10/15 – 10/17/19
10/15
After briefly getting lost among smokestacks and derelict factories, I found the entrance to Niagara Falls State Park, paid a mercenary fee to park in the empty lot, and reached the American Falls shortly after dawn. I had never seen the falls before; and those first few moments were magical: the thunder, the spray, the rainbows.
I spent the next hour walking around Niagara Falls State Park. Probably the most impressive moments were those I spent on the brink of the mighty Horseshoe Falls, where I managed to get soaked by water droplets falling from the plume of spray.
Having secured a spray-free picture of the rainbow over the Horseshoe Falls and walked along the rapids, I returned to the now-full parking lot and drove south to Buffalo, where I planned to spend the next six or seven hours cycling.
Parking in LaSalle Park (a half-mile or so from downtown), I rode south along the lakefront, and then followed the Buffalo River through a faded industrial district dominated by colossal grain elevators, nearly all long-abandoned.
I then rattled over a couple miles of potholed streets to Buffalo Central Terminal, a building I have wanted to see for years. The complex – formerly Buffalo’s main train station – was completed in 1929. Architecturally, it was a masterpiece of high Art Deco (always one of my favorite styles). It was equally impressive logistically, being equipped to handle up to 10,000 daily passengers. Unfortunately, actual traffic never approached this level, and the station was a white elephant within a few decades. It closed in 1979, and has remained shuttered since. Although a local preservation group has managed to secure and stabilize the central concourse, most of the complex has been left to rot for 40 years.
I walked my bike up an overgrown gravel road between the battered terminal and ruinous platforms, pausing occasionally for pictures. The massive silence of the buildings reminded me of Michigan Central Station in Detroit – and, more generally, of the ruined ancient cities I’ve spent so much time exploring.
After circling the terminal and visiting a few other abandoned buildings in the vicinity, I proceeded to the Anchor Bar, birthplace of the buffalo wing (I ordered beef on weck). Then I cycled north to Forest Lawn cemetery, home (among other luminaries) to Rick “Super Freak” James and Millard “wiggity Whig” Fillmore. As those of you who have read this far know, I have something of an obsession with the tombs of obscure figures from American history. I needed to find the tomb of Fillmore. Obscure even in his own lifetime, Fillmore proved elusive in death; it took me nearly a half-hour to track down his modest granite obelisk.
Once I’d had my fill of Fillmore, I headed into downtown Buffalo to gawk at the towering art deco City Hall and Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building. Then, back to my car, and westward.
10/16
I awoke to rain rattling against my motel window, and drove down desolate Euclid Avenue through a wind-whipped monsoon. Since the bike ride I had planned was out of the question, I decided to start the day by re-visiting Cleveland’s Lakeview Cemetery. In the Wade Chapel – a turn-of-the-century building splendidly decorated by the workshop of Louis Comfort Tiffany – I spent nearly an hour listening to the attendant, who (for lack of anyone else to talk to) outlined every aspect of the intricate decorative program. Then, after stopping into the musty memorial around the tomb of James Garfield, I drove into downtown.
Parking in a rather seedy lot (a homeless man was slumped next to the entrance), I made a brief, brisk circuit of Cleveland’s architectural highlights. My favorite was the Arcade, a late nineteenth-century shopping mall with more decorative cast iron than you could shake a stick at.
I stopped for a fried perch sandwich in Sandusky, where I watched whitecaps roll over gray Lake Erie. As I continued westward along the lakeshore, I noticed the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant in the distance. I realized, suddenly, that I had been here before – in April 2003, when I was a sophomore in high school, my father and I had stayed in a leaky trailer beneath those towers during an ill-starred fishing trip. On an impulse, I turned down the road toward Beef Creek Marina – and there it was, it all its unloveliness. I opened a window to the wind and drizzle for a picture of the marina, with the cooling towers hovering in the background. Then, I followed a series of two-lane road through the soggy countryside of northwest Ohio, and onto the familiar concrete of I-75 toward Detroit.
I hadn’t visited Detroit – or for that matter, any part of southeast Michigan – since May of last year, when my teaching appointment at Wayne State ended. Returning to the city had that half-sweet, half-awkward feel of coming back to a familiar place after a long absence – recognition, but a sense that you’ve both somehow moved on. That was certainly the case in and around downtown Detroit, where development has raced ahead over the past year and a half. I had planned to take a nostalgic bike ride through the city; but since it was raining again (and time was short), I contented myself with a visit to the massive John K. King bookstore and a short drive down some of my favorite streets.
Once I escaped the rush hour traffic on 94, I made my way to Lakeport State Park, about ten miles north of Port Huron. After going about the unpleasant process of setting up my tent in wind-driven rain, I drove back to Port Huron for some excellent fried chicken in the shadow of the bridge to Canada. Reluctantly returning to the campsite, I made hot chocolate on my propane stove, cleared out the passenger seat, and read as the whistling wind rocked my car.
10/17
The wind rattled my tent all night, snapping one of my rain fly’s two guy ropes. After experiencing the unpleasant novelty of having my tent blow away while I was trying to take it down, I got the hell out of Port Huron, and headed westward toward Flint.
Despite living less than an hour away for the better part of a decade, I had never visited Flint. So I stopped there for a couple hours, taking pictures of downtown’s impressive collection of art deco buildings and the deceptively tranquil Flint River. At the end of my visit, I drove to the site of Buick City – once a colossal GM facility, now a sapling-studded slab of concrete.
After a pleasant lunch in Grand Rapids with one of my former professors from the University of Michigan, I continued along the lakeshore, pausing briefly in Benton Harbor to see a now-abandoned hotel constructed by the House of David, a curious religious commune that flourished in the early twentieth century.
I only had a few hours left before I had to return my rental car. But I exited the already-jammed Borman Expressway for a final stop at Marquette Park Beach, just east of Gary. I usually go there in the winter, when ice piles photogenically along the shore. I stopped now in the interests of symmetry: the final day of a road trip around the Great Lakes, I figured, required at least one good look at a Great Lake. The weather was sunny, if a bit breezy. Down the shore on either side, smoke streamed inland from the chimneys of distant steel mills. Ahead, over the wave-streaked lake, hovered the familiar Chicago skyline. It had been, I reflected, an excellent trip. But it was time to go home.