Buffalo is a working city on Lake Erie, 20 minutes from the Canadian border and 30 from Niagara Falls. Its heyday was the turn of the 20th century, when the opening of the Erie Canal made it the second-largest grain-shipping port in the world — and the wealth that flowed through built one of the best collections of early-20th-century American architecture you'll find anywhere. Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D. Martin House, Louis Sullivan's Guaranty Building, and H.H. Richardson's towers of the old state asylum — now the Richardson Olmsted Campus — are all still here.
The city took a long beating after the 1950s — the steel mills closed, the population shrank by half — and you still see it in the empty storefronts and boarded houses. But since the 2000s there has been a genuine revival, led by Elmwood Village and the Canalside waterfront redevelopment. The Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox) holds a small but remarkable collection of modern and contemporary art.
And then there's the food. The Buffalo wing was invented at Anchor Bar in 1964 — nothing to do with the local buffalo (there weren't any), just to use up a bucket of chicken wings late at night. Beef on Weck — thin-sliced roast beef on a salt-and-caraway kummelweck roll — is the other Buffalo classic. The pizza is better than it should be.
Winter is brutal — lake-effect snow regularly buries the city. Summer is glorious. Autumn is the best time.