Why This Iowan Loves Buffalo’s East Side

One September day in 1992, I was awakened to the sound of my mother banging on my bedroom door. “Get up. It’s time for school,” she said.

I could barely believe what I was hearing. “School? On a SATURDAY?” I grumbled. It was a nine-year-old’s worst nightmare.

“I’ve signed you up for Polish Saturday School,” she announced grandly. “Haven’t you always wanted to learn Polish?”

I thought about this for a moment. From the time I was a toddler I’d been asking my two grandmothers to teach me Polish words – pies, kot, kolczyki. The thought of learning their language did seem exciting. But it also seemed a lot harder than watching all my favorite Saturday morning cartoons.

“Just try it,” she said. “If you don’t like it, you can always quit.” Grumbling, I dragged myself out of bed, got dressed, and followed her out to the car. She drove me from our home in Cheektowaga to a neighborhood just a few miles away, to a church that my parents proudly told me had been founded by my great-great uncle. I entered the church basement, shook the hand of a friendly white-haired teacher, and joined a small class of students who, like me, were studying Polish as a foreign language.

For the next four years, I spent every Saturday morning in the basement of St. Stanislaus Church, conjugating verbs and declining nouns, memorizing poems to perform at the annual Christmas and Easter celebrations, and studying the thousand-year history of the country my ancestors had come from. I learned about Wladyslaw Jagiello and Jadwiga, the royal couple who ruled a medieval empire. I learned about the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. I learned about the Solidarity Movement. And, for me, all of this learning was inextricably linked with the neighborhood where these classes were held. I heard the adults’ murmurs about the Broadway-Fillmore area – that it was dangerous, decaying, crime-ridden. But that simply was not how the area looked to me. Every week as we drove past its bars, its clothing stores, its Broadway Market, I felt completely safe and at home.

But, that was not how the adults saw it. Soon, the Polish Saturday School was moved from St. Stanislaus to St. John Gualbert in Cheektowaga. I finished high school and went away to college, and every time I came back, the neighborhood seemed even poorer and more stigmatized. After college I spent some years living overseas and admittedly lost touch with Buffalo. But then, in 2008, two things happened.

First, after several years of informally attending St. Stanislaus, my parents decided to sign up as parishioners. Then, I moved to Canada to begin a PhD at University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. Once I got settled in Toronto, I began to visit Buffalo about once each month. And, when I returned to the East Side for Easter in 2009, I could not believe what I saw: throngs of people from all over the city converging on the East Side for the Dyngus Day Parade. Something exciting was happening. In the years that have followed, it has become clear that this neighborhood is absolutely teeming with new life.

However, the East Side continues to need help and support. It is not enough for Western New Yorkers to converge on the area at Easter time. The Broadway Market and historic Polish churches will only continue to exist if we support them all year round. Meanwhile, we must realize that the East Side that is emerging will inevitably be different from anything that it has been before. To my fellow Polish-Americans (especially my elders), I’d like to urge you to recognize that the Broadway-Fillmore is a dynamic and increasingly diverse community. In order to revive the neighborhood, a spirit of openness and an appreciation of pluralism are crucial.

So many exciting things are happening throughout Buffalo, and I cannot tell you how much I yearn to be a part of the change that is occurring. I know that at this point some of you ar surely raising an eyebrow. What business does an Iowan have writing for a blog about a community that she only visits five times a year? What good can possibly be done from so far away?

To those skeptics, I’d dare to say that we live in a rapidly changing world where community and community-building have taken on new meanings. The Internet instantly lets us know what is happening around the globe; it allows us to share stories with people all over the world. While technology is never a substitute for hands-on, face-to-face communication, it allows us to extend our sense of place, to hold multiple identities without contradiction.

I must admit that I chuckle when I hear my parents’ generation identify with the street they were born on. “I’m from Randolph Street,” or “I’m from Sweet Avenue,” or “I’m from Paderewski.” I have lived on many different streets; at times I’ve felt perfectly at home in foreign lands. Now, after ten years of living abroad, I feel like a foreigner in my own country. But what I have learned is that, from Krakow to Managua, Toronto to Montevideo, most places have certain points of intersection. The East Side of Buffalo – with its roots and initial development, its neglect and decay, its years of subjection to stigma, racism and marginalization, and its current efforts toward renewal – shares much in common with communities across North America and indeed the world.

And so, in a preemptive response to any questions about what business an Iowan has commenting on the East Side, I have only one thing to say: if someone who lives 700 miles away cares this much…it is all the more reason why those of you who live in Western New York should care even more.