A Buffalo Tradition

This past weekend was the 50th annual Allentown Art Festival. Allentown is the area of Buffalo that's not quite downtown but has a lot of great little shops, restaurants, and houses. It's a sort of neighborhood enclave that has elements of the city without being too urban. Always a good venue for people watching, this festival takes up several blocks of main streets of Buffalo and boasts a wide variety of different artworks and fried foods. I will admit that a lot of the Allentown art is crap: Handmade jewelry, chintzy watercolors, overly cheerful magnets, statues made out of old metal and spoons.... Granted, the festival does have some true artisans, and I always find something interesting to buy for someone's Christmas or birthday present. I admit I think the real fun this year was walking around hand in hand with DH, looking at things we might want for a future house (to be discussed in a future post). While right now we can't buy any more art without it looking like an art gallery with our few walls, it's nice to know we'll have a house one day to spread out a bit and finally put everything away!

But anyway, Allentown's a great way to walk around and see all elements of Buffalo, good and bad. This year the weather was great and once again, I managed to support a few really hardworking artists. My only beef is that for some reason they don't allow local merchants to sell their wares outside their stores at Allentown; the Allentown Village Society doesn't allow it for some reason. This bugs me; why can't local people benefit, thus opening the suburbanites' eyes to what's just a few miles away, thus improving the economy for the entire city? It's what they do at the Taste of Buffalo, another festival that qualifies as a gastronomical wonderland. But I'll jump off my soapbox and stop boring my readers.

Enjoy your day!

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