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The oldest continually operating billiard hall in North America, Hippodrome Billiards opened in 1914 in the Theater District; through its early years of operation, some of history's great pool sharks, such as Minnesota Fats and Willie Mosconi, were regulars here. Sadly, Hippodrome is situated today in a nondescript suburban-style strip mall at the southwest corner of Delaware and Hertel Avenues. Despite the unfortunate location — and its spacious, bright and clean ambience that runs counter to the stereotype of pool halls — Hippodrome manages to conserve some of the old-school feel with chairs, cue racks, and several billiard tables retained from the original property. And, for those who'd rather skip the history lesson and just shoot a few games of pool, Hippodrome's rate of $4 per person per hour is hard to beat.
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The Manny Fried Playhouse, named after a former Buffalo theatre actor, union organizer, and political radical and located in the former Pierce-Arrow Factory Complex in Park Meadow, is the new home of the Subversive Theatre Collective. This bold new troupe's mission is to present provocative works of drama that are "dedicated to the needs, concerns, and aspirations of those who are oppressed, exploited, and disenfranchised by the existing social order". The Subversive Theatre Collective has staged performances of works such as Maxine Klein's The Furies of Mother Jones and Bertolt Brecht's The Mother, and has traditionally been an integral part of Buffalo's annual Infringement Festival.
16 screens showing standard big-name Hollywood fare.
Situated at the corner of Elmwood Avenue and Amherst Street and especially popular with students of nearby Buffalo State College, Voelker's may seem like it was plucked from another time. Behind a lively bar redolent of old-school Buffalo — the kind of place where you might see Pabst Blue Ribbon being drunk by rough-around-the-edges blue-collar types, rather than ironically by hipsters — are 36 bowling lanes, as well as three pool tables and a few dartboards. Open daily till 4AM, Voelker's is the place to go for late-night bowling in Buffalo.
On the center island in the middle of Fordham Drive, in Park Meadow on what once were the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition, is a small rock with a historic plaque marking the spot where President McKinley was standing when felled by the bullet of his assassin, Leon Czolgosz. (Well, not the exact spot, which is now inside the living room of the house at 29 Fordham, but close enough.)
A longtime fixture in the Buffalo arts community whose untitled illustration graced the inaugural issue of The Public, Craig LaRotonda opened Revolution Gallery in December 2016 along with his wife, fellow artist Maria Pabico LaRotonda, after a successful Kickstarter campaign. LaRotonda's own style is a sort of noir surrealism, and that's the aesthetic he's going for with this gallery — to borrow the words of the website, the emphasis is on works by local artists (including, of course, the LaRotondas themselves) that are "provocative and imbued with dark beauty, emotion, and mystery" and are executed in a variety of media: drawings, paintings, photography, and sculpture but also handmade jewelry and postcard prints offered for sale. As well, Revolution Gallery augments their permanent collection with a regularly scheduled slate of temporary and travelling exhibitions by local, national, and international artists including their inaugural one, Inception: a multimedia exhibit of work by artist Damien Echols, famous as one of the exonerated "West Memphis Three" falsely convicted of murder in 1994.