Niagara Falls Airport: Changing With the World

by Jamie Moses

The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority’s aggressive plan to build a new, $23 million facility at the Niagara Falls International Airport is without a doubt one of the most significant developments in the region. This underutilized and underdeveloped airport has the potential to create hundreds of jobs and have an economic impact of billions of dollars. Since it was opened in 1928, and later purchased by the NFTA from the City of Niagara Falls for $2 million in 1970, the airport has been all but invisible.

Higgins Calls for More Parkland

by Caroline Phelan

US Representative Brian M. Higgins has lobbied the Coast Guard to turn over 20 acres of its waterfront property for a public park, complementing the recently released master plan for waterfront redevelopment. If the Coast Guard agrees, the area of land to be redeveloped will practically double. We asked a few people what they thought about the prospect of more parkland on Buffalo’s waterfront.

by Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): It would be a great time to launch several new ventures all at once, even if it means abandoning an old project you’ve been working on for months. APRIL FOOL! Don’t you dare do what I just suggested. The future won’t thrive unless you lavish the past with the gift of your careful attention. Please please please put the finishing touches on a labor of love you’ve been working on for months—and then start new projects.

Don’t think readers haven’t noticed your right-ward drift over the past year. You’re bound to lose your core audience—try selling advertisement then.

by Chuck Shepherd

■ Because perhaps hundreds of Japanese Yakuza gangsters are nearing retirement age, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has drafted rules for the former gambling, loan shark and protection workers to qualify for benefits, according to a March dispatch from Tokyo in The Times of London. Since organized crime leaves no employment paper trail, ex-mobsters must supply a letter of retirement from their crime boss in order to sign up, although local governments are expected to accept as partial proof gang tattoos, criminal records and demonstrations of missing fingertips (the sign of traditional Yakuza punishment for mistakes).

Barry E. Snyder Goes Showbiz

by Bruce Jackson

Seneca Gaming Corporation chairman Barry E. Snyder Sr. threw a hissy fit last week because some members of the Buffalo Common Council wanted him to put in writing his promise that the Senecas have no intention of acquiring any more Buffalo land that would become exempt from property, sales, school, occupancy and other taxes.

Prime Time at Marinaccio's

by Arthur Page

If Clara Peller were alive and well and living in Buffalo today, she surely would be confused by all of the choices confronting her in response to her classic question: “Where’s the beef?”

Gerald Mead

by Cynnie Gaasch

Why you should know who he is: Mead left his position as a curator at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center about one year ago to focus on his own artwork and related projects. You see his name everywhere, exhibiting work, leading workshops—giving lectures, judging exhibits, teaching students through Young Audiences programs and showing exhibits of his collection of other artists’ work. After nearly 20 years at the Burchfield-Penney, he had achieved most of his arts professional goals there, including organizing more than 100 exhibits, including a Cindy Sherman retrospective and a survey of Milton Rogovin’s work, as well as exhibits that traveled across the country. He continues to serve as a lecturer in design at Buffalo State College. He also teaches at Chautauqua Institution. Mead is a leader in more ways than one, providing young artists and professionals with guidance and support and connecting people and organizations. He always keeps the big picture in mind: Buffalo’s artistic history and future.

Blossom Cohan

by Anthony Chase

The death of Blossom Cohan on Wednesday, March 22, 2006 marks the undeniable end of an era in Buffalo theater. Born Blossom Felder in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on February 6, 1922, Blossom first aspired to become an actress, but would earn her greatest success and the enduring adoration of an entire community working behind the scenes as the publicist for Studio Arena Theatre.

Totally Joe, by James Howe

by Jim Corbran

I was just about to say “I don’t know why I’m reviewing a kids’ book,” but that would be a lie. Being the father of two young teenagers, I’ve read plenty of kids’ lit over the years. Lately, now that they’re 13 and 15 and don’t need to be read to anymore, I find myself picking up these books and reading them on my own. And enjoying them.

The Coming NHL Skirmish

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

You think we had labor peace and that all was well? Well, maybe so, but a new battle is quietly brewing on the NHL labor front, and it all has to do with setting salary cap parameters under the new collective bargaining agreement.

Wagon Train

by Jim Corbran

In this day of SUVs, minivans, crossovers and a bunch of other made-up names, the lowly station wagon seems to have been forgotten. I bet that many of you reading this have memories of riding in the back of one (perhaps similar to the 1963 Mercury pictured on this page)—without seatbelts, even. Yikes! It seems like years ago every manufacturer had a station wagon version of each model they produced.

Cohen's Chain Connections

by Joanna Raczynska

For more than 25 years filmmaker Jem Cohen has been creating highly personal portraits of renegade musicians and evocative, history-laden places. He first visited Hallwalls in the mid-1980s to screen two shorts as part of a group show: the first a city symphony film called “This Is the History of New York,” the second what he terms “a kind of ethnographic document” of the Butthole Surfers. From the beginning of his practice until today, Cohen has consciously made work almost entirely on his own, utilizing the DIY politics that he shared with his friends growing up in our nation’s capital. “When punk rock hit DC in the late ’70s, that became the template for me as a filmmaker,” he says. “Super8 was my punk rock, my way of finding a means in which to work outside of the system” of traditional, profit-motivated filmmaking.

Chris Squier

You might like my music if you like… Folk rock with an Americana edge. Counting Crows, Stephen Stills and CSN, the Wallflowers. I guess, being from Jersey, there’s a bit of Springsteen in there as well. I love his acoustic stuff.