When he made the two most important proposals of his life, Brian Hayden was living in Kenmore, at 111 Wabash Ave.
One was a marriage proposal, the other a book proposal.
He got married in May. And now the book is out: “111 Places in Buffalo That You Must Not Miss.”
It so happens that 11 is a lucky number in Cologne, Germany, where the publisher of this series of travel books is based.
“But you can’t write about only 11 places in a book,” Hayden says, “so they stuck another ‘1’ on there.”
The 111 places in and around Buffalo and Niagara Falls are not the usual suspects. (No Anchor Bar, for instance.) This isn’t that sort of book.
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“It doesn’t purport to be the top places to visit,” Hayden says. “It’s meant to focus on hidden gems, off-the-beaten-path locales, and lesser-known stories of the more well-known places.”
• Old Fort Niagara, but with the story of Betsy Doyle, a laundress and nurse who carried hot cannonballs during a battle in the War of 1812 as the Americans traded fire with the British across the way at Fort George.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s onetime home at 29 Irving Place, in Allentown. His biographer Andrew Turnbull once described it as “a lovely spot for a poet to grow up in.” You can’t go inside, but you can see it from the street. (And be borne back ceaselessly into the past.)
• Doris Records, where a young James Johnson, later known as Rick James, promised store owner Mack Luchey that he was going to make it big one day. Buffalo’s oldest record store, at 286 E. Ferry St., is run today by Derrick Luchey, son of the late owner.
Each place in the paperback book gets a one-page write-up — four or five paragraphs — with a full-color photo on the facing page. So you can dip in and out as you please, as with a plateful of tasty appetizers.
The photos are by Jesse Pitzler, who shot the photos for “111 Places in Austin That You Must Not Miss” when he was living in Texas. Then he moved to Western New York.
Pitzler offers the sharp eye of a newcomer, and Hayden the loving eye of a lifer. He was born in Buffalo and grew up on Tacoma Avenue, and he has been immersed in local lore from an early age.
“This book is the culmination of a lifelong interest in my hometown,” he says. “It combines my interests in writing and journalism and history and travel and tourism.”
The places in “111 Places” are placed in alphabetical order. There is no hierarchy here.
“There will always be the question of, ‘Why this one?’ And, ‘Why didn’t you put this in?’ ” Hayden says. “But this book is meant to lead you to new places. People who live here will recognize some of the places in the book, but some will be unfamiliar to them. There’s something here for everyone, whether you’ve lived here all your life or are visiting for the first time.”
Twenty years ago, as a sophomore at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute, Hayden was a correspondent for a youth section in The Buffalo News called NeXt. His first piece for editor extraordinaire Jean Westmoore “was an opinion piece by 15-year-old me,” Hayden says, “and it implores other teenagers to believe in the city.”
He graduated from St. Joe’s in 2006 and majored in journalism at Syracuse University. He worked as a reporter for a couple of years at the Daily Courier Observer, in Massena, and then was social-media manager at Clarkson University, in Potsdam.
But always he longed for home. Hayden came back in 2014 to be communications manager for Visit Buffalo Niagara. He often offered help to visiting travel writers. In 2020, during the pandemic, he got a call from one of those writers, Jennifer Bain, a former travel editor for the Toronto Star. She had just written “111 Places in Calgary That You Must Not Miss” and suggested that Hayden propose a “111 Places” book about Buffalo to the publisher, a company called Emons Verlag, which has produced nearly 500 such titles around the world.
Today Hayden is director of communications and community engagement for the Buffalo History Museum, where you can find his book in the gift shop. The commentary he wrote as a teenager hangs on his office wall. Part of it is a plea for waterfront development: “Buffalo has been traumatized by past planning blunders, and thus may now be afraid to ‘throw the dice’ to try something new for fear of another miscue.”
In dice, lucky numbers are 7 and 11. In Cologne, carnival season commences on the 11th day of the 11th month at 11:11 a.m.
As for 111 Wabash Ave., Hayden doesn’t live there anymore. But he did when he proposed the book — and when he proposed to Melissa Blosser.
“Given that serendipity, I would call 11 my lucky number, too,” he says. “There’s no reason 11 can’t be lucky for Cologne, and for Buffalo.”