They could live anywhere, but these people picked WNY for all its wonderful and unique offerings –the seasons, the arts, the architecture, the schools, the community and much, much more
Choosing Buffalo, for all the right reasons
As a top-five executive at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, James Marshall wears a suit and tie to work most days. ¶ It’s not until you notice the windsurfing board strapped to his car that you catch a glimpse of the boy who grew up on the beaches of Southern California, riding the waves in search of mystic communion with the cosmos.
No, really.
"Throwing a ball is one thing," said Marshall, Roswell's senior vice president for cancer prevention and population science. "But surfing — you're on this wave, and you're standing on this board, and you're sort of in communion with this wave and the ocean. It's a cosmic kind of thing. I'm serious."
So serious that on the rare summer afternoons that Marshall leaves the office early, he usually heads to Gallagher Beach, on Buffalo’s waterfront. He changes out of the suit, and fastens the hand-held mast to his windsurfing board. Then he glides up the channel in the sun, enjoying one of the lives that could only happen in Buffalo.
Lots of people have left the City of Buffalo, their flotilla of U-Hauls heading to the suburbs and points south on I-95. But the roads run both ways.
Marshall, whose job includes recruiting bright young researchers, offers himself as an “only-in-Buffalo” guy. In other words, he says, only in Buffalo could he live the life he wants to live as cheaply and easily. Not only can he windsurf on his way home, he can follow his other outdoor passion –skiing –precisely 25 minutes from the front door of his Orchard Park home. Where can you find that in California?
“No place,” Marshall said. Today, we note some of the lives that are made in Western New York, specifically because of the place it is.
Factory layoffs couldn’t change the world-class attributes –sailing, art, river fishing, theater, the affordable urban spaces and yes, the weather –that draws and keeps people who could live anywhere they like.
Historical homes
Eve Berry was tired of living out of a suitcase.
When she needed a home, she chose Buffalo. In December, the furniture arrived at her newly purchased home: the 1815 Coit House on Virginia Street, the oldest wood frame house in the city.
Berry bought the house knowing that she would be living amid history –and historical societies, like Preservation Buffalo Niagara, which held its holiday party in Coit House less than two weeks after she moved in her stuff from the Gold Coast region of Connecticut.
“My furniture moved in Dec. 6,” said Berry, a career management consultant. “We had 90 people there at their party on Dec. 17.”
After spending years crisscrossing the country for corporate, government and nonprofit clients, Berry fell in love with Buffalo after an intensive five-day grant-writing seminar here hosted by the Red Cross brought her back each year for a decade.
Getting to know people led to work. “After I’d been on the road for 15 years, I knew more people here than anywhere else,” she recalled. “So I just said, I’ll move to Buffalo.”
Berry, whose other work includes community-building programs that have been put to use in places as diverse as Bosnia-Herzegovina, South Africa and Costa Rica, sees the house as a part of community building in Buffalo.
“This is not just my house,” Berry said. “It also belongs to the community, in some sense given what it is. At least that’s how I look at it. I’m the caretaker for the moment.”
It seems like a funny kind of ownership, but it was exactly what Berry was looking for at this phase of her life: A home that came with a built-in community.
Buying the Coit House meant that while it is Berry’s home, it will not be torn down, turned into a boarding house, or get carved up into apartments, Berry said.
“If I can honor the Coit House and make sure it remains a property of significance, if I can invite people in to learn and be part of my service to the community,” she said, “that’s going to have an impact on people. “
Wonderous waters
Frank Campbell knows how lucky he is.
Classmates at Niagara Catholic High School have mainly left town for work, said Campbell, 40, who lives in Niagara Falls with his wife Marre and four children. “People that have stayed here have settled for work, they’re not doing exactly what they wanted to do. The people who are left are taking what they can get.”
Campbell makes his living from the fabled waters of Niagara. Year-round, customers hire him to show them the way –not to the waterfall, but downstream, to the salmon and trout of the lower Niagara River, and upstream, to the smallmouth bass of Lake Erie.
As a charter captain, Campbell has been hired by anglers from nearly every state in the union, and nations including Japan, England and Argentina. In fact, Western New York is one of the top fishing areas in North America, news that often amazes Western New Yorkers, Campbell said.
Near the Lewiston ramp where Campbell and other boat owners launch their crafts on the Niagara River, there’s a table for cleaning fish.
More than once, Campbell said, while he was busy with a steelhead or trout, he was asked, “Where’d you get that?”
“I say, ‘The river across the street.’ They say, ‘I didn’t know those [fish] were in there.’ ”
Usually, he said, the questioner is from Lewiston. “There’s 50 or 60 trailers parked there on a good weekend, and people just aren’t aware of what we have,” Campbell said.
Fortunately, the anglers know. A client from Tennessee said he preferred to dangle lures for smallmouth bass in Buffalo because of the cooler weather. “When the smallmouth are biting, a lot of times it’s just too hot,” with temperatures in the 100s.
English fishermen scrambled to fish for carp off the shoreline, a privilege they’d have to pay for back home, where access to a salmon stream can cost $1,000 a day.
Other clients are former Western New Yorkers, back to enjoy the fishing they didn’t know about while they lived nearby.
“They’re out with me because they didn’t realize it was that good while they were here,” said Campbell.
That’s why he feels like he won the lottery. “I get to work at something that I like to do,” he said, “and I’m able to make a living at it.”
Schools and sports
Meg Crimmen and her husband thought about pulling up stakes. A decade ago, the chance to buy a South Carolina firm had Crimmen and her husband Brian thinking about packing up their three sons and moving south.
When they added it all up, Crimmen said, South Carolina couldn’t compete.
Crimmen grew up in Orchard Park. Then she moved away, to Manhattan, and then Paris.
Then she came back and met Brian. She runs her printing company while Brian renovates homes and runs his contracting business.
Today, their two oldest boys, Jack and Chase, are getting Canisius High School educations, following in their father’s footsteps. “In other cities it would cost half as much again to send your kids to a similar private school,” she said.
The youngest, Elliott, is a hockey fanatic at Iroquois Middle School. The older two get up before dawn to get on the Tonawanda Creek to row for the Canisius High crew team, and once the ice clears they’ll spend early mornings on the Black Rock Channel.
Because of the West Side Rowing Club’s success, “outside the area, Buffalo is thought of as this great rowing town,” said Crimmen. “I don’t know how many people in Buffalo know that.”
They live in a 160-year-old farmhouse in Elma, a historic Ebenezer Society home remodeled by Brian. Their barn is just as old, built before the Civil War, on hand-hewn beams that you cannot buy at Home Depot. So far the Crimmens have hosted two weddings in the setting, as well as the annual Elma Relay for Life fundraiser for the American Cancer Society.
On an acre and a half, their place cost $148,000 in 1990.
For a family that loves the arts, architecture and sports –both participatory and spectator –it’s hard to match Buffalo’s caliber for the cost, she said. They don’t have their Sherkston cottage any more, but friends have boats.
“In most cities, those are things only a few people can experience,” she said. “We don’t have to be making $500,000 a year to live the good life in Buffalo.”
Sun, surf, snow, ski
In 1977, when Roswell’s Marshall first came to Buffalo with his wife, he ran into the famed Buffalo inferiority complex.
It was on the heels of the Blizzard of ’77, and he had moved to Buffalo from Southern California. But he wasn’t prepared to hear a minister’s wife say, puzzled, “Why did you come here?”
He’s gotten used to people being perplexed at the move. “There’s February, which is not the nicest month,” Marshall allows, “except if you ski.”
His children could not have gotten the public school education they received in Amherst had the family remained in Southern California, Marshall said. “I don’t think it’s remotely possible,” he said.
There’s no way to count how many people have remarked on what a change it must have been to move from Southern California to Buffalo, “and of course it was,” said Marshall.
“It was a change weather-wise. It was a change culture-wise. And it’s been a change opportunity-wise.”
Awesome arts scene
How successful is photographer John Pfahl? Check out the toughest wall in town, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Two images from Pfahl’s “Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile,” his study of his backyard repository of rotting table rinds and dead flowers, are hanging in the gallery now.
Across from the cafe, actually, Pfahl noted with a chuckle. “They’ve got a sense of humor.”
Before the Buffalo landscape specialist had a chance to succeed as an internationally known artist, he found out that even a fledgling academic can afford to become a landlord in Buffalo.
It was 1970, and Pfahl was teaching photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, while his wife Bonnie Gordon taught at Buffalo State College. They bought their Potomac Avenue two-flat for $16,000 and never needed another home, turning the other apartment into studio space.
“It’s so much easier to live here than in New York or even in Brooklyn, where a lot of artists now live,” Pfahl said. “I have friends who moved here from Brooklyn, they had a child, and they are thrilled with the amount of house they could afford.”
In 1984, Pfahl taught at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. “I was considering eventually moving back down there,” he admitted.
“But when we returned to Buffalo, it was such a revelation as to all the things we had missed,” Pfahl said. “The greenery, the gardens, the Albright- Knox, the closeness to Europe as opposed to the closeness to Mexico –a whole different lifestyle that we didn’t even know we were missing.”
Pfahl chose the spectacular vistas of the Niagara Gorge for a project, dedicating his time to exploring the nooks and crannies on both sides of the Niagara River. “It was a great project because I could get to any place on the river in 20 minutes, so I could look at the sky and see what the clouds were like,” said Pfahl. “So I got to know the river very well.”
Last summer Pfahl and Gordon rented a cottage at Angola-on-the- Lake for a couple of weeks. “It was nice to be able to just look at water and fruit trees, and yet come back to Buffalo to get my mail.
“That was only a half-hour away,” sighed Pfahl, “but it was like being in a different world.”
