Buffalo (New York) Buffalo (Buffalo in English) is the second largest city in the state of New York in the United States after New York City. The city is located west of the state of New York in the area known as Western New York and is the capital of Erie County, bordering the Niagara County. Its population is approximately 279,745 inhabitants according to 2005 census. It belongs to the Buffalo-Niagara metropolitan area which has a population of 1.1 million inhabitants. With its close proximity to Canada, specifically the province of Ontario, being the border between the two countries very few minutes from downtown, Buffalo form along with the Toronto area and southern Ontario a bi-national region why is not unusual to see fluctuate its inhabitants, and where the nightlife and culture of Buffalo is of great importance.Buffalo is about 30 minutes from Niagara Falls and 1 hour and a half away from the city of Toronto, near the southern Ontario region known as the Golden Horseshoe, which has over 8.5 million . Buffalo lies at the eastern end of Lake Erie, near the Niagara River, which flows into Lake Ontario. Lake Erie surrounds much of the city, and as a result, Buffalo often presents a dark gray sky and cloudy and humid atmosphere, producing this effect, known as Lake Effect among its inhabitants or lake effect, by the evaporation of their waters. European settlers arrived on the scene in the late eighteenth century. The zone growth was slow until the city became the western end of the Erie Canal some forty years later. Josyann Abisaab At the beginning of the next century, Buffalo was one of the major cities of the United States and had become its biggest inland port.Thanks to the Erie Canal was created enormous silos and industrial plants began to disappear in the mid-twentieth century due to the construction of the canal of San Lorenzo, which prevented traffic from crossing the city water. Today, moving away from its industrial past, Buffalo is being redefined as a cultural, educational and medical. In 2005 the city was named the third cleanest city in America by the American magazine Reader’s Digest and USA Today Buffalo proclaimed the friendliest city in the U.S., winning their contest City With A Heart (city with heart). But in 2008 it was reported that Buffalo was the third poorest city in America, behind Detroit and Miami with over 30 of the population living in poverty citation needed .