Flowers of Buffalo: East Side Garden Walk Brochure
The East Side Garden Walk brochure strikes me as a rich primary source on cultural politics, nonprofit orientation, and community power in Buffalo. I’m a historian, so I imagine this brochure being useful to a young scholar in 2050, when she’s trying to understand how the Buffalo Renaissance of the early 2000s transitioned into the re-urbanization of the city.
As contemporaneous observers, we’re, of course, too close to the changes to perceive them clearly, but a document like the East Side Garden Walk brochure suggests themes to me that I would recommend to a future historian, based on my understanding of what’s happening in the town right now. Here’s a rough draft for that history.
Cultural Politics
The Garden Walk originated down the block from where I live on Norwood; that’s the west side. It’s a powerful gesture of collaboration and solidarity for the Garden Walk Buffalo organizers to co-create this branch, on a regional scale. This large garden event strengthens even as it fragments the garden walk’s citywide consensus. The East Side Garden Walk is the opening act; Garden Walk Buffalo is headlining – and, look at the map, the East Side is lit. Next week’s flower festival has even more gardens!
Nonprofit Orientation
This mitosis of Garden Walk Buffalo suggests nonprofits have found a sweet spot for attracting charitable donations by incorporating community members’ voices into decision-making and even facilitating their vision with the nonprofit’s resources. This is how it’s supposed to look, and it seems to be working well, recruiting key sponsors for community gardens, urban farms, and beautification projects for the East Side. This is homegrown, local development by people who live where they work the soil. The strategy: create bridges and pipelines for the two-way flow of information, expertise, and other resources across Main Street.
Community Power
The East Side Garden Walk brochure showcases how a community’s members can affect power through collaboration and strategic branding. The organizers, ever so subtly, announced to the Buffalo Metropolitan Area that they identify as the East Side (not East Buffalo). Even more monumentally, they mapped the East Side and dotted it with gardens – these dots are quite literally the East Side’s grassroots. Perhaps most significantly, the organizers who documented and mapped the East Side’s gardens recruited allies to amplify this regional self-definition and identification. Local newspapers, for example, frequently write about ‘East Buffalo,’ but when they report on the East Side Garden Walk - and they must report because this is a big-money, Gardens Buffalo Niagara event – these local media must recognize the East Side in print. That’s how the community shows its power. Today is a win for the East Side.
