Ideas & Insights from ArtsBuffalo
Exploring how arts and culture can help shape the future of Buffalo.
There is a lot of conversation happening right now about the future of downtown Buffalo, and there should be. Like a lot of American downtowns, ours is trying to work out what it is supposed to be now that it is no longer what it was. What should downtown be, and who should it serve? How do the streets and the public spaces feel active again? And how do we get to a downtown that people choose to spend time in rather than one they drive through on the way to somewhere else?
I don’t have the answers to those questions. We’re still in the early stages of ArtsBuffalo’s work. But we did get an opportunity this summer to learn something the useful way, which is by doing it and then paying attention to what happened.
We worked with JazzBuffalo, Tappo, and the Electric District Alliance to put a series of arts and cultural experiences on Ellicott Street. We closed the street. We brought out the music. Tappo and Big Ditch took part. And people showed up, which is never a guarantee, and anyone who has organized anything knows the particular anxiety of the hour before you find out.
What I did not expect was how long they stayed.
People did not come for the set and then head to their cars. They brought their own chairs. They ordered food and drinks and sat down with them. They talked to friends and, in a fair number of cases, to people they had met twenty minutes earlier. Some of them danced. Families came with kids. And a lot of them were still there hours after they could reasonably have called it a day.
On more than one Sunday I found myself not watching the stage at all. I was watching the street.
That is the part I keep turning over. It sounds like a small thing to say that people spent an afternoon downtown. I’ve come to think it is close to the whole ballgame. Every other ambition we have for downtown — the retail, the housing, the storefronts, the sense of safety that comes from other people being around — depends on people wanting to be there in the first place. You cannot build activity on top of an empty street.
Ellicott Street is ordinarily a street you travel through. It is a route. Close it for a few hours, put music on it, add tables and food and a few hundred people, and it stops being a route and starts being a destination. Same pavement, same buildings, completely different thing. That conversion is what interests me, and I don’t think it requires anything exotic. It mostly requires a reason.
The part that only lasts as long as the weather
Buffalo is very good at summer. We have earned that reputation, and we should keep it. But a downtown that works in July and empties out in November is not a functioning downtown; it is a seasonal attraction, and we have to be honest about the difference.
So what happens next matters more to me than what happened in August.
ArtsBuffalo and JazzBuffalo are continuing downtown with Art Meets Jazz at Beebe’s in the Brisbane Building, The Jazz Lounge at the Statler, and Jazz at Kleinhans. Three different buildings in three different parts of downtown, deliberately. ArtsBuffalo is also looking forward to being back on Ellicott Street, helping carry the spirit of the Buffalo Holiday Market farther into downtown, which will be a considerably different experience than a Sunday afternoon in the sun and will teach us different things.
The point was never to prove that Ellicott Street works on a beautiful July or August afternoon. Of course it does. The harder and more interesting question is what a Tuesday in February can be.
Nobody does this alone, and somebody has to pay for it
The other thing this summer and the Summer of Jazz experience clarified for me is how little of it we could have done on our own.
Arts organizations are not going to revitalize downtown Buffalo. Neither are the restaurants, or the developers, or city government, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims their own sector is the answer. What actually happened on Ellicott Street happened because a fairly wide group of people decided independently that activity downtown was worth their effort. ArtsBuffalo and JazzBuffalo brought the programming, the artists, and the audience. Tappo, and Rocco Termini’s energy brought food, hospitality, and something just as valuable, which is a permanent physical anchor on the block that is there the other six days of the week. The Electric District Alliance brought the businesses and stakeholders who have a stake in the neighborhood’s future.
And all of it cost money.
I want to be direct about that, because it tends to get left out of these conversations. Ideas don’t close a street. Sponsorship from Jim Beam, Iroquois Bar Corp, Five Star Bank, Visit Buffalo, Buffalo Civic Auto Ramps, and others is what gave ArtsBuffalo the resources to work alongside Tappo and the Electric District Alliance and turn an idea into something a person could walk up to on a Sunday. Without that, this is a nice proposal that never leaves the room. Oftentimes, collaboration between arts and business is critical to downtown revitalization endeavors.
We often discuss downtown revitalization as though it belongs to government and developers. Both are essential, and neither is sufficient. Businesses invest in the place. Sponsors underwrite the things that have no ticket revenue behind them. Developers bring the buildings back. Restaurants and shops supply the ordinary daily life that makes a neighborhood feel inhabited rather than programmed. Arts organizations give people a reason to come the first time. And the audience supplies the ingredient none of the rest of us can manufacture, which is other people.
Everyone in that list is doing something the others cannot do. That may be the most practical lesson of the summer. No one organization or sector can do this by itself.
Buildings are not the same as places
We have remarkable architecture in this city, and a lot of it is coming back. Theaters, concert halls, galleries, restaurants, public spaces, streets with more potential than they are currently being asked to deliver.
But a restored building is a restored building. It isn’t yet a place. A place is somewhere people have been, have a feeling about, and can picture themselves in again.
Art Meets Jazz in the Brisbane Building has been the clearest illustration of this for me. People come for the music or the art. That’s the draw, and that’s fine. But in the course of the evening, they end up inside a restored historic building they may never have had a reason to enter, and they spend two or three hours in it, and they leave with a sense of what it’s like to be there. The next time they pass it, it isn’t an unfamiliar facade anymore.
The arts turn out to be a very effective introduction to a building.
We have watched something similar happen at The Jazz Lounge at the Statler and with JazzMondays at Tappo, where the same faces start turning up. An event becomes a habit somewhere around the third or fourth time, when people stop needing to decide and start just going. That is a modest thing to observe, and I think it is how attachment to a place actually forms, one repeat visit at a time, rather than through any campaign.
What people have been telling us
More than 120 people in this community have now shared their perspective with ArtsBuffalo about arts, culture, and downtown. One thing has come through more consistently than anything else, and it has changed how I think about our work.
What we’re hearing isn’t simply a call for more events. People are looking for more reasons to be downtown.
I would not have predicted the distinction would be that sharp. A full calendar is not the same as a lively city, and we in the arts are prone to confusing the two because the calendar is the thing we control. What people described wanting is something closer to a reliable sense that if they go downtown on a given evening, something will be worth their time, and probably a second thing after it.
That is where the connections between all of this start to matter more than any single program. Music, theater, visual art, a restaurant before or after, a market, a walk past buildings worth looking at, other people out on the sidewalk. Any one of those is an evening. Together they are a reason to make a habit of it.
What we do with it
I am genuinely encouraged that the city is having this conversation seriously right now. The discussions about positioning and enlivening downtown matter, and so do the ones about housing, transit, infrastructure, public space, retail, safety, and investment, which are in many respects the harder work.
Arts and culture do not substitute for any of that. I want to be clear about it, because our sector occasionally oversells itself. But we belong in the conversation, and more to the point, we belong in the work, and I think we have something specific to contribute, which is the ability to give a person a reason to be somewhere on a particular night.
What happened on Ellicott Street was not an answer to anything. It was one street, on a handful of Sundays, in good weather. What I’d like to know is whether it can be extended. Whether more of these partnerships between arts organizations, businesses, restaurants, developers, and neighborhoods can be built, and built to last past the initial enthusiasm. Whether the cultural activity already happening all over Buffalo can be made easier for an ordinary person to find, because a great deal of it is effectively invisible unless you already know where to look. Whether more streets and buildings and public spaces can be turned into somewhere people want to be. And whether any of it can hold up in January.
I keep coming back to something obvious. A revitalized downtown has to be a downtown with people in it. Walking, eating, listening to something, looking at something, running into someone, staying longer than they meant to.
That is what we saw on Ellicott Street for Summer of Jazz this summer, for a few hours at a time. ArtsBuffalo is just getting started, and one summer certainly doesn’t give us all the answers. But it did suggest that when the arts, the businesses, the developers, the sponsors, and the community decide to work on the same block at the same time, what we produce is not only an event.
It’s the beginning of a downtown people want to be part of.
ArtsBuffalo Is Listening
Since we began this work, more than 120 people have shared their perspectives with us about arts, culture, and downtown Buffalo. We’re keeping that conversation going.
If you haven’t participated yet, I’d encourage you to take a few minutes and share your perspective. What we hear won’t determine every decision we make, but it will help inform what ArtsBuffalo builds, the questions we ask, and the opportunities we pursue.
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