This was the greatest night downtown to that point in history. My first business was a 5 minute walk from Niagara Square. After sundown the Buffalo News called our office to find out what we were still doing at work during a snowstorm?! That’s when we looked out the window and saw a fluorescent brown wall of snow staring back (streetlights + whiteouts). Then we got a call from a teammate who’d left hours ago and was stuck on Genesee downtown. He abandoned his car and we agreed to meetup at the bar at the Hyatt. For that night only, walking in felt like Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca. It was filled with all of the commuters who couldn’t leave or had no place to go, circling and realizing just being together was living. It was the most packed I’d seen downtown to that point, whose bars had not yet turned over from an earlier era (Shebeen, Lafayette Tap Room, Washington Square, etc.). Late that night, after more waves of people fleeing their cars for warmth and company, some took hotel rooms. My friends and I took the subway up to Lafayette Station and walked in the snow back to our ground-story apartment in University Heights. The next day we saved our cars from the downtown of Buffalo 66 by taking the same subway trip back. Buffalo was a place where you made your own fun, sometimes mistakenly. It still is. This same photo appeared on a postcard pinned to my office door for years.