Where to Stay in Amherst, New York

What is Amherst known for?

Amherst lies among the Northtowns of Erie County, and what it puts on the map is scattered rather than gathered: the Northtown Center, the Museum of disABILITY History and the Entranceway at Main Street at Roycroft Boulevard. Fields take the rest. Amherst Audubon Field and the Former Reformed Mennonite Church complete a list that has no downtown to hold it together.

What are the main landmarks in Amherst?

Six names carry the town. Two are gateways: the Entranceway at Main Street at Roycroft Boulevard, and the Entranceways at Main Street at Lamarck Drive and Smallwood Drive, which is an unusual thing for a landmark list to be built around. Churches and museums follow.

The Former Reformed Mennonite Church, the Museum of disABILITY History, the Northtown Center and Amherst Audubon Field make up the rest of what Erie County records here.

What is the history of Amherst?

The record here starts with a church. The Former Reformed Mennonite Church reads as the oldest thing on the town's landmark list, and a congregation of that kind belongs to a rural Erie County rather than to the suburb that followed. A founding year was never set down.

What survives instead is the fabric: a former meeting house, a set of residential gateways and the road pattern they belong to. Then came the planned streets. The Entranceway at Main Street at Roycroft Boulevard and the Entranceways at Main Street at Lamarck Drive and Smallwood Drive read as announcements for residential developments, and their place on the landmark list says how much of Amherst was laid out deliberately rather than grown outward from a village.

Buffalo did the rest. Families moved out along these roads, and the Northtowns took the shape they still hold. Newer institutions closed the sequence.

The Northtown Center, Amherst Audubon Field and the Museum of disABILITY History all belong to the suburban town rather than to whatever preceded it, and together with the entranceways they are most of what the record keeps. Amherst's list ends about there.

Where is Amherst?

The town covers about 139 square kilometres. Amherst occupies a block of Erie County next to Buffalo, with no river, ridge or shoreline named in the record to give it an edge, so its boundaries are administrative rather than physical. Main Street runs through the older part.

Amherst Audubon Field and the Northtown Center sit within the same short span of the Northtowns.

What is the climate of Amherst?

Amherst shares Buffalo's weather exactly. The town sits in the temperate band of the northern hemisphere, where a cold half of the year gives way to a warm one, and the suburb is near enough to the city that nothing separates their seasons. Erie County reports one pattern.

The Northtowns feel it as the city does.

How do you get to Amherst?

Buffalo is the hinge. Almost everyone reaching Amherst comes out of the city first, and the run into the Northtowns is short enough that the town functions as part of Buffalo's daily traffic rather than as a separate destination. Main Street is the orientation line.

The entranceways at Roycroft Boulevard, Lamarck Drive and Smallwood Drive tell a driver which part of the town they have reached, and the Northtown Center is the easiest of the named sites to find from any of them.