BUFFALO—First mistake: I book a room at the Marriott out in Amherst.

Second mistake: I tell Rocco Termini that I booked a room at the Marriott.

Third mistake: I tell this to Rocco while we’re standing in the lobby of his hotel, the Lafayette, the emblematic development of Buffalo’s resuscitating downtown.

“You came to do a story on Buffalo, and you’re staying in the suburbs? At a Marriott?” Rocco says.

But. But. But . . . the points.

This is weak beer and Rocco knows it. He gives me a disappointed look, and I feel the shame.

A few minutes later, he shows us around one of the Lafayette’s posh and decidedly un-Marriottesque rooms. I look to my photographer, Pawel, for some emotional support. You’re staying at the Marriott too, right?

“I haven’t checked in yet,” Pawel says. So much for the brotherhood of journalism.

Pawel switches his reservation for essentially same price. It’s too late for me; I’ve already got my stuff stashed out across the River Styx.

Many hours and several bars later, faced with the impossibility of driving, I end up on Pawel’s couch. This is not the first time Buffalo will surprise me. But it’s the last time it’ll catch me looking.

Burying the hatchet

In the past, I’ve taken a couple of bigswings at Buffalo in print. It’s too easy, really — just insert a snide comment about the downtown’s lunar landscape. But I’m not above that sort of thing (or many other things).

Understandably, this has upset some people. Okay, a lot of people. Only Scott Norwood has received more “Screw you!” emails from Buffalonians than I. One of the few comments that can be reprinted in a family publication: “Please burn down the Peace Bridge and never come back here!”

I don’t know the city. I know it to drive through on the way to, say, Cleveland. I know that after the first of those columnistic Scud missiles (which was reprinted by the Buffalo News), I’ve had a hell of a time getting over the border there. I suspect some Buffalo native who works at Homeland Security has put a big, red check mark next to my name.

This, then, is my mea culpa. To that guy especially. There is a threshold where “random” pull-overs tip into permanent paranoia.

My superiors sent me to Buffalo with one marching order: “Try to be nice!”

In the end, I didn’t have to try very hard. Or at all. All I had to do was pay attention.

Donn Esmonde of the The Buffalo News agrees to tour us around. Donn and I have traded a few warm-hearted slaps in print, but you wouldn’t know it. He’s like everyone in Buffalo: so upbeat and outgoing he atomizes all our smug Canadian notions of decency. We’re not particularly nice. We’re cordial. It’s not the same thing. In Buffalo, they’re nice.

Donn tells me he’s recently talked to someone in local tourism that did a study of what Torontonians associate with Buffalo.

Here’s the list: the Galleria Mall, the airport, random acts of violence and Eyewitness News’ Irv Weinstein.

“Irv hasn’t been on the air since 1998,” Donn says drily. “The tourism guy was near tears.”

Here’s the problem, as I see it. A Canadian comes to Buffalo and he or she might make it 1,000 metres over the border. Within that boundary, you’ve got the hockey arena, the baseball park, a few bars. If you’re headed to shop or fly, all you’re seeing is the freeway and the abandoned warehouses that gird it.

These parts of Buffalo share the faults of every American industrial hub that declined through the 20th century — that same short-sighted sprawl outward that left the innards of the city desiccated.

That’s changing downtown, one building at a time.

Like most real transformations, this isn’t government’s doing. It’s the work of visionary developers who see a buck to be made.

Five years ago, the Lafayette was a seven-storey flophouse slated for demolition. Rocco saw the disguised early-century opulence, bought it cheap and restored it for $45 million (U.S.). Now it’s a destination.

“A while back, the chief of police called me,” Rocco says. “He told me, ‘We’re getting some complaints about the cars lined up outside your door on the weekends.’ I told him, ‘A few years ago, there were still cars there, but they were stopping to buy drugs.’ And the chief said, ‘Forget I called.’ ”

Later, we have dinner at another of Rocco’s downtown outposts, a former garage converted into an Italian restaurant called Tappo. No bottle of its very decent plonk costs more than $15 (leading inevitably to Pawel’s couch). Purchased for $75,000, it’s the only edifice on the block that appears inhabited. And it’s throbbing on a Friday night.

After dinner, we head out to watch the Leafs play the Sabres. It feels a lot like the ACC — Leafs jerseys in the majority — but with a little pop.

Most of these people got here a couple of hours before the game, will leave immediately after and will spend more time wandering a parking garage than the city. Imagine every visitor to Toronto arriving via ferry at Cherry Beach and never getting north of the Gardiner!

Little wonder our opinions of Buffalo are trapped in a WGRZ time-warp of house fires and urban blight.

Though slowly changing, downtown is still the Buffalo of those tourism polls. It isn’t a dangerous place, but nor is it a walked place. Any large, empty space will always seem foreboding, whether it actually is or not.

But there are people here. To find them, you have to go a couple of kilometres north, into vibrant neighbourhoods such as Allentown and Elmwood Village or smaller-scale work-play draws such as Larkinville. It’s a truism of the sports business that every athlete who plays for a Buffalo team ends up settling there after retirement. These places are why.

Just a little outside the centre, you find yourself in some achingly elegant spots. These aren’t even the really swish districts. They’re middle-class. Wandering around Parkside, we stumbled across a roadside bookstall, called “The L’il Library,” where neighbours drop books off for each other. How goddamned twee is that? How un-Buffalo?

Distressingly, these areas are also incredibly cheap.

Eventually, we’re running around like idiots pointing at houses and asking Donn, “How much is this one?” Donn is not a real estate agent, but he’s trying. Every time he takes stock of some towering, if faded, Victorian masterpiece and says, “Don’t know . . . maybe 250?,” we gape for a while, stagger to the house next door and repeat the process. Being from Toronto, we have an inexhaustible fascination with only two things: real-estate prices and the procedural minutiae of civic politics.

I’m warning you honestly: Do not come here if you’re in the process of buying a house! You’ll go home suicidal. While we were in Elmwood, my wife sent me a text telling me that we need (another) part of the roof torn up. If I’d been near the river, I’d have walked into it with a pocketful of rocks.

That Friday night ends in Allentown, at the greatest, dive-iest saloon in the known world. It’s called the Pink Flamingo. Or the Pink. Or the Old Pink. Or the Stink. Or other names that can’t be repeated here. This is the place every epic Buffalo evening goes before it dies.

The Pink is as low, narrow and dim as a mineshaft. The staff all appears to be on some sort of work release. The bar has been leaned on by so many for so long, it’s tilting toward the backsplash at a dangerous angle.

As Pawel and I are standing outside talking to a few reprobates, a loud argument erupts on the street over a parking space.

The unsteady gentleman next to us remarks casually, “I think we’re all about to get shot.”

Hey man, don’t get caught in the hype! The screaming ends in a bunch of friendly “F___ you!s” and someone on the curb cheers the coming of peace in our time. We go back inside for one more, a decision we will both deeply regret in the morning.

At least I don’t have to lug around 50 pounds of camera equipment . . . or offer to help.

Wings, wings and other wings

It is only right and good that you will end up at chicken-wing birthplace, the Anchor Bar (or, as it’s known in the world of fowl, Golgotha of the Birds).

You’re going to have the wings. Trust us on this one: Don’t stray from the wings! Whatever happens, you’re going to regret it. Not because the wings aren’t good; they’re great. But overcome by an explorer’s enthusiasm, you’re going to have far too many.

There were some Quebecois next to us inhaling a batch of 50, and groaning through the effort because they’d had “a big breakfast at the Cracker Barrel.” I assume they all died on the way home.

However carefully you play it, you will leave the Anchor feeling like you’re sweating Canola oil.

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For other, less kitsch options, I turned to Buffalo’s Susur Lee, chef Mike Andrzejewski. Mike suggested a bunch of places. In a typical Buffalo touch, he also gave me his phone number and strict instructions that I call him if I needed help. Later, he dropped into conversation that his son was getting married the next day.

“But don’t worry about that!” Mike says. “If you need me, call me!”

I did not go to any of Mike’s suggestions, because I was already 10-per-cent chicken wings.

But I’ll pass them on to you: Hutch’s, Bistro Europa, Tabree and Cantina Loco. Mike also suggested that we check out the Darwin D. Martin House, which, sadly, turns out to be an actual house, rather than a public one.

Another crystalline Buffalo moment: sitting at Cole’s mid-afternoon, drinking one of what seems like a thousand local drafts with the same determination one brings to choking down cough medicine. Sacrifices. We made a few.

We get into what I now consider the ur-Buffalo conversation with the woman behind the bar, Lauren.

“So where you from?”

“Toronto.”

“I love Toronto.”

Every Buffalonian loves Toronto, and wants badly to tell you so. This is the focal point of my reconsideration. They like us so much; and we think of them so little. It’s entirely our — and mainly, my — loss.

Prepare yourself for emotions; I feel terrible about this now. Lauren is chattering away and Pawel remarks casually about a bottle of what is advertised as “quinoa whiskey” behind the bar. Unprompted, Lauren pours us each an enormous shot. A glassful, really. I give Pawel what I intend as a withering look, and what probably looks more like desperation. How the hell am I going to drink this? But I do. Lauren’s watching and this feels like some small sort of penance for my sins of hospitality.

While I sit there turning grey, Lauren is trying to describe a Toronto bar she was in recently. It was “across from the hotel. You know, the one downtown.”

Pawel and I try for a while, and then we give up. We have no idea what she’s talking about. It seems ill-mannered to say so.

“It was great,” Lauren says. “We got wasted there.”

Eventually, we’ve all agreed that we love this theoretical Toronto bar.

I really wish I knew what she was talking about. It sounds great. Wherever it is, it’s full of people from Buffalo.

If you’re in Buffalo getting to know it, there are a few larger than-life things on offer. You’ve got your Albright-Knox Art Gallery and your Burchfield Penney Art Center, but the Martin House is Buffalo’s key cultural attraction. If you’re going to Buffalo to buy a metric ton of toilet paper and a bunch of five-dollar dress shirts, at least drive by so you can fool friends into thinking you’re sophisticated.

I won’t comment on the architecture, other than to say I quite liked it. On the downside, there’s an awful lot of lawn to mow.

The Martin House is more tempting as a metaphor.

Built in the early 1900s by a young Frank Lloyd Wright for a local business titan. Abandoned for 17 years beginning in the mid-’30s after the suddenly penniless owner dies. Sold for $22,000 in the ’50s. Much of it demolished to make way for hideous apartment buildings. Rescued beginning in the ’90s by local conservationists.

Now almost restored to original condition. Running tab: $55 million.

The Martin House isn’t in Buffalo. It is Buffalo.

Fun stuff coming up

Dec. 8, 6:30 p.m.: Mannheim Steamroller Christmas, Shea’s Performing Arts Center, 646 Main St., Buffalo. Tickets 1-800-745-3000. For those who prefer their holiday music loud, with the added value of its performance in a beautifully-restored, circa-1926 theatre.

Dec. 12, 7 p.m., The Cult. Post-punk British rockers bring it to the Town Ballroom, 681 Main St., arguably Buffalo’s best music club. www.townballroom.com . 1 (716) 852-3900

Dec. 17-22, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, The Musical. Shea’s Performing Arts Center, 646 Main St. Tickets 1-800-745-3000. Family holiday fun in a beautifully restored theatre.

Dec. 13-15, Holiday Pops, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Primary conductor JoAnn Falletta takes the orchestra, fresh off a Carnegie Hall appearance, through its holiday paces, with featured Broadway-star vocalist Michele Ragusa. At the Saarinen-designed Kleinhan’s Music Hall, 3 Symphony Circle, Buffalo. 1 (716) 885-5000, bpo.org

Dec. 22, 1 p.m.: Buffalo Bills vs. Miami Dolphins, Ralph Wilson Stadium, Orchard Park. There’s no guarantee on the weather, or of a victory. But there will be acres of pre-game tailgaters, a more engaging atmosphere than at the annual Rogers Centre game, and a chance to either keep alive faint playoff hopes, or help to dash rival Miami’s chances. buffalobills.com

Wednesdays through Saturdays, 5:30 p.m., Jackie Jocko at E.B. Green’s. Buffalo’s resident local legend lounge pianist, often visited by touring musical acts, plays any song you can think of, at the Hyatt Regency’s esteemed downtown steakhouse. 2 Fountain Plaza, Buffalo. 1 (716) 855-4870, ebgreens.com

—Donn Esmonde

Did you know . . . ?

There’s no “eh” in Buffalo, but there is an “a” . . . as in the hard, eardrum-assaulting, Buffalonian pronunciation of the letter. Miss us? Don’t worry, we’ll be be-ack.