COMMENTARY
Charity Vogel: Buffalo bar a long way from Camelot
Camelot, it’s not. The Thruway Inn on Seneca Street is so true-blue, blue-collar Buffalo that it’s practically archetypal: the idea of what a working-class bar in this city should be. Outside, a vintage sign advertises “Light Lunches, Rooms By Week.”
Inside, the white linoleum floor is worn smooth as a grandmother’s rosary, and the main attraction underneath the pressed tin ceilings — other than the food and the drinking — is a pool table with a surface soiled by stains.
Regulars sit at the eight black leather bar stools at 2 p. m. on a Tuesday, bent over glasses and thick ceramic plates. They wear the clothes of people who have just worked hard, and plan to do so again soon: heavy boots, Carhartt jackets, knit ski caps. They go quiet, for a moment, when a stranger enters. Then, it’s back to the beer and $1.25 tacos that drew them here on a cold winter afternoon in the first place.
This is Buffalo, in a section of the city where Lovejoy presses up against South Buffalo. It’s a place where, for decades, you could count on a name like Kennedy carrying a certain resonance.
It still does. Only now, instead of calling forth rumbles of respect for a president long-gone, but admired, the name provokes one patron to emit a loud, somewhat rude noise, like the shrill buzzer that ejects a contestant from a game show.
“Wrong answer,” added the man, Hans, 43, the owner of a Clinton Street car repair shop, who was reluctant to give his last name to a reporter he didn’t know personally. “We’re screwed up enough as it is.”
Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy and the woman who would like to occupy the Senate seat soon to be vacated by Hillary Clinton, is culling different responses all over the state as she argues her case for Gov. David Paterson appointing her to the post, which would be her first public office.
Many people support her, calling her a strong, smart woman who has worked hard for a variety of good causes.
Those attributes are undoubtedly true. But in South and East Buffalo, among people who work hard all day and play hard in equal measure, that kind of curriculum vitae doesn’t get you all the way from Point A, on Manhattan’s upper East Side, to Point B, the Senate floor.
What matters, around here, are two things: track record and on-the-ground experience. That means Kennedy is at a disadvantage. And it means her recent sweep into Buffalo for a meeting with Mayor Byron Brown didn’t help her cause; if anything, it made her look elite and unconnected with regular folks. If she had driven through a few city neighborhoods on her route to City Hall — down Seneca Street, perhaps — that might have helped.
“It’s a family business for her,” said Rod Vosburgh, 28, a father of two who works installing garage doors. “She’s a Kennedy, that’s it.”
That sounds like cynicism, and it is, despite the fact that all over America people have hailed the election of Barack Obama as a new day in the nation. The folks eating tacos on Seneca Street might have faith in change, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to fall into line behind a celebrity they wouldn’t recognize if she walked into the bar. They are cynical about pretty much all politicians, not just Kennedy. Living in Buffalo for the past few decades, and seeing what has happened to the city over time, has made them that way. This Senate pick won’t change that.
In the meantime, here’s something to think about. A lot more people out there live like the people in the Thruway Inn than like those on Park Avenue. What they think matters; this is their country.
And these days, despite the optimism of a new administration, that country is pretty far from Camelot.
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