COMMENTARY
Californians drawn here for the culture
Years from now, I think we will look back on them as pioneers. They came to a largely unexplored territory, discovered its treasures and returned home to spread the word.
If all goes as planned, that trickle will became a flow, and the flow will expand into a river of cultural tourists.
Thirty visitors from Southern California recently spent five days in Buffalo. They did not come for the chicken wings or to see Terrell Owens in a Bills uniform. They came for Frank Lloyd Wright. For Louis Sullivan. For Elbert Hubbard.
They came because we have the world-class art and architecture that people—as unbelievable as it may seem to some—will come from parts distant to see.
Ask Rita Koch, the Los Angeles-area tour leader who—after discovering Buffalo culture on an Internet search—arranged the visit.
“I had no idea that Buffalo had this much,” said Koch, who owns a travel agency in Manhattan Beach, Calif. “It’s a hidden gem. I knew this would be a good tour.”
The 30 visitors are connected to Los Angeles’ Banning Museum. They take an annual cultural tourism trip. Previous stops included Chicago, Boston, Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S. C. This year, Buffalo.
I caught up with the group during a lunch break in East Aurora.
“A lot of us were like, what’s in Buffalo?” Carol DeVore said. “But now we have an entirely different impression. I had no idea of the number of Wright buildings here.”
Culture junkies have come here for years, drawn by everything from Wright’s Darwin Martin complex –nearly fullyrestored— to the modernist AlbrightKnox Art Gallery. A glut of recent media coverage—including last year’s six-page piece in the New York Times— has raised the volume.
The Southern Californians voiced a consensus lament: Too much to see, too little time. “There is more here than in a lot of places we’ve been,” Carolyn Lee said. “You could spend more time than we had. Some of us are talking about coming back.”
The itinerary included the Albright- Knox; the Martin complex, and Graycliff in Derby; the downtown house of civil rights pioneer Jesse Nash; Sullivan’s skyscraper- prototype Guaranty Building; the new Burchfield Penney Art Center and the Roycroft, the early Arts and Crafts outpost in East Aurora. They were typical cultural tourists: bright, older, with—control your salivation reflex— disposable income.
People who don’t know Frank Lloyd Wright from Orville Wright understand the wisdom of bringing outsiders here to stay in our hotels, to eat in our restaurants and to spread the word about our upscale attractions. It will pump money into our wallets, inflate our communal self-esteem and expand our national image beyond the Bills and blizzards.
We have spent upwards of $100 million in public and private dollars to restore and rebuild our cultural lures, from Wright buildings to the Erie Canal terminus. The California visitors are an early return on the investment.
Each tourist is another argument to restore the advertising dollars that were slashed in the county’s 2005 budget. First with Joel Giambra, now with Chris Collins, hotel bed-tax dollars disappear into the county’s general fund instead of —as intended—being invested in tourism marketing.
Spending millions to get these attractions up to speed, then not doing enough to get the word out, borders on self-abuse. The longer our treasures remain a secret, the less good it does us.
A band of tourists from Southern California— for maybe the first time ever— just spent five days in Buffalo. If we are smart, the trickle will soon be a flow.
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