From John Loder:

Our family minus one Upper West Side daughter has lived in downtown Buffalo since 1990 after first testing the area by living in Eden for a decade. I've lived a lot of places – raised in Rochester and Greece, NY, Army time in Fort Dix, New Jersey, Ft Sam and Ft Hood in Texas, Walter Reed in Washington, DC and Ft Meade in Maryland, then young adult time in Chicago, Baltimore and Bernardsville, New Jersey, moving back to NY east of Troy in 1979 then Eden in 1980. Once in Eden, and working on the West Side, I started accreting more and more favorable impressions of Buffalo against my impressions gained traveling extensively throughout the US as part of my job.

They call New Orleans the Big Easy, but Buffalo could certainly be called the Mid-sized Easy. No matter what they say, Buffalo weather is livable and variable. Buffalo isn't snooty. It has a surprising range of restaurants of many ethnicities and prices. It has architecturally distinctive neighborhoods, considerably too many churches, many of which are lovely, our Olmsted parks and a superb library system. It has a boatload of venues for classical music and legitimate theater as well as for rock, folk and jazz. The art community seems vibrant, and holdings at the Albright-Knox and Burchfield-Penney galleries are world class. It may be rust belt, but the metal is thick and structurally stable. As the Art on Wheels so elegantly demonstrated, the entire Niagara Frontier is rich in life-enriching resources. Most everything is easy to get to, and rush hour is brief.

I'm leaving feet first.