Meteor Alley is one of the whimsically named spaces of Buffalo. Running over a two-block stretch parallel to North and South Division streets between Emslie and Lord, it is also one of the cool, hidden spots of the Hydraulics. Meteor Alley, renamed in 1893 from Anderson Alley to avoid confusion with Anderson Place, still has a pretty cosmic feel.
While the reason the name “Meteor Alley” was chosen is lost to history, it’s established that typically the City polled residents on a name choice. Perhaps kids in the neighborhood, fresh off reading Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, insisted it would be a neat idea, and their preferred name change prevailed. Either way, meteors and meteor showers invigorated the fascination of the public in the 1890s, as scientific theory on their nature and origin advanced considerably. The renaming of the space to “Meteor Alley” would have been very timely.
It was during this decade that astronomers George Johnstone Stoney (did his mother know that her son, with his rock-themed name, would contribute so much to our understanding of sun-orbiting stones?) and Arthur Matthew Weld Downing first offered the idea of a meteoroid stream or trail, calculating how meteoroids, once freed from a comet and traveling at low speeds relative to the comet, would drift mostly in front of or behind the comet after completing one orbit around the sun.
Only a few decades prior to this period, meteors were still thought to be only an atmospheric effect, similar to lightning, not objects colliding with the mesosphere. After Yale professor Benjamin Silliman theorized in 1807 that a meteorite fall had extraterrestrial origins, President Thomas Jefferson dismissed Silliman’s claim, saying, “I would more easily believe that (a) Yankee professor would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.” The progression in understanding astrological phenomena started to reach a crescendo in the decades to come. The renaming of Anderson Alley to Meteor Alley would have been a sign of the times.
Meteor Alley runs over the area where a millpond once existed prior to the early 1880s, when the Hydraulic Canal leading into the neighborhood was filled and this swath of land was prepped for residential development. As in most traditional neighborhoods that have alleys, Meteor Alley is fronted by garages and back yards, making driveways unnecessary and allowing detached houses to be built closer together, enhancing the civic scale of the streets the houses face. The co-mingling of back yards has always made alleys, with their minimal auto traffic, ideal places for children’s play and neighborhood gatherings. Modern planners now see alleys, or “rear lanes,” as essential tools for integrating automobile and pedestrian traffic in neighborhoods. Alleys are also more efficient spaces to plow than numerous, separate driveways.
Alleys tend to be forlorn, forgotten spaces, but they are being rediscovered by urban planners and developers who point to their functional utility and their unique charm. In Chicago, which has 1,900 miles of alleys that make up the largest network of alleys in the world, has even instituted a Green Alley Program (check out these links on the program at the New York Times and Streetsblog) to convert asphalt in alleys to permeable pavement types, better able to absorb stormwater run-off. The alley, once derided, is cool again. A name like Meteor Alley makes it even cooler!
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