Each U.S. President, said diplomat Clare Boothe Luce, is recalled by a single sentence. Lincoln saved the union. FDR beat Hitler and Depression. Nixon went to China, and resigned. Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

Cities are similar. Chicago is still Carl Sandburg’s City of Big Shoulders. Los Angeles remains forever Tinseltown. New York is The City That Never Sleeps. Boston is the Athens of America – especially to itself.

Try defining other cities in a sentence. One might have meant photography; another, music; a third, manufacturing. Today they mean – what? In our sound-bite, attention span-challenged, callow and shallow, age, verbal shorthand means more than ever. What persona do we want?

Some say high-tech; others, education; many, a gateway, not destination. The quandary is how other cities have pre-empted one or each criterion: Palo Alto, Biloxi, Portland, Oregon and Maine, to name a few. How is your city different, let alone unique?

“Take [struggling] Upstate New York,” said ex-Rochester Mayor Bill Johnson. “How does Utica remake itself after losing heavy industry? Syracuse, after General Electric? Binghamton, losing population?” Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, “There’s no there, there.” A city must prove there’s a here, here.

In 1991, Hollywood released the film City Slickers. Freeze-framed is Jack Palance telling Billy Crystal about life’s DNA. Raising an index finger, he says: “It’s one [thing].”

“What’s the one?” asks Crystal.

Palance says, “You have to find it for yourself.”

Ironically, in Upstate New York one city is.

Buffalo’s sprawling history ties rise, near-ruin, and perhaps now recovery. A century ago, more millionaires per capita dotted it than any U.S. burg. The Queen City was America’s eighth-largest. A checkered melting pot — Slavs, Poles, Italians, Germans – flocked to the hub of Lakes Erie and Ontario.

By the 1960s, the economy turned from blue- to white-collar. Manufacturing collapsed. Population plunged. Recently, hundreds of police, fire fighters, and teaching jobs vanished to balance the budget. “We hit bottom,” said Buffalo News columnist Bob McCarthy. “Sometimes only desperation makes you find a solution.”

For Buffalo, the solution to Palance’s “one thing” may be something for which most towns would kill. “Our seemingly inexhaustible [even nonpareil] sources of water,” said Mayor Byron Brown: among others, the Erie Canal, two Great Lakes, the Buffalo and Niagara Rivers, and Niagara Falls.

“Any city should play to its strengths,” explained McCarthy: thus, the current $275 million plan to build a downtown waterfront Erie Canal Museum, promenade, marketplace, marina, and above all, 100,000-square foot Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World store, at Buffalo’s former Central Wharf terminal.

With luck, the store could open by mid-2009: ideal for a region with more fishermen per capita than any part of America. Each Apri11 Opening Day, anglers fill Upstate streams, lakes, and ponds. Buffalo bets that many will troop to Bass Pro. “It’s the anchor store,” said McCarthy. “The other shops, restaurants, and venues will revolve around it.” In truth, each revolves around H2O.

“We have baits and boats, and you have water, so this should work,” mused Jim Hagale, heading the Bass Pro Shops Springfield, Missouri-based chain. The plan must now vault environmental and architectural rapids. “We’ve got to convince them, and will,” said Brown, “that this is in keeping with the historic nature of the inner harbor.”

Any city can try a makeover, extreme or otherwise. Success depends on fit. Does an area’s “one thing” go back to the future? Does it embody a city’s past, heart, and soul?? Buffalo’s seems to. Three Dog Night sang, “One is the loneliest number.” As Palance knew, it can be the smartest, too.

What is your burg’s “one thing?” Inquiring minds want to know. This we know already: Like leaders, cities are defined by a single sentence – what we were, are, and mean.

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