A Closer Look: Alexander O. Levy's 'Squaw Island, Winter Eve' in The Buffalo News

Squaw Island, the small sliver of land in the Niagara River that runs for about a mile and a half along the western edge of the city before tapering off into a long concrete pier, has recently become the subject of an important community debate. Two women of Native American descent, Jodi Lynn Maracle and Agnes Williams, have requested that its derogatory name be changed in order not to further malign the already marginalized Native American community.

Before the island was transformed into the picturesque park and urban oasis it is today, it served as a garbage dump. But before that, as this painting from around 1918 by the gifted artist and illustrator Alexander O. Levy shows us, it was a residential area for a booming city (click for a larger version):

The twilight scene, with lighted houses dotting the island surrounded by a blanket of snow, brings us instantly back to a time when Buffalo was at the height of its international prominence. It's fun to speculate about what sorts of lives the residents of those long-ago demolished structures lived, and what economic opportunities -- also long-vanished -- drew them to the thriving city on the edge of Lake Erie.

As Bruce Fisher wrote in his fascinating historical essay in the catalog for the Burchfield Penney Art Center's exhibition "Alexander O. Levy: American Artist, Art Deco Painter," the era during which this painting was made was one of explosive population growth. Between 1909, when Levy arrived in Buffalo to work as an illustrator, and 1922, the city's population grew by 100,000. Between 1900 and 1930, it climbed from 350,000 to 550,000 -- a population surge unimaginable to today's Buffalonians, whose experience has been one of slow and painful shrinkage.

It's through paintings like this one that we can look back on the history of the city in a way free of nostalgia, to experience a small slice of beauty from a time that seems so distant from our own experiences as to be almost prehistoric. It gives us a few clues to the muffled rhythms of the city that we can still hear today, if only we listen hard enough: The park that used to be a garbage dump. The garbage dump that used to be a residential enclave. The residential enclave that used to belong to Native Americans, whose legacy its name now disgraces.

Levy's painting lends us much-needed perspective and adds to our understanding of the landscape, and even to the current debate over what the island's new name ought to be. It's both a simple, beautiful twilight scene in which to let your imagination loose and a potentially fruitful exercise in projecting your mind back in time.