Editor’s note: My slightly scary upstate swing

Despite my impressive title, City & State has not found it proper to provide me with a chauffeur – a phenomenon in New York City government that Sahalie Donaldson got the green light to cover this week, drawing great stories out of current and former city leaders who got cars and drivers. 

So instead, when I traveled to Syracuse this past week, I took Amtrak, and then the Greyhound to Buffalo when storm debris cancelled my second train, and then flew home. It was my own version of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” – a movie that Tim Clark, commissioner of the Buffalo Niagara Film Office, proudly informed me was filmed partially in Western New York. 

City & State’s office is in Manhattan, but we want to keep living up to our name, God forbid we become known as City & Downstate. So this upstate swing was a great way to meet with a bunch of players in Onondaga and Erie counties and hear what they’re thinking about politics and policy. And I had a great guide in City & State New York Advisory Board member and de facto upstate ambassador Jack O’Donnell. 

The trip will inspire some City & State stories – and maybe even a ghost story. I was tickled to stay at the Richardson Hotel, which was once the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, and has been dubbed one of America’s most haunted hotels. In a city known for its architecture, the hotel is an absolute gem, a sprawling, gorgeous complex that also happens to have an eerie, dark and empty ballroom if one climbs the grand staircase alone to the top floor late at night. The chill down my spine had me running to call my chauffeur … but my chauffeur never existed.