the drab little waiting room. There is a map on one wall of the rail network that reveals how much track there still is around here, and how much of it – maybe 90 per cent – is dedicated to freight. The train has come in from Toronto on its way via Buffalo to New York City. But it takes two hours between arriving at Niagara Falls, Ontario, and leaving Niagara Falls, New York. There are two US immigration men in the waiting room but they have questions for only two
passengers, who turn out, interestingly enough, to be one Russian and one Mexican. They take their passports and examine them in some detail, though quite why, or how they picked them out, I have no idea. There is not even any obvious indication that the two have crossed the border. But after the better part of 10 minutes they hand their paperwork back. I’m probably the only other ‘alien’ in the room. But it doesn’t occur to them to trouble me. And I’m not complaining.

Then the conductor calls out the already familiar ‘All aboard’ and I’m on the train again, rattling past freight yards and warehouses and along the banks of the river rushing towards its precipice. All bound for Buffalo. What a mistake that would turn out to be.

IT SAYS ALMOST EVERYTHING
you need to know about the city of Buffalo today that the thing it is most famous for is chicken wings in sticky sauce. Taste doesn't come into it.

Once upon a time, arriving in Buffalo by rail was a truly memorable
experience
: alighting – possibly from the first class splendour of New York Central's 20th Century Limited – in a magnificent art deco terminal that saw 30,000
passengers
a day pass through. Buffalo boasted one of the country's most splendid city halls, several of the influential architect Frank Lloyd Wright's
groundbreaking
buildings, the grandest hotel of one of the world's great chains and the first in the world to offer a bath in every room. Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who had designed New York's Central Park, laid out its heart and immodestly proclaimed it the ‘best planned city as to its streets, public places and grounds in the United States, if not the world'. I was looking forward to it. I'd seen
Bruce Almighty
. Jim Carrey and God both hung out here. It couldn't be that bad, could it? I had no idea. No idea at all!

Arriving in Buffalo by rail today is still a memorable experience: like being thrown off a truck underneath Spaghetti Junction. The great railway terminal is derelict awaiting a slow process of restoration for office use. In the meantime it has been used as a set for low-budget horror films. The present ‘downtown' station would be more suited to comedy: a tiny square brick bungalow on a traffic island dwarfed by overhead freeways. The address says I'm on Exchange Street but whatever was once exchanged here has long since been given away for nothing. The only thing that stands out amidst the sprawl of
interlaced
urban highways is the giant concrete bulk of the Buffalo Bisons baseball stadium.

I'm already developing a bad feeling therefore as I plod past it, backpack weighing heavily, in search of somewhere to drop the damn thing for a few
hours while I go in search of Buffalo's beating heart. It may have only been a short hop from Niagara, but the next train out westwards is 12 hours away and doesn't even stop at the downtown station but at a ‘depot' in the distant suburbs called Depew. The bus garage – a sprawling, featureless shed
populated
by sparse groups of people surrounded by possessions packed into plastic bags and canvas hold-alls (which don't!) – offers no more storage facilities than the Amtrak station (which wouldn't be big enough to store more than a couple of 10-year-olds' schoolbags).

‘Not since 9/11, sir. I don't think there's anywhere,' says the large black lady falling out of her too-tight flowery blouse behind the information counter. It is an answer that I am to realise has become ubiquitous: ‘Blame it on the
terrorist
' – justified perhaps but also an excuse for withdrawing a service – the same excuse used by George W. Bush for the Patriot Act, the greatest infringement of America's liberties since the revolution. But what do I know: I come from post-Blair Britain. Nonetheless it seems strange to find America has
abandoned
left luggage. All those movies with keys left in airport lockers will have to be rescripted. Unless you have a hotel you have no alternative but to carry it with you. Which is what I end up doing.

The only trouble is I don't know where I'm going. I've found a map on the side of the bus station, but like all American maps I've seen so far, it seems deliberately designed not to convey any useful information: just thin straight black lines on a grid. So I do the only thing that seems sensible: head for the centre of it. The first street sign I find tells me I'm on Washington Square, which is a windswept paper-strewn pretence of a municipal park with
concrete
benches and bus shelters housing hobos. On one side sits the
Washington
Tavern, a neat nineteenth-century two-storey pub, stripped entirely of its urban context.

The buildings on either side have been pulled down – affording a fine view of the neo-Gothic college building beyond – across an achingly empty parking lot. I have never seen a city with so many parking lots – multistorey lots right next to tarmac lots around the corner from stretches of wasteland with wooden huts to identify them too as parking lots. Hardly any of them have any cars. This is a city with streets wider than most British motorways and enough parking lots to provide spaces for the entire output of the Japanese motor industry, and next to no traffic. Maybe the cars are all parked away in yet another series of vast subterranean lots whose existence is cunningly
concealed
. Maybe there are just no people any more. The pavements are as empty of pedestrians as the roads are of cars.

The occasional grand nineteenth-century building – a school, a college, a church – stands in what might be deliberate isolation were it not so painfully obviously just the absence of anything else, a spot where something has been pulled down and nothing put up to replace it. The splendidly-named Lafayette Tap Room – another grand old Victorian-style city pub building that would not look out of place in Brixton or Birmingham, is isolated from the
community
it surely exists to serve. Whoever they are. Wherever they live. This, I realise, is what Jane Jacobs was addressing in the book Laurence told me about in the White Horse Tavern back in Manhattan. Her
Death and Life of Great American Cities
was published nearly half a century ago, but nobody in Buffalo has got round to reading it yet.

A large man in a checked shirt with a baseball cap pulled down firmly over his eyes is leaning against the bus stop, though not in any obvious
expectation
of a bus turning up. He doesn't look the friendliest of types, but he is the only type available. I'm just a little worried that my question, ‘Is this the city centre?' will sound inane, but the answer is hardly less so: ‘Well, I guess. Sort of.' This is my first indication that I have just asked a question which many Americans, not just here in Buffalo, will find disturbingly hard to answer. But after 20 minutes of following my nose in circles in a vain search for social or architectural signs of the city centre, there is no other conclusion but that I am already in it, in fact have been all along.

That dark, faceless block-length slab that looks like a freezer factory or supersize storage radiator, I now identify as a mall: a sterile – and little used, it would seem – indoor shopping facility. A small sign over one of the few
pedestrian
entrances – the chief mode of access is via a gaping parking facility – says ‘Main Place'. The heart sinks. And then a glimpse of something that offers at least aesthetic consolation: the city hall with its great yellow stone tower and colourful art deco mouldings on its lofty parapets almost glows in the early autumnal sunshine. Until you get up close.

This is Niagara Square. Once upon a time it really was Buffalo's ‘beating heart'. Olmsted made it the centre of his city design with leafy avenues
radiating
out in eight directions – from each corner and each of the four sides – lined with mansions of the well-to-do who would set an example of gracious living to inspire their fellow citizens. In 1901, with Frank Lloyd Wright himself living and working in town, and the city host to the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo was on a roll. The railroads were steaming ahead and with the
completion
of the Erie Canal, Buffalo was a transport nexus, a city light in heart as it entered the century it would leave so miserably. Niagara Square was linked by
a long avenue of greenery to the exposition fairground which was attended by President William McKinley himself.

The superstitious could be forgiven for seeing that as the pivotal moment in Buffalo's history, the apex of its grandeur and the moment things began to go wrong. As he greeted crowds outside the Temple of Music McKinley was shot twice at point blank range by an anarchist. One of the inventions on display at the fair was the new-fangled X-ray machine. Unfortunately the doctors were too scared of the new technology to use it to locate the bullet which had lodged in his body. As the local hospital didn't have electric light and they couldn't have candles in the operating room because of the ether which was used to keep the president unconscious, aides employed frying pans to reflect sunlight for the surgeons to work. They got the bullet but a week later the apparently convalescing president had his first cup of coffee and promptly expired.

The granite obelisk surrounded by four vigilant lions in the centre of Niagara Square was erected in McKinley's memory and the square enlarged to accommodate it. Around it today are signs boasting of Buffalo's architectural heritage, oblivious to its desecration, and flags of ‘sister cities'. One is Lille in northern France, not one of the greatest French cities but a jewel in
comparison
; another is Siena, whose city councillors really ought to reconsider their twinning list. The third is somewhere I've never heard of in Ukraine. That just might about fit the bill.

The decline which has hit Buffalo over the past half century could not have been imagined when McKinley met his fate, nor the subsequent decades as the city's prosperity, based on steel and industry grew and grew. The splendid city hall in front of me was its crowning moment, finished just as the Roaring Twenties turned into the Great Depression. The revolving doors' faded brass and scuffed skirting are clearly original.

Inside, the lobby positively glows with an amber and ochre radiance from the vast mosaic in native Iroquois Indian motifs that covers walls and ceilings. Above the entrance is an allegory of peace as a goddess reconciling warriors bearing British and American flags, a reminder that even in the 1920s Canada, just ‘a spit away' across the Erie River was still considered the frontier to what had for so long been ‘the evil empire'. To the side of the main door is an equally powerful symbol of modern Buffalo: a gimcrack kiosk selling fizzy drinks and cigarettes for the municipal workers, a gaggle of whom stand puffing on the steps outside.

When it was opened, the main attraction of Buffalo City Hall was the 28th-floor observation platform, which offered a view of the founding fathers' 
original symmetrical cityscape. I decide it has to be worth a look. To my
surprise
there is no security guard or even municipal flunky to point the way or ask for an entrance fee, just an old sign painted on the wall by the empty central lobby desk indicating the lifts to the right are for floors 15–26, ‘and observation platform'. Enticed by the idea of piloting one of Mr Otis's original wood-lined vertical escalating machines myself, I step in and press the button for 26, the highest floor available, with only the slightest trepidation as the thing shudders and takes off like a steam rocket, the floor indicator disconcertingly remaining firmly fixed on ‘1' until it resumes counting again at ‘15'. This is an ‘express' lift.

Emerging on floor 26 my other question is answered by a sign that says
OBSERVATION PLATFORM FLOOR
28:
STAIRS ONLY
. The only remotely
welcoming
door amidst all those thick with a thousand coats of dark brown paint, unmarked and firmly closed, leads to a stairwell with peeling emulsion in
hospital
green and an open door in a security cage marked
EXIT
. I can only assume it is also an entrance.

My assumption turns out to be correct. Three floors up – from floor 26 to 28 – the stairwell opens into a bare brick-lined circular room with eye-level windows on all sides marked
TO SAVE ENERGY DON'T OPEN WINDOWS
. And there can be no doubt that Buffalo's city fathers are serious about saving their energy: all but one set are locked shut, as indeed, disappointingly are the doors leading to the observation platform running round the outside. Obviously someone has decreed that not even the perspex sheeting, completely
enclosing
the outdoor deck, is sufficient to deter would-be suicides. I can imagine there might be a lot of them.

The eye-level windows offer enough perspective over the city to see that the original town plan has been brutally overridden by the grid-and-lot tyranny of erection and demolition. There are a couple of faceless modern tower blocks in the middle distance, an incalculable number of parking lots and, near at hand, the great slab of the Statler hotel building, in its heyday one of Buffalo's great treasures yet so obviously a major contributing factor in the destruction of the elegant nineteenth-century street plan. To the north stretches a
panorama
of magnificent natural beauty: the vast expanse of Lake Erie reflecting the autumn sun in dark blue placid waters. Along the shoreline is a marina, filled with the yachts of the wealthy, yet devoid of waterfront life: cafés, promenades, people. Buffalo sits this side of a six-lane freeway along which cars rush, everyone in a hurry to get somewhere else. Buffalo sits on the edge of one of the world's great lakes, and shows it its arse.

In the vain hope of catching the genuine 360-degree view I had hoped for,
I try the other four doors, one in each corner, even though none obviously offers access to the viewing platform. All turn out to be firmly locked except for one which to my surprise wrenches open, only to reveal bare brickwork, a bucket and some fuse boxes. I close it hurriedly in case my intentions might be misinterpreted, not that there is anyone to see me. Or is there? Footsteps are rapidly ascending the staircase below. Have I been rumbled? It's not as if I've done anything I shouldn't have, as far as I know, except perhaps open that door, maybe just coming up here in the first place. Then a large man with a loud voice emerges from the exit door. I'm hugely relieved to find he is talking to someone behind him and pays me no attention at all. ‘Here we are,' he all but shouts to a young woman behind him. They round the corner to the doors leading out to the observation platform. I wonder if they might have a key I unknowingly had failed to request from some appropriate authority, and then I hear a weary sigh. And they sweep past me with dark faces to head downstairs again. ‘Fucking typical, just fucking typical,' says the man to no one in
particular
. It's hard not to agree.