Drat! Missed a Quasquicentennial again!

Go on. YOU try finding a “belated“ card for one of those. 

I was actually only today years old when I found out that’s what the term was for a 125th anniversary. I’m old enough to have gotten “bicentennial“ burned into my brain in 1976, and both Buffalo and Rochester celebrated their "sesquicentennial" 150th anniversaries in the early 80s. I’ll return to that Odd Couple in a moment, but 1898, hundreds of miles away from both of them, was also a significant date. For that is the year that two adjacent cities, then both among the largest in this nation and each with its own long and proud history and institutions, joined with numerous towns in three adjacent counties to form what became initially known as “Greater New York.“ Over those years, it has gradually become known as just “New York City.“ But please, not “THE City.” That has somehow remained in the lexicon only to refer to Manhattan, as even residents of Queens and Da Bronnix will refer to “going to the City“ as being exactly the same as the bridge and tunnel kids from Merrick and Mahwah do.

The City of Brooklyn gave up most of the trappings of municipality provided by Albany, as did dozens of towns and villages in the places now known as the boroughs of Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. It required legislative approval from up the river, as well as votes in all five of the soon to be constituents. Only the roughly western half of Queens became part of the amalgamation, as its three eastern towns, morphing into my birthplace of Nassau County, were split off before the big event.
 
The usual suspects at Wikipedia have a decent summary of the constituent jurisdictions, and of how each voted on the consolidation. It is striking how few voters actually sealed the modern day fate of New York City. Maybe not so surprising, because this was before the 19th Suffrage Amendment in 1920, so only men were deciding. Manhattan and Queens were firmly in favor, Brooklyn with the most to lose passed it by only a handful of votes, but most surprising to me was that Staten Island, literally and politically the most outlying of the five, was also strongly in favor back then. That borough is the source of crank secession bills introduced in Albany in recent years. They will never pass, unless they somehow get the vampires on board.

There remained, and to some extent still remain, rivalries among the boroughs, especially between the two former cities linked by the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.  As recently as the 1970s, every episode of Welcome Back Kotter, set in Kings County, started off with an image of this completely incorrect sign on the Verrazano Bridge leading into the borough:



Until 1957, the Dodgers of Flatbush and Giants of Upper Manhattan had the fiercest crosstown rivalry in the city's sports, mostly taking it with them thousands of miles away and hundreds of miles apart to the West Coast. Today's NBA Knicks and Nets capture a little of that. Despite those petty differences, though, Greater New York was made greater by the merger. They share a mass transit system, a diverse tax base that keeps the ship of city afloat when one sector declines while the other grows, and their collective loves of culture and welcoming of immigrants that would do well to be modeled elsewhere in the state and nation.

What makes me think of all this is those other two cities that really ARE big cities in the state- Buffalo and Rochester- coming up on their bicentennials in the 2030s.  I've lived and worked in both for good segments of the past 44 years, more than two thirds of my life, and while a Greater Western New York is the pipiest of pipe dreams in a legal sense, there is so little untapped  commonality between the communities except when there is. Wegmans and the Bills are perhaps the biggest uniters, but everything else implies an invisible but impenetrable Batavia Wall somewhere around Exit 48 on the 90.

Today I am in the Rochester end of things, and tonight begins the 21st annual Rochester International Jazz Festival. More than Just Jazz, it features blues, rock and soul performers of national and international note. Taj Mahal kicks off the headliners at the Eastman Theatre tonight. The latter half of Hall and Oates is there next Thursday. Laufey must be one the kids are listening to; she's sold out the joint next Wednesday night. Dozens of other venues offer smaller rooms and prices, and outdoor stages are free throughout.

If I asked 100 people in Buffalo about it, at and around the clubs I regularly visit? Maybe three would know what I was talking about. Nobody there has heard of Danielle Ponder, either.  Meanwhile, if I mentioned Sportsmens to a friend in Rochester, with perhaps three exceptions they'd think it was a sports bar. 

I'm starting to see some crossover. A sax playing friend who fronts a  Buffalo band has played the Lilac Festival and is booked next week at my favorite small club in downtown Rochester, sadly too small now to be a Jazz Fest venue. Lake Street Dive played Abilene on their first RIJF stop years ago; I saw them years later when they headlined at the Eastman Theatre.  Our poet friend Danielle (another one) is now fronting her own five-piece ensemble, and she's been asking about the Rochester scene to fill their dance-and-sing card on nights they can't find booking in Buffalo; I recommended Abilene to her, as well.  Dave Miller from Buffalo is opening next week at a free outdoor Jazz Fest show. He's got the idea.

Hopefully, as the cores of these cities get older and smaller, there will be more thought about how they could come together. There's much resistance from the old guards in both; they've kept the media markets separate for my entire time here, as each has shrunk out of national relevance but, if ever combined, would rocket back into the top 20 markets in the nation. It'll never happen, though; corporate America has divided us and they will remain that way. Likewise, if both cities' fathers (as they then all were) had years ago settled on a sports complex midway between the downtowns, we would have not only the Bills and Sabres but NBA would never have left, MLB would be strong, and major league soccer would have landed as well. Another nope from the separate civic pride-sters. We'd also be a much more major force in state government than just being considered part of the "gingham dress and Sears Roebuck suit"  crowd "Upstate." It took a massive scandal to get a Buffalonian into the Governor's Mansion for the first time in close to a century, and nobody from anywhere near here will ever catch that lightning in a bottle again as long as the West of New York Divided still stands.