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captainsblogI've waxed rhapsodic in the past week or so about our twenty years living here, and the foliage we've planted here and at our last home. Today's paper reminded me, however, that not all of my old-school digs were sunshine and lollypops.... street names notwithstanding.
I've also mentioned before that my first Buffalo apartment was, to say the least, interesting. I leased a room in a three-bedroom townhouse from a guy who was, at the time, the oldest PhD student in UB's history. Separated from his wife (who lived three blocks away) who loved him but couldn't stand living with him, he rented the third room to a couple of Korean students who put a kimchi pot on the kitchen counter right below my bedroom. (To this day I'm somewhat suspect of the smell of cole slaw;)
Jake lost his lease in the dead of winter, one of the coldest in Buffalo history, and I had to move in a hurry. I knew some upperclassmen who had a spare room in an upper unit a few miles away.
On Sunshine Drive.
It was still in the Town of Amherst (although at the time it had a North Tonawanda zip code), but I later learned that it was a neighborhood not-so-fondly known as Looney Acres.
I was never quite clear if it had gotten this moniker for a former owner of the tract or if it was more descriptive. Certainly it's acquired at least the latter cachet over the years:
Around the time I moved there, a demographic researcher put out some early stats on targeted marketing to zip codes, explained in a 2006 article thusly:
In PRIZM NE, each ZIP Code is assigned one or several of sixty-six clusters, based on the shared socioeconomic characteristics of the area. The clusters each have snappy names and short one-line descriptions encompassing the key demographic for the cluster. These clusters "range" from #1 Upper Crust, the elite multi-millionaires at the top of the nation's economic hierarchy, to #66 Low-Rise Living, the poorest of the poor. A listing and description of the 66 clusters can be found online.
The PRIZM designation for that part of Amherst was, and likely still is, "shotguns and pickups," as was clear from a ride down the street. Our landlady was also of the less-sophisticate set; she wouldn't take my first month's rent check, drawn on an Ithaca branch of a statewide bank (I'd never closed the account because every local branch treated me as local), so I had to close it and open an identical one in Amherst. Her husband was a yeller, if not worse, and I suspect that it would have been worse if there hadn't been three law students living upstairs. For the first month there, I had no car (my '71 Maverick from Cornell senior year finally died of frostbite and old age in the previous place's car park), so anytime the boys had a different class schedule than mine, I had to shlep through a muddy field to Niagara Falls Boulevard to get a bus to the wrong campus and then shuttle to the right one. (Uphill both ways.)
Those were three of the longest months of my life, especially with a rough first-year semester on top of it. By May, I'd moved in with a classmate in my own year, had wheels, and generally survived the rest of it, but despite being mere miles from this home, Sunshine has never rested on my shoulders or in my brain in any way.
Until today.
----
Looney Acres made the paper, and not for any Garden Club awards:
The Erie County Sheriff’s Bomb Squad and agents from the federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unit took a “suspicious package” found by a man on Sunshine Drive in Amherst to examine it as a precautionary measure.
Amherst Police Lt. Bruce Mann said a man who lives in the 100 block of Sunshine Drive off Sweet Home Road noticed the package in the roadway near Sweet Home and took the closed package home with him. Worrying about its possible contents the man called Amherst police at about 6:30 P.M. Thursday.
I haven't seen the update on that disclosing the actual contents, but I did speculate, given what I know of the place, that the package most likely contained a case of cheap beer and a couple of truck nuts.
I've also mentioned before that my first Buffalo apartment was, to say the least, interesting. I leased a room in a three-bedroom townhouse from a guy who was, at the time, the oldest PhD student in UB's history. Separated from his wife (who lived three blocks away) who loved him but couldn't stand living with him, he rented the third room to a couple of Korean students who put a kimchi pot on the kitchen counter right below my bedroom. (To this day I'm somewhat suspect of the smell of cole slaw;)
Jake lost his lease in the dead of winter, one of the coldest in Buffalo history, and I had to move in a hurry. I knew some upperclassmen who had a spare room in an upper unit a few miles away.
On Sunshine Drive.
It was still in the Town of Amherst (although at the time it had a North Tonawanda zip code), but I later learned that it was a neighborhood not-so-fondly known as Looney Acres.
I was never quite clear if it had gotten this moniker for a former owner of the tract or if it was more descriptive. Certainly it's acquired at least the latter cachet over the years:
Around the time I moved there, a demographic researcher put out some early stats on targeted marketing to zip codes, explained in a 2006 article thusly:
In PRIZM NE, each ZIP Code is assigned one or several of sixty-six clusters, based on the shared socioeconomic characteristics of the area. The clusters each have snappy names and short one-line descriptions encompassing the key demographic for the cluster. These clusters "range" from #1 Upper Crust, the elite multi-millionaires at the top of the nation's economic hierarchy, to #66 Low-Rise Living, the poorest of the poor. A listing and description of the 66 clusters can be found online.
The PRIZM designation for that part of Amherst was, and likely still is, "shotguns and pickups," as was clear from a ride down the street. Our landlady was also of the less-sophisticate set; she wouldn't take my first month's rent check, drawn on an Ithaca branch of a statewide bank (I'd never closed the account because every local branch treated me as local), so I had to close it and open an identical one in Amherst. Her husband was a yeller, if not worse, and I suspect that it would have been worse if there hadn't been three law students living upstairs. For the first month there, I had no car (my '71 Maverick from Cornell senior year finally died of frostbite and old age in the previous place's car park), so anytime the boys had a different class schedule than mine, I had to shlep through a muddy field to Niagara Falls Boulevard to get a bus to the wrong campus and then shuttle to the right one. (Uphill both ways.)
Those were three of the longest months of my life, especially with a rough first-year semester on top of it. By May, I'd moved in with a classmate in my own year, had wheels, and generally survived the rest of it, but despite being mere miles from this home, Sunshine has never rested on my shoulders or in my brain in any way.
Until today.
----
Looney Acres made the paper, and not for any Garden Club awards:
The Erie County Sheriff’s Bomb Squad and agents from the federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unit took a “suspicious package” found by a man on Sunshine Drive in Amherst to examine it as a precautionary measure.
Amherst Police Lt. Bruce Mann said a man who lives in the 100 block of Sunshine Drive off Sweet Home Road noticed the package in the roadway near Sweet Home and took the closed package home with him. Worrying about its possible contents the man called Amherst police at about 6:30 P.M. Thursday.
I haven't seen the update on that disclosing the actual contents, but I did speculate, given what I know of the place, that the package most likely contained a case of cheap beer and a couple of truck nuts.