Magic Buffalo by Bunnie Reiss at 1322 Hertel Ave, Buffalo. Image @ Drew Brown via Buffalo & Niagara Tourism
The creative spirit of Buffalo, New York, thrives in the most unexpected of places.
I came for the wings, obviously. And, of course, to sneak a peek at Niagara Falls flexing its watery muscles just down the road.
Buffalo itself was meant to be a side quest. A blur between bigger names. But somewhere between drying myself off from a Niagara drenching and licking hot sauce off my fingers at a canalside bar, a guy scraping out a tune on a beat-up guitar beside me, I discovered a city with an almost anarchic creative charm, Still wearing its steel-cap work boots, sure, but dancing in them,proudly, like everyone’s watching.
This city may have been built on commerce, industry and the wealth that flowed from them, but today it feels more like renovation rescue meets high art. Larger galleries and public spaces have benefited from grants, investment and organised redevelopment. Yet much of the city’s creative pulse still comes from grassroots efforts by artists, musicians and creative misfits who choose to build rather than break.
The result is music spilling out onto the streets, brushes splashing colour across brick and concrete and abandoned industrial buildings being reborn as gallerie and music venues. And I am all in!
Buffalo’s silo revival
Once symbols of industrial might, Buffalo’s towering grain silos now stand like a concrete middle finger to anyone who thinks the city’s best days are behind it.
Having being repurposed as canvases for art, backdrops for performances and festivals, and even the framework for entertainment and adventure complexes, these hulking relics serve as bold reminders that reinvention, not decline, defines Buffalo’s spirit.
Buffalo Riverworks
Buffalo Riverworks. a rundown dockyard filled with concrete silos, warehouses and heavy machinery, has been transformed into a buzzing playground where zip lines slice through the air beside brutalist towers and craft breweries hum beneath.
Outdoor ice skating and rollerblading in winter give way to paddleboarding and boat tours once the weather warms. Throw in craft breweries, food trucks and live music, and you’ve got a spot that perfectly captures Buffalo’s refusal to be predictable.
A guided tour takes me inside one of the abandoned silos, under rusted grain funnels and through concrete caverns so cold they feel like they’ve swallowed the sun. On the walls, faded artworks flicker into view and I am as excited as if I were discovering modern-day cave paintings. They’re not, of course. They’re traces of an annual festival where chalk artists stake claim to the walls. And though time has faded most of the temporary masterpieces, a few seem determined to endure.
Among them, there’s a Buffalo, naturally… and a startlingly detailed gothic raven. Hauntingly perfect, it is perched between concrete columns, defiantly refusing to be erased. It reminds me that even in forgotten spaces, creativity finds a way to survive.
Silo City
Buffalo was once the grain capital of the world and Silo City its towering cathedral. But as shipping routes changed and industry faded, the silos were left to crumble and rust. That is, until Rick Smith bought the site and began slowly, stubbornly reimagining it as a ruinous playground for artists and dreamers.Today it hosts festivals, art installations, poetry readings and summer concerts that echo through the hollowed towers.
But the transformation is not just cultural. Smith has been quietly pulling nature back in, working with ecologists and students to let the land recover on its own terms. Native grasses and wildflowers now push through the spaces between silos, turning hard concrete corridors into soft green corridors. The birds have returned. So have the bees thanks to The Silo City Elevator B Beehive project, which gave a displaced colony of wild bees a custom-designed architectural home in one of the silos
It is a small reminder that restoration does not always mean rebuilding. Sometimes it means leaving enough space for everything else to find its way back in.
Nestled within it all is Duende at Silo City . Housed in a 1940s office building that once belonged to the American Malting Company, it’s now an atmospheric home for live music, experimental performance art and bloody good beer. Duende is a Spanish word that, roughly interpreted, means a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity. And it fits. Because Buffalo has got duende by the keg.
Buffalo’s art beat
Nowhere is that authenticity and passion for expression clearer than in the unexpected bursts of creativity that spill out from curated exhibitions displayed in galleries into, and onto, the very bones of Buffalo.
Buffalo AKG Art Museum: a modern art mecca
I’ve traipsed through my fair share of galleries with their white walls, polite murmurs and maybe an artwork or two by someone I’ve actually heard of. But the Buffalo AKG? She’s not like the others. The gallery, one of the first in the U.S. to boldly back modern art while the rest of the world side-eyed it suspiciously, recently had a $230 million glow-up so glam that TIME magazine named it one of its 2024 World’s Greatest Places. And rightly so. The place shimmers. Literally.
The shiny new glass-wrapped Gundlach Building connects to the stately neo-classical original via a floating bridge that feels like it was flown in from 3024. Step inside, and you’re greeted by a glittering steel-and-glass canopy that cascades down like a web.
Inside, the collection swings big, with masters like Degas, Monet, Van Gogh and Renoir sharing wall space with trailblazers like Kahlo, Rothko, Pollock and Warhol. At some point you stop counting names altogether because it is not about who is on the walls, it is the noise they make together.
Martin House: Frank Lloyd Wright’s design masterpiece
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie-style masterpiece, The Martin House, proves Buffalo’s design DNA runs deep. With its intricate woodwork, flowing open-plan design and stunning art glass windows, it’s considered one of his most important works. After being nearly lost to time, the whole complex, originally made up of six interconnected buildings, has been lovingly restored. You can feel the care in every detail.
The buildings flow into each other, connected by strong horizontal lines that ground the house and draw the eye across the landscape. But Wright didn’t just design houses; he choreographed how you move through them. Narrow, almost claustrophobic hallways push me forward. Ceilings suddenly drop low to make me feel compressed, then open wide to wow and welcome me with space and light.
Even the built-in furniture is part of the act. It’s beautiful, yes, but also brilliantly bossy. And more than a century later, the Martin House still guides visitors exactly where Wright wanted them to go. I left the house with mixed feelings about that level of control, but I couldn’t deny the undeniable genius behind Wright’s design.
Art in the open: Buffalo street art
Happily, in Buffalo, art isn’t just something you see in hushed galleries or historic homes. It’s something you walk through, brush against and occasionally find staring back at you from a random underpass. Towering murals have turned Hertel Avenue into something of an open-air gallery. This literary fangirl finds herself especially drawn to Eduardo Kobra’s jaw-dropping mural of Mark Twain and John Lewis, painted in honour of Twain’s brief career as a newspaperman in Buffalo.
Downtown is just as decorative with works like Casey William Milbrand’s iconic Greetings from Buffalo postcard mural and the utterly gorgeous Wildflowers for Buffalo by Ouzi, which adorns the side of The Sinclair building on Washington Street. The charmingly surreal presence of Shark Girl by Casey Riordan Millard, a part-human, part-shark figure located at Canalside has become another beloved symbol of Buffalo’s playful, artistic spirit.
There’s also The Freedom Wall, looming along Michigan Avenue and East Ferry Street. Painted in 2017 by local artists John Baker, Julia Bottoms, Chuck Tingley and Edreys Wajed, this special installation immortalises 28 civil rights icons, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to Rosa Parks and Angela Davis, in an unapologetic declaration of justice, resilience, and the ongoing fight for equality.
Buffalo rocks
Sound pulses through Buffalo’s veins, spilling out of bars and breweries and into the streets like the city never really learned how to turn it down. The scene blends alternative, indie and punk rock with flashes of jazz, blues and the occasional canawler folk diitty. And honestly, that’s pretty close to my perfect jam.
If there is one thread running through it all, it is authenticity. This is, after all, the hometown of funk legend Rick James and folk icon Ani DiFranco, who turned a derelict Gothic Revival church on Delaware Avenue into Righteous Babe HQ, also known as Babeville. A multi-use space built around independent art, activism and community, she once described it as “a people-friendly, sub-corporate, woman-informed, queer-happy small business that puts music before rock stardom and ideology before profit.”
And, of course,there are the Goo Goo Dolls, Buffalo’s alt rock sons, who made heartache an anthem and turned rain-soaked streets into stages. I only have to mention I am blasting them in my EarPods and half the town is my new best friend. Because the Goo Goo Dolls aren’t just from Buffalo. They’re of Buffalo. They grew up on these streets, played their first music in the city’s bars and studio corners and never forgot where they came from.
They are so woven into the city there’s a mammoth mural of the band on Hertel Avenue, keeping an eye on the action, and another, across town at 982 Broadway, borrowing that unforgettable line from Iris, ‘I just want you to know who I am,’ to make a bold statement for inclusion.
I’m no newcomer to their fanbase. In fact, I was an early adopter. Iris dropped on April 1, 1998, and by April 2, I was a diehard. Not quite shrine-to-Johnny-Rzeznik-in-my-living-room level die-hard … but if I was, it’d absolutely include a framed still from their July 4th, 2004 show at Buffalo City Hall, Rzeznik soaked to the bone singing through a thunderstorm, water streaming down his face. You can (and should) watch it, here.
That moment is soaked into Buffalo’s bricks. Sixty thousand people, ankle deep in puddles, watching their hometown heroes get pulled off stage for safety, only to storm back out again, gear shorting, instruments failing and singing like their lives depended on it. The crowd sang back like it did too. That’s not showbiz. That’s Buffalo.
If Rzeznik is Buffalo’s voice, then Robby Takac, the Goo Goo Dolls’ bass player and purple-haired philanthropist, is the heart. He founded Music is Art, a not-for-profit festival that pours Buffalo’s creative soul into a single weekend every September. The event raises money for youth music and arts programs and donates instruments to schools and students across Western New York. This ensures Buffalo’s next generation of noisemakers and dreamers have the tools they need to be heard.
Because in this city music isn’t just welcomed, it’s encouraged. So much so that I reckon if you stand still too long, someone will probably hand you a mic.
New York State’s best-kept secret
Just when I think Buffalo has finished surprising me, it lobs one more curveball across the water. Down at Canalside, beside an old carousel creaking through the night air, a local band called Yellow Jack is tearing it up with what locals call Canawler music, a rough cut blend of canal folk, frontier fiddle and barroom stomp. Grown men sway. Kids spin like tops. I stay still, wrapped in the moment like it might unravel if I move. The perfect farewell from this canal-born, fiercely creative city, it is less a gig and more a mic drop.
From its bars, buzzing bees and addictive wings to the carousel dancing to Canawler music, this city has earned my affection through art and authenticity. And as Yellow Jack cranks out one last tune, it hits me…
Buffalo isn’t trying to be the next big destination. It’s trying to be your favourite secret.
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An award-winning travel writer and photographer, Aleney de Winter was fresh from school when she first set off to explore the far reaches of Australia with a two-man tent and a beaten-up Kingswood for company. Three decades, and two kids later, and she's still on the go, with her itchy-footed offspring in tow. 