Current Time in Buffalo, United States

Buffalo lies at the eastern end of Lake Erie in western New York State, at the head of the Niagara River and directly across the water from Canada. With around two hundred and seventy-five thousand residents it is the second largest city in New York State and the centre of a metropolitan area of well over a million people. Niagara Falls is half an hour away, and the international bridge to Ontario begins in the city itself.

Buffalo's rise was spectacular. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made it the point where grain and goods from the Great Lakes transferred to canal boats bound for New York City, and the world's first steam-powered grain elevator was invented here in 1842 to speed the process. Milling, steel, railways and shipping followed, and by 1900 Buffalo was one of the wealthiest cities in America. Cheap hydroelectric power from Niagara earned it the nickname the City of Light, celebrated at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, an event remembered also for the assassination of President William McKinley and the swearing in of Theodore Roosevelt at a friend's house in the city, now a national historic site.

That prosperity left an architectural legacy of national importance. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Darwin D. Martin House complex here, one of his finest Prairie houses, and the Graycliff estate on the lake shore; Louis Sullivan built the ornate Guaranty Building; H. H. Richardson designed the immense Romanesque complex now known as the Richardson Olmsted Campus; and Frederick Law Olmsted laid out a connected system of parks and parkways that is among the earliest in the country. The Art Deco City Hall of 1931 dominates the skyline.

Culture is unusually strong for the city's size. The Buffalo AKG Art Museum holds a superb collection of modern and contemporary art in a recently expanded campus, the Buffalo Philharmonic performs at Kleinhans Music Hall, a Saarinen design, and Shea's Performing Arts Center is a restored 1920s movie palace. Canalside on the redeveloped waterfront hosts concerts and skating, and the city is famous for its food, above all chicken wings, invented at a Buffalo bar in 1964, beef on weck sandwiches and sponge candy. Devotion to the Bills in American football and the Sabres in ice hockey borders on the religious, and lake-effect snowstorms are a civic identity in themselves.

The economy today rests on health care, education, insurance, advanced manufacturing and cross-border trade. The University at Buffalo is the largest campus in the State University of New York system, and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, anchored by one of the oldest cancer research institutes in the world, has transformed the downtown. Resettlement of refugees from Burma, Somalia, Bhutan and Ukraine has revitalised whole neighbourhoods.

Historic, affordable and increasingly confident, Buffalo is one of America's most underrated cities.