Outside Erie

The six-word motto concept is spreading.
I received a note this morning from Alan Bedenko, author of Buffalo Pundit, saying his blog is now asking readers for six-word slogans for our sister Lake Erie city.
Some early nominees:
Buffalo: home of the shrinking rennaissance
Buffalo: better than toledo, detroit, and erie
Buffalo: come see the erie canal or something
Wings, beer, […]

Jim Russell over at Burgh Diaspora has been spending a lot of time lately asking some important questions about the potential value of setting up formal partnerships between Rust Belt communities that would help further economic growth throughout the region.
Like we have here at GlobalErie, Russell has long seen value in tapping into expatriates who […]

The calls for an organized effort to bring together thinkers in Erie and other Rust Belt enclaves such as Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Buffalo is on.
And Erie looks like the central place for having that discussion.
As I’ve stated earlier, GlobalErie would love to play a key role in making this effort happen and in helping […]

An idea is getting thrown around by Janko, the blogger behind i will shout youngstown, to play host to a regional gathering of Rust Belt bloggers in Erie.

The idea is to get together thinkers in cities like Youngstown, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Erie, and Buffalo to talk about ways to discuss strategies to help each of these […]

Take a look at this statement:
“There is more that ails us than 45 separate governments inside one county. Our problems go beyond an overlapping collection of politicians, police departments, school districts and highway crews. We suffer from worse than a half-dozen competing development agencies shuffling pieces on the same chessboard.”
Sound familiar?
It certainly does. But the […]

Reader Dale Hannah has prompted an interesting discussion by suggesting that Erie needs business leaders like Jim Berlin to step in to change the culture of local government.
It’s an argument that makes sense in many ways. If someone has been successful in business, he or she can certainly figure out how to run an entity […]

We’ve spent a lot of time this week talking about the community college, Halloween, and Fuhrman’s cider.
So I thought (for the sake of variety) that we’d single out a missive on another topic as this week’s top comment.
Here it is, from Nathan K., who suggests that Erie should stop lumping itself in with Rust Belt […]

Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, recently offered this interesting look at the gradual decline of Buffalo, N.Y.’s, economy in the New York Sun.
The parallels between the Buffalo Glaeser describes in his essay and the Erie we all know and love are easy to draw.
Erie, after all, has followed a similar […]

I’ve watched two football games over the past few days that simply defied reality.
In the first, Stanford University – 41-point underdog – went on the road to play the University of Southern California.
Nobody expected Stanford to win. They were nothing more than a sacrificial lamb for the home team – an appetizer that was expected […]

In honor of my beloved Buffalo Bills appearance last night on Monday Night Football, I wanted to point to a story I saw recently about Buffalo expatriates gathering regularly to cheer on the Bills and Sabres — in Baltimore, Md.
There at a bar called Fletcher’s, Buffalonians on “every occasion the Buffalo Sabres and Bills […]