Buffalo/South Buffalo

Buffalo is movin' on up these days: downtown has luxury hotels and condos aplenty, the Elmwood Village has high-end specialty shops, even the West Side sports a vibrant multiethnic pastiche with exotic food markets, restaurants, and artists. But let the other parts of town compete to see who's trendiest. South Buffalo doesn't need to be "cool" or to put on airs. What it offers visitors is not the future but the past; a throwback to a hardworking, blue-collar, rough-around-the-edges Buffalo that's steadily disappearing.

Combine the formidable barrier that is the Buffalo River with the notorious clannishness of its residents and it's easy to see why South Buffalo seems like a city all to its own, immunized both from Buffalo's post-World War II downward spiral and its 21st-century gentrification. You won't find much here that's pretentious, just quiet streets lined with old houses and shade trees, greasy spoons turning out some of the cheapest but tastiest food in the area, old-school watering holes, and friendly, downhome neighborhood people who'll give you a warm welcome the whole time.

Sound boring? Far from it. South Buffalo lays a hard-to-challenge claim on the title of best-kept secret in the city, with plenty to interest visitors. You can try your luck at the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino, peruse the Buffalo & Erie County Botanical Gardens, learn about the area's industrial history at the Heritage Discovery Center or Waterfront Memories & More, or take a boat tour through Elevator Alley, the cavernous stretch of the Buffalo River lined with the grain elevators that earned Buffalo over 100 years of prosperity. And if you're the outdoor type, South Buffalo is the place for you: it's got a pair of Olmsted parks that are among the best-preserved in the city, nature preserves built on old industrial brownfields, golf courses, and — best of all — nearly four miles (6 km) of Lake Erie shore lined with beaches, marinas, and still more parkland.

Fans of the Emerald Isle are in luck too: South Buffalo is the city's Irish enclave, with pubs lining the streets, traditional music and other cultural pursuits at the Buffalo Irish Center, and an official Irish Heritage District along Abbott Road with a handful of specialty boutiques selling imported wares. And if you're in town at the right time, South Buffalo's neighborhood St. Patrick's Day Parade is an unmissable spectacle, with the streets of the Old First Ward and The Valley turned green each year on the Saturday before March 17.

Understand
Broadly speaking, South Buffalo is bisected by the Buffalo River, which itself is the site of Elevator Alley, the world's largest extant collection of grain elevators that extend some two meandering miles (3 km) inland from the harbor and were the nucleus of Buffalo's most important industry for nearly a century and a half. The neighborhoods north of the river are older than the ones to the south — in fact, the, which extends from downtown east as far as the old New York Central Railroad tracks just past Katherine Street, is the cradle of South Buffalo, out of which all the outer neighborhoods grew. Though it remains Irish in constitution, the Old First Ward today bears little resemblance to the crowded, crime-ridden and desperately poor slum that it was in the 1800s: today it's mostly a quiet working-class residential area in the shadow of the grain elevators. However, its innermost blocks, known as the, have been given a new lease on life lately as a cluster of trendy bars and restaurants and even a casino. East of the Old First Ward, sandwiched between the New York Central and Buffalo Creek Railroad tracks (hence its name), is, a largely Polish neighborhood that's almost as old.

Outward from these areas lie and, a pair of neighborhoods on South Buffalo's northern boundary that are often considered to be part of the East Side. They're included here because of their history as industrial centers, their adjacency to Seneca Street (an important South Buffalo thoroughfare), and, in the case of Seneca-Babcock, its majority-Irish ethnic demographics. Seneca-Babcock is a somewhat nondescript neighborhood of working-class homes whose interest to visitors is largely due to the Niagara Frontier Food Terminal at its northern edge; for its part, Larkinville has emerged as a sort of satellite business district, with corporate offices, small businesses, bars, and restaurants occupying the former warehouses of the Larkin Soap Company, and its central focal point, Larkin Square, hosting frequent events.

South of the river, things are a little more spread-out. Lying just at the foot of the main bridge across the river, the first neighborhood you'll come to is, a charming middle-class area of turn-of-the-century flats whose main thoroughfare is South Park Avenue. Northeast of there is Seneca Street, an imposing commercial district that dubs itself "downtown South Buffalo" even though it long ago lost the title of the neighborhood's main shopping street. Outward from there, neighborhood boundaries get murkier. Toward the city's southern borders, the thoroughfares of South Park Avenue and Abbott Road take on an almost suburban character, with strip malls and ample parking lots abundant; interspersed between them is a network of pleasant, leafy side streets lined with charming middle-class houses from the 1920s. Finally, in the southwest, separated from the rest of south-of-the-river South Buffalo by a wide swath of railroad tracks, is found the, a vast expanse of lakeshore that boasts the pleasant greenery of Buffalo Harbor State Park, Tifft and Times Beach Nature Preserves, Wilkeson Pointe, and other parkland.

History
South Buffalo's history begins with the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, at that time the most ambitious engineering project ever undertaken in the United States: a 363-mile (584-km) inland waterway from Albany to the sleepy frontier village of Buffalo. Though the bulk of what is now South Buffalo was then part of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, which had been set aside for the Seneca Indians at the time of the Holland Purchase in 1793, the lots immediately east of the harbor (today's Cobblestone District and Old First Ward) were not — and when the unskilled, destitute immigrant laborers from Ireland they hired to dig the canal were finished, they settled there.

The first years of the Erie Canal were a time of explosive growth for Buffalo, and the First Ward was no exception. This was among the city's lowest-lying land, and Buffalo's founding fathers had not even bothered to divide it into lots, assuming that no one would want to live on this swampy riverbank. But the digging of the canal was such a huge undertaking that there were hundreds if not thousands of Irishmen who needed housing, and the First Ward, dirt-cheap and close to the canal, was a natural place for them to make their homes. The poorest of the poor lived in the blocks south of the main drag of Elk Street (now South Park Avenue) in what was called "The Flats", which, in springtime and after heavy rains, would almost always be inundated by floodwaters from the Buffalo River. In the 1840s, during the Irish Potato Famine, another wave of immigrants crossed the Atlantic — and the First Ward became even more crowded.

In those days, when freighters filled with grain and flour arrived at port in Buffalo, the cargo had to be unloaded, divided, and sent east in canal boats by hand — a slow, inefficient process that required more workers than the First Ward had to offer. Buffalo's growth was stunted by the bottleneck of too many ships, too much grain, and too few workers. Enter Joseph Dart, a local merchant who, in 1842, invented a machine that unloaded grain by steam power, stored it in a huge silo, and loaded it later onto canal barges: the first grain elevator. In the space of less than ten years, the Buffalo River was lined with grain elevators, and the reinvigorated harbor had become so congested that many freighters could not find any place to berth. The city responded by constructing a network of feeder canals and basins, such as the City Ship Canal, the Main and Hamburg Canal, and the Ohio Basin, that crisscrossed the First Ward — and whose polluted, stagnant waters helped spread cholera and other communicable plagues among the residents. The First Ward earned the reputation as one of the nastiest slums in the country, plagued by crime and disease, where the desperately poor lived in shanties and tenements sandwiched among the shipyards and factories, working as canal boaters, grain scoopers, longshoremen, and miscellaneous unskilled laborers and shunned by their Anglo-Saxon Protestant social betters.



Meanwhile, north of the First Ward was the Hydraulic Canal, which flowed westward from the Buffalo River over a large cascade to the Main and Hamburg Canal, in an area that came to be called The Hydraulics. Reuben Heacock, a wealthy merchant who was one of Buffalo's founding fathers, built the canal in 1828 to furnish water power for the Hydraulic Business Association, a league of manufacturing concerns he founded. Though the canal eventually proved too small to bring to full fruition Heacock's vision of The Hydraulics as one of the foremost industrial centers in the United States, it was still a buzzing milling district — and together with the harbor, it cemented South Buffalo's enduring status as the city's industrial epicenter.

Even before the federal government dissolved the Buffalo Creek Reservation, the overcrowding of the Irish neighborhoods forced some residents to seek out new spaces to live near the harbor — in fact, living conditions in the shantytowns along the lake shore near present-day Times Beach and on Ganson Street between the grain elevators were somewhat better than in the First Ward proper. However, when the Compromise Treaty of 1842 sent the Seneca south to the Cattaraugus Reservation, huge new tracts of land opened to development. One of the first new neighborhoods was The Valley, just east of the First Ward on the other side of the railroad tracks. South Buffalo's lot began to improve soon after, with Bishop John Timon working tirelessly to establish Catholic schools, hospitals and charities for the Irish, who were often victims of the anti-Catholic discrimination that ran rampant in city-owned institutions. The leaders of the Irish community also proved to be expert political organizers, playing on popular suspicions of tacit anti-Catholicism in the Republican Party to turn the First Ward loyally Democratic, with droves of voters turning out each Election Day. Soon, Irishmen began to enter political office, appointing their neighbors to lucrative patronage jobs and creating a middle class among their community — they came to be known as "lace-curtain Irish", as opposed to the "shantytown Irish" of the grain mills. (It should be emphasized that political activity in the First Ward was not limited to the ballot box: the most successful of the five Fenian Raids, where battle-hardened Irish-American Civil War veterans sought to invade the British colony of Canada and hold it for ransom until Ireland was granted its independence, was launched from Buffalo in 1866; Buffalo's Fenians successfully ambushed a Canadian militia company at the Battle of Ridgeway and briefly took Fort Erie before British reinforcements drove them back across the border.)

The new Irish political class soon turned their efforts to finding a better place to live than the crowded, crime-ridden First Ward, and starting about 1875, the Germans who farmed the lands of the former Seneca reservation south of the river gradually gave way to nouveau riche Irish city dwellers. Real-estate speculators such as William Fitzpatrick (the so-called "Builder of South Buffalo") were happy to oblige them, laying out side streets off Seneca Street, Abbott Road, and other former farm lanes and filling them with houses as fast as he could build them. Frederick Law Olmsted got into the act, too — he was called back to Buffalo to design a southern extension of the park system that had grown so popular in the city's northern precincts, and when South Buffalo's parks and parkways were finally completed in 1894, they helped stimulate even more growth in the new neighborhoods.

In the midst of all this expansion, there were fundamental changes afoot at the harbor. Throughout the 19th century, the state government continuously enlarged and deepened the Erie Canal and transformed it into a full-fledged transportation network, with feeder canals such as the Genesee Valley Canal, the Cayuga-Seneca Canal, and the Chenango Canal extending into all parts of the state. Nonetheless, the canals found it harder and harder to compete with the railroads, which could transport passengers and goods much more quickly: in the years after the New York Central Railroad reached Buffalo in 1841, passenger traffic on the canal dropped to a small fraction of its former numbers, and freight traffic declined steeply as well. As public outcry forced the city to fill in many of South Buffalo's small canals as public health hazards, the First Ward and Elevator Alley became crisscrossed by railroads instead: the lines extended right up to the elevators themselves, enabling grain to be unloaded directly onto boxcars. The railroads also engendered a local steel industry which would go on to become a major player in Buffalo's economy: iron ore arrived daily by freighter from Michigan and Minnesota and coal was shipped by railroad from Pennsylvania to be processed into steel at what was then the world's largest steel mill, set up by the Lackawanna Steel Company in 1899 on the lake shore just south of the city line. The railroad network extended into The Hydraulics as well, enabling it to continue on as an industrial center after the Hydraulic Canal, too, was decommissioned in 1883. The Hydraulics soon came to be dominated by the Larkin Company, which was founded in 1875 as a producer of soap sourced from the nearby stockyards and helmed by a group including namesake John Larkin and top executive Darwin Martin. By the turn of the century, Larkin expanded into a conglomerate that occupied about a half-dozen huge warehouse buildings clustered around the corner of Seneca and Swan Streets, where a wide gamut of products sold by mail order were manufactured.

The early 20th century was South Buffalo's heyday, with the Irish coming to dominate the police and fire departments just as they did local politics. As its middle class continued to grow and leave the First Ward for the more spacious neighborhoods south of the river, the demographics of the older neighborhoods began to change. Italians from the Ellicott District, who were seen by the Irish as competition for unskilled positions at the port and on the railroads, began to trickle south of the railroad tracks and formed a sizable minority in the First Ward by the 1920s; at about the same time, The Valley became a majority-Polish neighborhood centered around St. Valentine Church on Elk Street. Thanks to its residents' relatively stable civil service jobs and the charitable tradition of the Catholic church, South Buffalo rode out the Great Depression better than most parts of the city, but further changes came to the First Ward in 1940 when about 300 houses on Perry Street (derided by city officials as "slums") were razed to make way for the Commodore Perry Projects, a government-subsidized housing development for low-income individuals. For the first time, there was a sizable African-American presence in the First Ward, igniting ethnic tensions that simmer to this day.

After World War II, though, the bottom fell out. Traffic at the harbor still had not reached pre-Depression levels by the time the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, rendering Buffalo permanently irrelevant as an inland port. While previously the presence of Niagara Falls meant that boat traffic on the Great Lakes couldn't go much further downstream than Buffalo, the enlargement of the Welland Canal in Canada made for direct access to the sea, so freighters could bypass Buffalo entirely. Within ten years, most of the grain elevators along the Buffalo River had shut down, the harbor was nearly empty, and the local economy was reeling. Furthermore, at about the same time, the railroad industry declined steeply thanks to the new Interstate Highway System, which moved passengers and freight much more quickly and cheaply. The steel industry wasn't spared either: a market flooded with cheap imported steel meant that the American-made version couldn't compete, so after shedding jobs for a few decades, the Lackawanna plant finally went belly-up in 1982.

But, even though these events were happening right in its backyard, South Buffalo rode out the downturn much better than most other areas of the city. The reason, once again, was the cushy civil-service jobs that a disproportionate number of its residents held (especially during the four mayoral terms of Jimmy Griffin, who took special care of his native First Ward and the rest of South Buffalo during the rock-bottom 1980s and early '90s). As well, its residents' clannish nature and dogged loyalty to their neighborhood meant that South Buffalo did not lose nearly as many of its residents to the suburbs as other neighborhoods. And the urban renewal that wrought such havoc in places like the West Side and the Ellicott District barely touched South Buffalo, with the notable exceptions of Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Administration Building in The Hydraulics, which was demolished in 1950, and the construction of the Buffalo Skyway in 1953, the first controlled-access highway in Erie County, an elevated eyesore that serves as a giant wall between South Buffalo and the waterfront. Eventually, Buffalo bottomed out and slowly began pulling itself together, and today there are some parts of South Buffalo that are undergoing revitalization: the Cobblestone District is home to a handful of hip bars and a glitzy new casino, the Outer Harbor is now a state park, The Hydraulics has been reborn as a business district-cum-festival venue dubbed Larkinville, the Old First Ward became a nucleus for Buffalo's growing craft beer industry, the grain elevators are finally getting their due as engineering marvels of the Industrial Age, and in 2017, Tesla ' s, the largest solar panel manufacturing facility in North America, opened on a former industrial brownfield along the river. But by and large, despite these changes, everyday life in South Buffalo continues on the same as ever.

Climate
Thanks to Lake Erie, South Buffalo's climate is a little bit different than other parts of the city.

Much as in downtown, in the warmer months areas near the waterfront are noticeably cooler and windier than other parts of the city. This can be a double-edged sword: the fresh lake breezes are a godsend on a hot summer day, but if you're birdwatching at Times Beach or biking the Shoreline Trail in the spring or autumn, you might want to wear a jacket and long pants.

These same winds over the lake also mean that, even more than other parts of the city, South Buffalo really gets pummeled in the winter with lake-effect snow. After the winds pass onto dry land, it takes some time for the snow to condense out of the moisture-rich air — so, curiously enough, it's not unusual for Cazenovia Park to get walloped while the Outer Harbor only sees a dusting.

Read



 * Against the Grain: The History of Buffalo's First Ward by Timothy Bohen (ISBN 9780615620527). An engaging chronicle of the Old First Ward from its initial settlement in the 1820s and '30s to the present day, as well as the larger-than-life characters who have called it home over the years — including champion prizefighter Jimmy Slattery, politico William "Fingy" Conners (more on him below), World War I hero and intelligence agent William "Wild Bill" Donovan, and, of course, Buffalo mayor Jimmy Griffin.
 * Author Richard Sullivan mines the lore of three generations of his ancestral family for The First Ward, a five-part series of novels that paints a slightly fictionalized but remarkably true-to-life portrait of life in the colorful titular neighborhood from the 1850s through the first decades of the 20th century. In Fingy Conners, the Sullivan Brothers & Mark Twain (ISBN 9781463636586), an account of the friendship between Twain (then a columnist for the Buffalo Express) and the author's great-grandfather and great-great-uncle (a police detective and city councilman, respectively) serves as window dressing for the nefarious exploits of Conners, a local dock laborer turned shipping magnate and political boss who the author describes as "America's most hateful yet least-known villain". Fingy Conners and the New Century (ISBN 9781478172932) follows the further rivalries between Conners and the Sullivan brothers, with Teddy Roosevelt, Nellie Bly, William Randolph Hearst, and other turn-of-the-century luminaries putting in appearances. Conners is relegated to a supporting role in the third and fourth installments: Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins (ISBN 9781515212515), wherein Detective Sullivan, haunted by the memory of the McKinley assassination, is tasked with reforming the city's corrupt and incompetent police department amidst a series of brutal murders and ahead of President Taft's visit to Buffalo, and His Lips Forgot the Taste of Truth (ISBN 9781974190126), which pits the Sullivans against serial killer J. Frank Hickey, who claimed a dozen Western New York victims in the 1910s. And of course, keep your eye out for the exciting conclusion, on which (as of Mar 2020) the author is hard at work!
 * The World According to Griffin: The End of an Era by Brian Meyer (ISBN 1879201119). Sixteen years' worth of colorful, no-holds-barred sound bites from the eminently quotable Jimmy Griffin, four-term mayor of Buffalo and proud native son of the First Ward, as collected by the Buffalo News freelancer who worked the City Hall beat during his tenure.

Talk
Despite the bilingual street signs installed in 2008 on Abbott Road between Southside and Red Jacket Parkways — Buffalo's officially recognized "Irish Heritage District" — few if any South Buffalonians speak Gaelic, or anything other than English.

By car
South Buffalo is surrounded on three sides by highways. Though the New York State Thruway (I-90) runs just beyond and roughly parallel to the city line, it doesn't provide direct access to South Buffalo. However, the district is well-served by the other two.

Interstate 190 skirts the border between South Buffalo and the East Side on an east-west trajectory from the Thruway toward downtown, then turning north and passing through the West Side on its way toward Niagara Falls and the Canadian border. I-190 serves South Buffalo via the following exits:


 * Exit 1 (South Ogden Street). Following Ogden Street southbound through Kaisertown and turning right on Mineral Springs Road will lead you to Cazenovia Park and the heart of the Seneca Street business district.
 * Exit 2 (Clinton Street/Bailey Avenue) and Exit 3 (Seneca Street) are the main points of highway access to South Buffalo. Get off at Exit 2 and follow Bailey Avenue north to Seneca-Babcock or south to Heacock Park in The Triangle. Southbound travellers can also turn off at Seneca Street into Larkinville, continue along Abbott Road toward Cazenovia Park, or follow the US 62 Southbound signs down South Park Avenue to access the Botanical Gardens and South Park. Exit 3, accessible from the southbound lanes only, lets you off on Elk Street a block before Bailey Avenue, where you can follow the same directions to the same destinations as Exit 2.
 * Exit 4 (Smith Street) leads northward to Larkinville or southward to The Valley.
 * Exit 5 (Hamburg Street via northbound lanes; Louisiana Street via southbound lanes) provides access to the Old First Ward.
 * Exit 7 (NY 5 westbound), accessible via the southbound lanes only, is the northern terminus of the Skyway, described below. To get to the Skyway via the northbound lanes, get off at Church Street downtown and follow the signs for the Outer Harbor.

The Buffalo Skyway (NY 5) begins downtown at I-190 and extends southward parallel to the lake shore, providing access to the Outer Harbor and various other parts of South Buffalo:


 * Take the Outer Harbor Drive exit and head north on Fuhrmann Boulevard to get to Wilkeson Pointe and Times Beach Nature Preserve.
 * The Ohio Street exit lets you off just north of Gallagher Beach. As well, you can take Ohio Street northbound to get to Elevator Alley and the Old First Ward.
 * The Tifft Street exit also provides access to Gallagher Beach. Otherwise, you can take Tifft Street east to Tifft Nature Preserve, Ship Canal Commons, and, further afield, The Triangle and the Olmsted parkways.
 * The Skyway ends at the Ridge Road exit, which is beyond the city line in Lackawanna. Nonetheless, following Ridge Road east will take you to Ship Canal Commons (via Commerce Drive), South Park, and the Botanical Gardens.

If you're visiting in the winter, keep in mind that the Skyway is often closed when there is inclement weather.

South Park Avenue is the main surface route between downtown and South Buffalo, running from the foot of Main Street somewhat south of due east through the Cobblestone District, the Old First Ward, and The Valley, then turning sharply southward at a complicated intersection with Bailey Avenue and Abbott Road where it picks up the designation of US 62. Thenceforward, it runs along the eastern edge of The Triangle, past South Park, and on beyond the city line. This somewhat confusing trajectory results from the fact that the portion of its route north of Southside Parkway was cobbled together in the 1930s from what was once Triangle Street and parts of Abbott Road and Elk Street. A GPS system or map will come in handy when navigating South Park, as there are a lot of opportunities for wrong turns. At the aforementioned confusing intersection, South Park meets Bailey Avenue (US 62), which runs north through Seneca-Babcock and into the East Side, and Abbott Road, which continues southeastward past Cazenovia Park and into the residential heart of South Buffalo.

Seneca Street (NY 16) straddles the murky, poorly-defined northern border of South Buffalo, running roughly southeastward from downtown through the Ellicott District, Larkinville, and Seneca-Babcock, through the South Buffalo business district, past Cazenovia Park, and into suburbia. Further north still, Clinton Street (NY 354) clips the northern boundary of Seneca-Babcock.



Like many other districts of the city, Frederick Law Olmsted's parkway system extends into South Buffalo. The backbone of South Buffalo's parkway system is McKinley Parkway, which begins at the Olmsted-designed Heacock Park and runs southeastward to, where it intersects with the short Red Jacket Parkway heading toward Cazenovia Park. It then proceeds due south to Dorrance Avenue, where sits directly on the city line. McKinley then proceeds for a short distance southwestward through Lackawanna, ending in front of the Botanical Gardens at South Park. Those who've seen Olmsted's work in other parts of the city will notice that South Buffalo's parkways are somewhat less impressive than the more northerly ones: though lined with shade trees, they are much narrower and lack a center median, bearing more resemblance to Richmond Avenue than Lincoln or Chapin Parkways. Olmsted had originally planned to link the northern and southern sections of his park system via Fillmore Avenue, Smith Street, and South Park Avenue, which were to be redesigned as a grand parkway that would have connected with McKinley Parkway at Heacock Park. However, with the exception of a few blocks of Fillmore south of Humboldt Park on the East Side where rows of stately elms were put in, his plans never came to fruition. The long-term plans of the Buffalo Olmsted Park Conservancy include improvements to those streets to better integrate the two halves of the system, but in the meantime, the Conservancy has also been hard at work elsewhere on South Buffalo's parkways: they were responsible for the construction of McKinley Circle in 2002 — a never-built feature of Olmsted's original plan — as well as installing charming period street lamps and thoroughly landscaping the parkways and circles with delightful flowers and new trees.

Though it didn't appear in his original plans, Olmsted's influence is also evident in the Outer Harbor Parkway, a three-and-a-half mile (5.6-km) stretch of Fuhrmann Boulevard that runs along the Outer Harbor between Times Beach and the Union Ship Canal, which was redesigned in 2010. The Outer Harbor Parkway's design pays tribute to the grand avenues Olmsted built elsewhere in the city with all the classic features of his work: elegant roundabouts, charming antique lampposts, and a wide central median lush with trees and greenery.

Other major streets in South Buffalo include Ohio Street, which runs from South Park Avenue southward through the Old First Ward and across Elevator Alley, ending at Fuhrmann Boulevard; Tifft Street, an east-west route that links the Outer Harbor with South Buffalo proper; and Hopkins Street, which runs west of and parallel to South Park Avenue between The Triangle and South Park.

Parking in the Cobblestone District can be especially tight during Sabres games and other events at the KeyBank Center. The surface lots between Mississippi and Columbia Streets charge $2 per day, and at the KeyBank Center parking ramp on Illinois Street it's $2 per hour up to a maximum of $5 per day; naturally, both of these numbers increase sharply when there's an event at the arena. As for on-street parking, it's prohibited on Perry Street and South Park Avenue, but permitted on the side streets with some restrictions: parking meters are in effect on the southern half of Illinois Street on weekdays from 8AM to 5PM, charging $1 per hour to a maximum of 2 hours, and parking is prohibited on Columbia Street after 5PM. Larkinville is another place where parking can be a pain — there are plenty of surface lots, but most of them are restricted to workers in the various office buildings except during special events. For visitors, the best bet for parking is the Larkin @ Exchange visitors' lot on the corner of Exchange and Van Rensselaer Streets — parking is free and nominally limited to two hours, though it's not too well-enforced. There's also metered parking on Exchange Street between Van Rensselaer and Smith Streets, in effect on weekdays from 7AM to 5PM at a flat rate of $2 per day. Parking is free and unrestricted on Seneca Street, Swan Street, and the side streets, and is generally easier to find the further you get from Larkin Square.

Elsewhere in South Buffalo, parking on Abbott Road is free of charge and only subject to time limits in the vicinity of Mercy Hospital, with parking between Columbus and Alsace Avenues limited to two hours at a time between 7AM and 7PM, Monday through Saturday. Beware, though, because empty spaces on Abbott and its side streets can be hard to find, especially between Heacock and Cazenovia Parks. Two-hour parking is also in effect for the same days and times on Seneca Street between Pomona and Hayden Streets and between Zittel Street and the city line; on South Park Avenue between Abbott Road and the city line, the hours are 7AM to 7PM, Monday through Friday. However, on-street parking on Seneca and South Park is usually much easier to find than on Abbott. In the Old First Ward, The Valley, and Seneca-Babcock, on-street parking is free, unrestricted, and virtually always easily available.

By public transportation
Public transit in Buffalo and the surrounding area is provided by the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (NFTA). The NFTA Metro system encompasses a single-line light-rail rapid transit (LRRT) system and an extensive network of buses. The fare for a single trip on a bus or train is $2.00 regardless of length. No transfers are provided between buses or trains; travelers who will need to make multiple trips per day on public transit should consider purchasing an all-day pass for $5.00.

By bus
South Buffalo is traversed by a number of NFTA Metro bus routes:

To and from downtown
NFTA Metro Bus #2 — Clinton. Beginning at the Bank of America Operations Center in West Seneca, Bus #2 proceeds down Clinton Street through the far northern part of Seneca-Babcock, with service to the Niagara Frontier Food Terminal. It ends on the Lower West Side.

NFTA Metro Bus #14 — Abbott. Beginning at Erie Community College South Campus in Hamburg, Bus #14 proceeds through South Buffalo via Abbott Road and South Park Avenue, passing by Cazenovia Park, along the northern edge of The Triangle, and through The Valley and the Old First Ward. Turning north at Michigan Avenue and proceeding to Exchange Street via Carroll and North Carroll Streets (outbound buses use Seneca Street), Bus #14 then passes through the Cobblestone District before ending at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

NFTA Metro Bus #15 — Seneca. Beginning at the Southgate Plaza in West Seneca, Bus #15 proceeds along Seneca Street past Cazenovia Park and through Seneca-Babcock and Larkinville. Bearing right onto Swan Street at the fork, it then enters the East Side and ends downtown.

NFTA Metro Bus #16 — South Park. Beginning in the Village of Hamburg, Bus #16 enters South Buffalo via South Park Avenue, passing by South Park and the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens, and proceeding through The Triangle, The Valley and the Old First Ward. Turning north at Michigan Avenue and proceeding to Exchange Street via Carroll and North Carroll Streets (outbound buses use Seneca Street), Bus #16 then passes through the Cobblestone District before entering downtown and ending its run at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

NFTA Metro Bus #42 — Lackawanna. Beginning at the Southgate Plaza in West Seneca, Bus #42 detours slightly to serve South Park and the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens during the Lackawanna portion of its route, then enters South Buffalo proper via the Skyway, exiting onto Fuhrmann Boulevard at Tifft Street with service to the Tifft Nature Preserve, Gallagher Beach, and Buffalo Harbor State Park. Turning north on Ohio Street and again onto Michigan Avenue, the bus proceeds to Exchange Street via Carroll and North Carroll Streets (outbound buses use Seneca Street), then passes through the Cobblestone District before ending downtown.

Crosstown routes
NFTA Metro Bus #18 — Jefferson. Beginning at the Delavan-Canisius College Metro Rail Station, Bus #18 passes through the East Side via Jefferson Avenue and Hamburg Street, then makes a sharp right at Seneca Street with service to Larkinville. Turning right again, Bus #18 serves the Old First Ward via Van Rensselaer Street and South Park Avenue, ending at the corner of South Park and Louisiana Street. Northbound trips loop through the Ward via Louisiana, Perry, and Hamburg Streets before rejoining the above-described route via South Park Avenue.

NFTA Metro Bus #19 — Bailey. Beginning at the University Metro Rail Station, Bus #19 enters South Buffalo via Bailey Avenue, serving Seneca-Babcock and ending at the corner of Abbott Road near the northern tip of The Triangle.

NFTA Metro Bus #23 — Fillmore-Hertel. Beginning at the Black Rock-Riverside Transit Hub, Bus #23 proceeds through North Buffalo and the East Side and enters South Buffalo near where Fillmore Avenue and Smith Street merge. Serving Larkinville and The Valley via Smith Street and South Park Avenue, Bus #23 ends its route at the corner of Bailey Avenue and Abbott Road near the northern tip of The Triangle.

By Metro Rail
The Metro Rail lies north of South Buffalo, on a 6.4-mile (10.3 km) stretch of Main Street running south and west from the South Campus of the University at Buffalo. However, the southernmost station,, is located at the corner of Main and Scott Streets, adjacent to Canalside and a stone's throw away from the Cobblestone District. As well, connections to Buses 14, 16 and 42 are also available a block down Scott Street, at Washington Street.

In early 2013, plans were hatched to extend the Metro Rail an additional 0.6 miles (1 km) past its current southern terminus. Trains would turn eastward around the back of the KeyBank Center, pass through the upper level of the former DL&W Train Shed that is now the NFTA's terminal depot, and continue along South Park Avenue through the Cobblestone District, ending at a parking ramp to be built at the corner of Michigan Avenue (and across the street from the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino) that would serve commuters to the intentionally parking-poor Medical Corridor. At last check, the project had moved beyond the conceptual stage into the realm of feasibility studies and public workshops — but given the constant service delays and sharp reduction in ridership during the reconstruction of Main Street downtown, not to mention the scores of Metro Rail expansion plans over the decades that never went anywhere, the smart money says "don't hold your breath".

By bike
Buffalo has made great strides in accommodating bicycling as a mode of transportation, with recognition from the League of American Bicyclists as a Bronze-Level "Bicycle-Friendly Community" to show for its efforts. The development of bike paths and lanes in South Buffalo lags somewhat behind more cycle-friendly parts of the city like Allentown and the Elmwood Village, but as in the rest of the city, it's improved: notably, the conversion of Ohio Street into a vital link in Buffalo's bicycle transportation network — with two off-street bike lanes flanking an attractive tree-lined swath through the Old First Ward — was completed in July 2015.



The showpiece of South Buffalo's bicycle infrastructure is the Industrial Heritage Trail, the Outer Harbor leg of the Shoreline Trail that runs along the waterfront all the way to North Tonawanda. Completed in 2010, this waterfront path extends along the shore of Lake Erie from the Coast Guard station southward along the waterfront into Lackawanna, passing by or through waterfront attractions such as Times Beach, Buffalo Harbor State Park, Tifft Nature Preserve, and Ship Canal Commons. The Shoreline Trail continues to downtown and the more northerly waterfront via Ohio Street and South Park Avenue, mostly along off-street paths (including a particularly interesting stretch on the shore of the Buffalo River behind the old DL&W Train Sheds that gives you an up-close-and-personal look at the grain elevators), with the exception of a few stretches along Ohio Street with dedicated on-street bike lanes. From Memorial Day through Columbus Day, you can also get to the Outer Harbor from Canalside via the Queen City Bike Ferry; the fare is $1.

Aside from the Shoreline Trail, South Buffalo's original Olmsted parkways are also great places to enjoy a bike ride. McKinley Parkway has a bike lane on each side of the street from Southside Parkway at Heacock Park through to McKinley Circle and onward into Lackawanna, where it comes to an end at South Park in front of the Buffalo & Erie County Botanical Gardens. Red Jacket Parkway links Cazenovia Park to McKinley Parkway at McClellan Circle, again with bike lanes on each side of the street.

Other South Buffalo streets have also been fitted with bike lanes and other accommodations. The Cazenovia Park area has a particularly dense concentration — with "sharrows" (pavement markings on roads too narrow to accommodate dedicated bike lanes, indicating that drivers should be aware of bicyclists) on Seneca Street between Southside Parkway and the city line, on Warren Spahn Drive through the park itself, as well as a dedicated bike lane on each side of North Legion Parkway for its entire length — as does the Cobblestone District, where there's a bike lane on each side of Michigan Avenue between Scott and Ohio Streets, as well as one in each direction along South Park Avenue between the KeyBank Center and Marvin Street (the bike lanes also continue up Marvin, behind the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino, to Perry Street). Further down South Park Avenue, bike lanes appear again between Hamburg and Dorrance Streets. Elsewhere, the Tifft Street Greenway Connector serves as a brief spur of the Shoreline Trail along Tifft Street east to Ship Canal Parkway, with dedicated on-street bike lanes east of there as far as Hopkins Street, and a similar spur runs off the Ohio Street trail to Mutual Park via St. Clair Street and South Street. Finally, in Larkinville there's a bike lane on each side of Seneca Street between Emslie and Smith Streets, with plans in place to eventually bridge the gap between Smith Street and Southside Parkway with dedicated lines, sharrows, or some combination thereof.

Bike sharing and rental
South Buffalo has two Reddy Bikeshare racks:


 * at Larkin Square, alongside Seneca Street at the end of the first walkway past Van Rensselaer Street
 * at RiverWorks on Ganson Street (follow the signs for the entrance; the rack is on the right side of the blue-gray office building next to the Labatt Blue grain silos)

If you're planning a weekend visit to the Outer Harbor but human-powered cycling isn't your thing, is another option. On Saturdays and Sundays in summer between 11AM and 8:30PM, these folks rent out motorized bicycles (with specialized fat tires for balance) from their kiosk at Wilkeson Pointe at a rate of $20 for the first hour plus $10 for each hour after. If a regular old pedal-powered bike is more to your liking, they have those, too, at half of the foregoing rate or $25 all day; tandem bikes go for $15 for the first hour and $10 each hour thereafter, as well as various other fun contraptions (check website for rates).

On foot
While walking is not a feasible way to travel between the neighborhoods of South Buffalo, there are many areas within this sprawling district that are great for pedestrians. Abbott Road, especially north of Cazenovia Park, is a nice place for a stroll and some window-shopping. Similarly, if you want to go bar-hopping on Seneca Street, it's perfectly possible to leave your car at the hotel.

History
Buffalo's glorious past as an industrial giant is on full display in South Buffalo's range of historic museums and attractions.

Outdoors
Despite its former industrial character, today's South Buffalo is all about the outdoors, with a huge, breathtaking expanse of shoreline at its front door and many former industrial facilities that have been repurposed as green spaces.

Olmsted parks
In 1887, twenty years after the first phase of his work in Buffalo was complete, landscape architect extraordinaire Frederick Law Olmsted was called back to design an extension of his extremely popular park system to serve residents of the southern part of the city. His original design for the new sector would have been centered on a large park stretching inland from Lake Erie (around the site of the present-day Ship Canal Commons), rivaling Delaware Park in size and boasting a beach, athletic fields, and a Venice-like maze of man-made canals for pleasure boaters extending all the way to downtown. After city leaders balked at the cost of such a park, he returned in 1894 with a second proposal that's the basis for what exists today: two inland parks, South Park and Cazenovia Park, linked to each other by a network of parkways that merge at the small Heacock Park to the north. Today, compared to the damage inflicted over the years by careless planners on the original parks and parkways, South Buffalo's Olmsted elements remain remarkably true to their original design. The links at Cazenovia Park draw golfers from all over Western New York — and, of course, locals by the thousands flock to the Buffalo & Erie County Botanical Gardens, the verdant centerpiece of South Park.





Other parks
In addition to those listed above, South Buffalo is also home to a number of smaller parks. Many of them are part of the Buffalo River Greenway, an "emerald necklace" of small parks and green spaces along the shores of the Buffalo River. Aside from Thomas Higgins Riverfront Park and Seneca Bluffs, both listed below, and the aforementioned Red Jacket Riverfront Park, the Buffalo River Greenway includes, located at the foot of Hamburg Street in the Old First Ward and boasting a neighborhood historical museum, a riverfront promenade and small amphitheater, and the best views of Elevator Alley you can get outside of a boat, as well as , which, as its name implies, is the setting for a three-day celebration of Buffalo's waterfront history each June.

Other parks in South Buffalo include, a pleasant expanse of ball fields, playgrounds and open lawns on the former site of the Ohio Basin, a vital link in the Old First Ward's 19th-century labyrinth of ship berths and canals, Seneca Indian Park, covered above, and , a tiny Olmsted park whose significance lies not in its amenities but in its importance to Olmsted's design, as the northern hub of South Buffalo's parkway network and planned nexus with the northern parkways.

Nature preserves

 * Tifft_Nature_Preserve.jpg
 * Tifft_Nature_Preserve.jpg

Architecture
South Buffalo's main contribution to Buffalo's rich architectural heritage is the grain elevators of the former industrial district. It was in Buffalo where Joseph Dart built the first grain elevator in 1843, and today Elevator Alley is still the largest single collection of grain elevators in the world. Long derided as eyesores, these rock-solid monoliths were saved from the wrecking ball largely by virtue of how expensive it would have been to demolish them. These days, though, Buffalonians have taken to embracing their scrappy industrial history, with grain elevators being repurposed for a variety of uses.

As well, South Buffalo contains a number of neighborhoods that are interesting to fans of historic architecture. In the entire city, there are 12 historic districts listed on the National Register of Historic Places as well as 11 additional ones that have been granted landmark status by the Buffalo Preservation Board, and although only two of them are located in South Buffalo, there are also a couple of "unofficial" ones that are notable.


 * Slightly over 13 acres (5.3 ha) in size, the Cobblestone Local Historic District is bounded by Perry Street, Columbia Street, South Park Avenue, and Illinois Street, and also includes the two blocks of Michigan Avenue north of the Buffalo River, where the historic fireboat Edward M. Cotter is docked. Dating to the 1820s and '30s, in its day this was one of the nation's nastiest slums, populated by poor Irish industrial laborers and crisscrossed with a network of man-made shipping lanes that radiated out from the harbor, by which factories received raw materials shipped across the Great Lakes or sent finished products on their way to market via the Erie Canal. The neighborhood began to decline in importance around the turn of the century, when the canals were filled in, and as the Irish, with newfound political and social clout, gradually became well-off enough to move to the much safer, still-semirural lands south of the Buffalo River. The Cobblestone District's main attraction to history buffs today are the streets themselves — many are still paved with the granite blocks that gave the neighborhood its name, brought over as ballast in the hulls of lake freighters and discarded at port. As for the buildings in between, most of them have been demolished, with the exception of a collection of 19th- and early 20th-century brick industrial buildings between Illinois and Mississippi Streets (anchored by the Bendin Building, a five-story warehouse at 95 Perry Street) that are now being actively restored as bars, restaurants, office space, and loft apartments.
 * Though it's not yet been named to any historic register, The Triangle is a charming expanse of turn-of-the-century homes that's well worth a visit for architecture fans. The district is aptly named: the classic boundaries of The Triangle are South Park Avenue on the northeast, Amber Street on the south, and Hopkins Street on the west, though the streets west of Heacock Park on the other side of South Park Avenue share essentially the same identity. The Triangle started out as rural farmland belonging to Reuben Heacock, a wealthy banker and industrialist, but its history really began in the 1890s, when Frederick Law Olmsted was called back to Buffalo to design a southern extension to his park system. At the time, urban development in South Buffalo lagged far behind the rest of the city, from which it was separated not only by the Buffalo River but also a series of busy railroad tracks — and in wet weather, the swamps around the riverbanks would often flood, cutting off what few roads led north. Before beginning his work, Olmsted stated that city leaders needed to make South Buffalo more easily accessible from the rest of the city and to mitigate the constant flooding problems. The city responded by building more streets and dredging the river into a concrete channel, and as soon as Olmsted's park system opened, The Triangle began developing into a classic turn-of-the-century "streetcar suburb" with South Park Avenue as its main shopping street. Today, the side streets of The Triangle are dominated by homes that date from the 1890s to the 1930s and reflect the architectural fashions of that period: wood-frame houses in the Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Craftsman, and American Foursquare styles, many of which were partially prefabricated "kit houses" available through mail-order catalogs. Peppered among them are a few larger buildings, including some fairly impressive churches, Holy Family Catholic Church at 1887 South Park Avenue and St. Jude's Episcopal Church at 124 Macamley Street among them.




 * Proposed for the National Register of Historic Places, the Larkin Local Historic District is centered on the corner of Seneca and Swan Streets, in a part of Buffalo once known as The Hydraulics. Named for the Hydraulic Canal, built in 1828 by local entrepreneur Reuben Heacock, this was supposed to be one of the foremost industrial districts in the world — but the canal was only big enough to support a few tanneries, slaughterhouses, and other industries. Luckily, The Hydraulics' proximity to the railroads preserved its importance as a center of industry even after the canal was filled in, and it soon came to be dominated by the Larkin Company, a mail-order giant whose huge campus of factory buildings was centered around its beautiful Administration Building, designed by Darwin Martin's close friend Frank Lloyd Wright. The company went out of business in 1943, wracked by the effects of the Great Depression combined with a decline in popularity of catalog sales, but most of Larkinville's buildings (with the notable exception of Wright's Administration Building; see below) still stand and, in many cases, have been renovated and restored for offices. These include the gargantuan Larkin Factory Complex at 701 Seneca Street and Terminal Warehouse Building at 726 Exchange Street; the U Building at 239 Van Rensselaer Street, which now houses offices, and the Kamman Building at 755 Seneca Street, now the home of a local architectural firm. At the center of it all is, with pleasant greenery, restaurants and food trucks, and frequent special events.

Festivals and events
The Outer Harbor has become Buffalo's festival venue of choice, with many events previously packed like sardines into places like Canalside or the streets of North Buffalo (respectively, the Buffalo Irish Festival and the Galbani Italian Festival) have relocated to this wide-open lakeside space.

However, by far the most interesting festival venues in South Buffalo can be found in Elevator Alley, where many of the old grain silos have been ingeniously redeveloped into innovative spaces. is the larger of these: a trio of grain elevators on Childs Street (the American, Perot Malting and Marine "A" Elevators) owned by local entrepreneur Rick Smith which, after having been abandoned for almost half a century beforehand, reopened in 2012 to a growing schedule of concerts, guided tours, activities, and events within and around these majestic, weather-beaten monoliths. Hot on Silo City's heels in late 2014 came, the product of an $18-million restoration of the Grange League Federation Elevator complex on Ganson Street offering indoor and outdoor rock climbing, a zipline, performance space, a variety of sports, and — above all — two regulation-size ice rinks that play host every year to the Labatt Blue Pond Hockey Tournament.

Boating
Together with nearby Canalside, the historic industrial waterways of South Buffalo are ground zero for the kayaking craze that's hit the Buffalo area.



Sports

 * Pickleball. Larkin Square ' s retro quirkiness is a great part of its appeal — and one of the best expressions of that whimsy are the two located just off the rear of the square, behind the Kamman Building. A popular recreation for visitors as well as workers in the nearby office buildings who want to blow off steam after a long workday cooped up at their desk, pickleball is an old-time sport that's sort of a cross between badminton, volleyball, and ping-pong. You can play on the courts for free, on a first-come-first-served basis, and paddles and plastic whiffleballs are stored in a basket beside the courts (don't forget to return them after you're done). Those who want to brush up on the rules can take a look at the Larkin Square website, or just read the back of your paddle — they're printed right on them.
 * Pickleball. Larkin Square ' s retro quirkiness is a great part of its appeal — and one of the best expressions of that whimsy are the two located just off the rear of the square, behind the Kamman Building. A popular recreation for visitors as well as workers in the nearby office buildings who want to blow off steam after a long workday cooped up at their desk, pickleball is an old-time sport that's sort of a cross between badminton, volleyball, and ping-pong. You can play on the courts for free, on a first-come-first-served basis, and paddles and plastic whiffleballs are stored in a basket beside the courts (don't forget to return them after you're done). Those who want to brush up on the rules can take a look at the Larkin Square website, or just read the back of your paddle — they're printed right on them.

Golf
If you're a golfer in Buffalo, you're in the right neighborhood. South Buffalo contains two of the city's four golf courses, where you can hit the links amid a setting of impeccably manicured greenery designed by the United States' foremost landscape architect.



If "full-size golf" is not your thing, head to Larkinville instead:



Ice skating




Live music and performance
With the emergence of the Cobblestone District as a hip cluster of bars in the shadow of the KeyBank Center and Canalside, plus a growing slate of offerings around the Outer Harbor, the live entertainment scene in South Buffalo has exploded in size.



Learn
South Buffalo is the home of, a small, private Catholic junior college founded in 1958 by the Sisters of Mercy. Expanded from its initial mandate of training teachers for Buffalo-area Catholic Schools, Trocaire now offers associate and bachelors' degrees in about a dozen health care, hospitality and technology programs at its campus adjacent to Mercy Hospital.

South Buffalo Business District
Though it's been outshined since the late 20th century by the more suburban-flavored Abbott Road corridor, "downtown South Buffalo" still boasts its share of shops, bars and eateries.

Cobblestone District, the Old First Ward, and The Valley
The latest phase of Buffalo's ongoing renaissance has seen developers set their sights on the precincts of South Buffalo closest to downtown, notably the Cobblestone District and the Ohio Street corridor. As that gets off the ground, a bevy of stores and other attractions for visitors will surely follow; however, as of 2023, there's not much here for shoppers.

Liquor, beer and wine
The industrial precincts of South Buffalo have lately asserted themselves as the epicenter of Buffalo's incipient craft spirits scene. Along with Larkinville, the Cobblestone District and the Old First Ward are where it's at.


 * Pressure Drop Brewing in the Barrel Factory; see below.
 * Pressure Drop Brewing in the Barrel Factory; see below.
 * Pressure Drop Brewing in the Barrel Factory; see below.
 * Pressure Drop Brewing in the Barrel Factory; see below.

The Triangle and South Park Avenue
As a shopping street, South Park Avenue is the happy medium between the historic but largely deserted Seneca Street business district, and the somewhat more upscale boutiques of Abbott Road.

Abbott Road
The closest thing South Buffalo has to an Elmwood Avenue, the section of Abbott Road adjacent to and north of Cazenovia Park is densely packed with a variety of shops and restaurants, many with an Irish theme (in keeping with its designation as Buffalo's Irish Heritage District). South of there, it takes on a more spread-out, suburban feel.

Seneca-Babcock
Since 1931, Seneca-Babcock has been the home of the Niagara Frontier Food Terminal, founded in 1931 by the Erie and Nickel Plate Railroads as an alternative to the congested Elk Market Terminal for wholesale produce vendors. Despite both the demise of the railroads and the rise of suburban-style supermarkets as the dominant option for grocery shoppers, the Niagara Frontier Food Terminal continues in operation and is today the home of a number of specialty food concerns, as well as the Clinton Bailey Farmers' Market.



Aside from what's at the Food Terminal, Seneca-Babcock is also where you'll find the famous...



Eat
If you want the most elegant fine dining Buffalo has to offer, look elsewhere. But if you want neighborhood dives brimming with local color and serving up delicious homestyle foods at shockingly low prices, South Buffalo has you covered.

One unique specialty of South Buffalo cuisine that many locals don't know about, let alone out-of-towners, are Smitty-style wings — a variant chicken wing recipe invented in the late 1960s (only a few years after Teressa Bellissimo cooked up the first batch of classic Buffalo-style wings) by Carol O'Neill, chef of the long-gone Smitty's Tavern on Abbott Road. The ineffable seasoning blend that made the original recipe so distinctive remains a closely-guarded secret that current purveyors of Smitty-style wings can only guess at, so nowadays the flavor varies slightly depending on where you get them. But broadly speaking, by comparison with the classic Buffalo style, the meat tends to be crispier on the outside yet more tender on the inside, while the sauce is less spicy and sports a pronounced flavor of garlic and vinegar, as well as (here's where things get especially murky) a blend of sweet and aromatic spices that may include ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon. The best places to find Smitty-style wings nowadays are not the sit-down restaurants in this section but the neighborhood taverns listed below in "Drink" — Doc Sullivan's and the Nine-Eleven Tavern are the consensus favorites.

Mid-range




Pizza
The following pizzerias are located in the South Buffalo business district. Those who are interested in pizza delivery (as opposed to pickup) might want to also check listings in adjacent districts; local pizzerias will often deliver to several different neighborhoods of the city.



Budget
If the pricier dining options directly inside the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino don't appeal to you, there are cheaper eats across the street.



Pizza
The following pizzerias are located in the Cobblestone District, the Old First Ward, and The Valley. Those who are interested in pizza delivery (as opposed to pickup) might want to also check listings in adjacent districts; local pizzerias will often deliver to several different neighborhoods of the city.



Local chains
The following local chains have locations in The Triangle and on South Park Avenue. Descriptions of these restaurants can be found on the main Buffalo page.



Pizza
The following pizzerias are located in The Triangle and on South Park Avenue. Those who are interested in pizza delivery (as opposed to pickup) might want to also check listings in adjacent districts; local pizzerias will often deliver to several different neighborhoods of the city.



Larkinville
Larkinville has a variety of brick-and-mortar restaurants to choose from, listed here. However, when it comes to dining, doubtless the most well-known attraction in the neighborhood is Food Truck Tuesdays, where a revolving cast of about two dozen food trucks from Buffalo, as well as visitors from Rochester and elsewhere, descend on Larkin Square from 5PM to 8PM, May through October.

Pizza
The following pizzerias are located on Abbott Road. Those who are interested in pizza delivery (as opposed to pickup) might want to also check listings in adjacent districts; local pizzerias will often deliver to several different neighborhoods of the city.



Pizza
The following pizzerias are located in Seneca-Babcock. Those who are interested in pizza delivery (as opposed to pickup) might want to also check listings in adjacent districts; local pizzerias will often deliver to several different neighborhoods of the city.



Groceries
The Niagara Frontier Food Terminal is home not only to Buffalo's largest farmers' market, but also a cooperatively-run community food market as well as a "cash and carry" market where you can buy groceries directly from distributors at wholesale prices.

Drink
South Buffalo is a drinker's paradise: the main drags of Seneca Street, South Park Avenue and Abbott Road are lined with colorful and unpretentious spots where you can mingle with the locals or even have a pint with one of Buffalo's finest after the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Cobblestone District
"Industrial chic" is the name of the game in the nightlife district nestled in the shadow of the KeyBank Center. As you can imagine, these bars really hop when the Sabres are playing, but when there's nothing going on at the arena, the scenario is no less pleasant: you can imbibe in a quieter and more intimate ambience, and enjoy ample free parking at the huge, deserted KeyBank Center lots.



Old First Ward and The Valley
Aside from the spanking-new craft brewery and distillery tasting rooms — which, needless to say, are an entirely different story — bar-hopping in the Old First Ward and The Valley is like taking a trip back in time to working-class Buffalo of old. These rough-and-tumble gin mills go way back — in fact, some of them (like the Swannie House) have been in business since the late 1800s, when the First Ward was home to Irish canal workers and grain scoopers.

The Triangle and South Park Avenue
South Park Avenue's lengthy roster of Irish (of course) pubs are not quite as gritty as the ones you'll find in the Old First Ward, but there's still plenty of opportunity to mingle with the locals in an environment that's utterly free of pretension.



Larkinville
Even more so than the Old First Ward, Larkinville is where to go in South Buffalo if you want to taste what local craft brewers, distillers, and cocktail artisans have to offer.



Sleep
South Buffalo doesn't have any hotel accommodations of its own, but there are ample options in nearby areas. Clustered near Exit 55 of the Thruway in West Seneca and around Exit 1 of Interstate 190 on the border between Cheektowaga and the East Side, you'll find a range of budget- and mid-priced chains — and of course, downtown you'll find a more upscale selection that tends toward quirky boutique hotels and luxury properties for business travelers. Also, if the Outer Harbor is on your agenda, there's a La Quinta located on Route 5 in Lackawanna, less than five minutes by car from the state park.

Connect
For postal service, head to the at 2061 South Park Ave., corner of Woodside Ave.

As in other neighborhoods in Buffalo, for those who need access to the Internet and don't have a usable smart phone or laptop of their own, a public library is the best bet. South Buffalo is represented in the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library System by the, at 2010 South Park Ave. at the southern edge of The Triangle. Not only do they offer free WiFi, but there are also twenty computer terminals available for public use, all with Internet access and printers. Also, though it's no longer affiliated with the county library system, the at 155 Cazenovia St. remains open as a community center with publicly accessible computers.

Stay safe
Despite the fact that Buffalo's crime rate has fallen steadily since the 1990s, it is still higher than the national average for cities its size. If you're passing through the Commodore Perry Projects on the northern edge of the Old First Ward, watch out: robberies, vehicle break-ins, and assaults happen here frequently. But these crimes aren't targeted at tourists, and tourists don't have much reason to be in that area anyway. Another hot spot is the northern half of The Triangle immediately west of Heacock Park (extending south to around Koester Street) and around the corner of McKinley Parkway and Tifft Street, an area where cars get broken into from time to time.

However, for the most part, South Buffalo is a quiet residential area that boasts among the lowest crime rates of any district in the city. This includes the bars on Seneca Street and South Park Avenue, which, while gritty and blue-collar, are almost never the scenes of drunken violence. Of course, as in any urban area, common sense pays — lock your car doors, keep your valuables out of sight, and so forth — but you have little to worry about in this part of town when it comes to crime.

The panhandlers that are becoming more and more of a nuisance in places like the Elmwood Village and Allentown are almost completely absent from South Buffalo.

Newspapers
In operation since 1920, the South Buffalo News is a weekly community paper that covers local news and high school sports for both South Buffalo and neighboring Lackawanna. Event listings, a police blotter, and Lackawanna City Council proceedings are also featured.

Larkinville
The Larkin Convenience Store, open weekdays 10AM-2PM in the atrium of the Larkin @ Exchange office building, offers dry cleaning services.

Places of worship
Not much religious diversity here: South Buffalo is the most monolithically Christian area of the city.

Roman Catholic
True to its own history in particular as well as the demographics of the Niagara Frontier as a whole, the Catholic Church remains a dominant force in South Buffalo's religious life.







Black churches
A few African-American congregations can be found in South Buffalo, principally near its northern border with the East Side.



Go next

 * Did the towering monoliths of Elevator Alley, or perhaps the historic exhibits at the Heritage Discovery Center, whet your appetite for more Western New York industrial history? Cross the city line into Lackawanna, once the site of the world's largest steel plant, where 20,000 workers (many from South Buffalo) once toiled. The plant closed in 1982, and Lackawanna has yet to truly get back on its feet, but there's still a surprising amount of vitality around the main intersection of South Park Avenue and Ridge Road, where a cluster of shops, bars and restaurants soldiers on. That same corner is where you'll find Lackawanna's main landmark: the gleaming white marble Basilica of Our Lady of Victory is a Baroque masterpiece built in 1926 under the direction of Father Nelson Baker, whose philanthropy earned Lackawanna the nickname "City of Charity" and put Baker himself on the road to sainthood.
 * Or maybe it's more Irish culture you're hungry for? If so, check out the Southtowns, whose changeover from rural farming communities to commuter suburbs started in the 1950s, as South Buffalo's "lace-curtain Irish" pushed further and further away from the First Ward and eventually past the city line, into...
 * Hamburg, which has a little something for everyone. In the Southtowns' largest town (population about 55,000), you'll find a diverse environment that runs the gamut from the scruffy blue-collar neighborhood of Blasdell in the far north, which doesn't look terribly dissimilar to South Buffalo, to the historic Village of Hamburg in the south with its quaint downtown full of cute shops, to sprawling waterfront mansions along Old Lake Shore Road. For the visitor, Hamburg boasts a wealth of attractions: beachcombers can laze by the shore of Lake Erie at Woodlawn Beach State Park, amateur paleontologists can dig for 300-million-year-old fossils at the Penn Dixie Center, and at the end of the summer, you can join over a million Western New Yorkers at the twelve-day-long Erie County Fair. And if your money is burning a hole in your pocket, why not splurge on a day of shopping at the McKinley Mall or try your luck on the horses at the Buffalo Raceway?
 * Orchard Park, which is more than just the home of the Buffalo Bills' New Era Field. First settled by Quakers in 1804, this upscale outer-ring suburb boasts a handsome village center full of cute little boutiques, elegant restaurants, and historic character. Also in Orchard Park is Chestnut Ridge Park, a twelve-month-a-year destination for outdoor lovers: over 1,200 acres (490 hectares) of forested hills with disc golf, verdant nature trails, one of Western New York's most popular sledding and tobogganing hills, and an eternal flame hidden behind a low waterfall.
 * West Seneca, which before the South Buffalo Irish arrived was solidly German — in the 1840s and '50s, it was home to the Ebenezer Society, a reclusive sect of renegade Lutherans from Hesse who came here seeking a place far removed from the evils of the outside world. You can learn about them at the West Seneca Historical Society, located in an original Ebenezer home built about 1848. The Ebenezers are long gone, and the town is a lot more crowded now than it was 150 years ago, but you can still "get away from it all" in West Seneca: the Charles E. Burchfield Nature & Art Center is a patch of woods along the shore of Buffalo Creek that was an inspiration for its namesake, once one of the premier watercolor painters in the United States.


 * When the once-poor First Ward Irish began to enter the halls of power, their new leaders found themselves with cushy jobs downtown. Then as now, the business district is the nerve center of Buffalo, thanks in no small part to the radiating street pattern designed by Joseph Ellicott and centered on Niagara Square, where stands City Hall, that paragon of Art Deco architecture. If those 19th-century Irishmen were here today, they probably wouldn't recognize Canalside at all: instead of railroad tracks, lake freighters, warehouses, and docks, today it's a waterfront green space where you can take in a crowded calendar of festivals and events, tour World War II-era warships at the Naval and Military Park, and catch an exciting hockey game at the KeyBank. Downtown also boasts a vibrant Theater District, the Chippewa Street entertainment district, and, at its northern edge, the hospitals and research facilities of the Medical Corridor, where the UB Medical School has set up shop.