GreaterBuffaloBlog

Richardson Park, Now and Forever

It is not often that a community gets $100,000,000 to spend on civic improvements. That happened four years ago, the state legislature approved, and the Governor Pataki signed, a budget bill that allocated funds for the restoration of the Richardson Olmsted Complex, a 100-acre National Historic Landmark with buildings by H.H. Richardson, landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted, and even some buildings by Buffalo’s preeminent local architect, E.B. Green.

We cannot squander the opportunity before us. We have the resources in hand to create a magnificent amenity for the entire region: a picturesque 100-acre park by America’s most revered landscape architect (left, Olmsted's planting plan of 1877), designed hand-in-hand with the beloved founding father of American architecture to host a sublime monument of the Picturesque movement in architecture.

Imagine a “Richardson Park” with not one, but two of Olmsted’s patented tree-bordered meadows: one stretching the length of three football fields along Elmwood Avenue, the other a lush, sun-drenched greensward for the impossibly romantic pile of Richardson’s Administration Building. Imagine, too, a “pastured pleasure ground” stretching along Forest Avenue with, as Olmsted envisioned, “groups of trees and large open spaces of turf.” (Today, these landscapes are dominated by parking lots, including two, the length of football fields, along Elmwood Avenue.)

Envision, as Olmsted did, the area to the north of Richardson’s buildings as an expanse of fields and treed lawns stretching to a cluster of agricultural buildings. Where a massive parking lot now encroaches, baseball fields for a recreation-deprived West Side could sprout. Imagine playing or watching America’s pastoral game against the skyline of Richardson’s castle. Finally, imagine the Buffalo Psychiatric Center and Buffalo State College seamlessly woven into the surrounding community, with an Olmstedian path system offering shortcuts between the neighborhood to both institutions and beyond. A ring road, precisely one kilometer in length, would tie everything together.
(Click on image above for conceptual plan) We have not yet begun to imagine what could go into the range of buildings by Richardson and Green, but we already can see, as Olmsted did in his Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns, a scene crowded by people of all walks of life, gathered together in the common pursuit of recreation, “each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of others.”

People attract people, and it is not hard to imagine that the repaired and stabilized Richardson buildings, to say nothing of the bordering neighborhoods, would attract interest and private investment with such a public amenity outside the door. This vision of amenity-driven development is something which Olmsted, Richardson, and above all businessman and politician William F. Dorsheimer would have recognized. It was Dorsheimer, then the local district attorney, who brought Olmsted to town in 1868 to design a park system for the city as a means of civic advancement.

It’s center would be Delaware Park, but Olmsted saw an easy way to expand its effects if the existing Forest Lawn Cemetery and the projected State Hospital could be contiguous with it. Olmsted thought of it, Dorsheimer made it happen. Dorsheimer engineered an offer of over 200 acres of land for the State Hospital on the condition the hospital commissioners located the institution where Olmsted and Dorsheimer wanted it. In late 1869, at a meeting held in the offices of the Buffalo Parks Commission, of which Dorsheimer was a member, the hospital commissioners accepted the offer.

In early 1871, Dorsheimer further engineered the selection of the young H.H. Richardson to design the complex in collaboration with Olmsted. Richardson designed the buildings, and Olmsted sited them within his landscape to maximum effect. It was city-shaping on a majestic scale: together with Delaware Park and Forest Lawn, the hospital grounds constituted over 800 acres of artfully designed meadow, forest, lake and stream.

That majesty is diminished today. Much of Olmsted and Richardson’s (and Dorsheimer’s) grand gesture has been lost, chipped away by decades of college expansion, highway building, and parking lots. The fields, meadows, and open space of the State Hospital have been reduced by half, mostly by Buffalo State College, which moved to the site in the 1930’s, occupying much of the former farmlands. Today, one tenuous tendril of Olmsted’s green vision remains to connect the Buffalo Psychiatric Center to Delaware Park and beyond: that piece of land at the corner of Rockwell Road and Elmwood Avenue. Olmsted designed it as the northern end of his Elmwood Avenue meadow, flanked by his ring road, paths, and dense stands of trees.

How can we summon forth that majesty again? Beyond creating a restoration corporation, all encroachments must stop, before we lose another square inch of this extraordinary legacy and potential economic resource. Second, undertake immediately the emergency repair and stabilization of spelled out in the most recent architect’s report (2004), plus the repair and stabilization of the two remaining but severely neglected E.B. Green buildings, the female patients’ summer house, and the remaining agricultural buildings.

How much would this cost? Shockingly little. According to an architect's report commissioned for the purpose, less than $8,000,000 for every building designed by Richardson himself. Throw in the others mentioned above and the restoration of Olmsted’s lost landscape, and a figure of $10-$12 million seems plausible. In order to restore the landscape, all the parking lots must be replaced by carefully designed and sited structured parking for existing and future uses, but this can be financed by parking revenues. To fully occupy and restore the building interiors would cost more, but considerably less than the $1000 per square foot (for 300,000 square feet of space) bandied about by some. The tens of millions of dollars remaining from the state appropriation will go a long way.

  What happens beyond the repair and landscape restoration? Worth examining is the former Hudson Valley Psychiatric Center, which has embarked upon a privately funded $300,000,000 project of apartments, lodging, and other private development while protecting the National Historic Landmark grounds and buildings by Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. A key component of this must be the elimination of surface parking lots and their repalcement by well-designed and carefulyy sited structured parking, and a parking plan that includes paid parking to manage demand and provide operational revenue. A bird's eye view of a Richardson Park concept appears at left. This concept mitigates somewhat the impact of the colossally unsympathetic, even arrogant imposition that Buffalo State College's Burchfiled-Penney Art Center represents.

At left, is an existing conditions plan, with Buffalo State College's campus expansion highlighted in blue, while the footprint of the Burchfield-Penney building itself is in black.

We can redeem ourselves the trnsgressions of the lst 50 years by devoting ourselves to the cause of building Richardson Park. Olmsted and Richardson were giants. Restoring their vision, standing on their shoulders, we can be giants, too.
                                                                                                                                                                    

Take Me to the River: How Buffalo Can Get Rid of its Waterfront Barrier and Achieve Widescale Preservation and Recreation-based Development

If there is one thing we can do for ourselves and our children and our children’s children, it would be to rid ourselves of the cursed and thoroughly damned Thruway along the Niagara River. Blocks of historic houses in Black Rock, Riverside, and the West Side are being consumed by disinvestment. Whole neighborhoods are at risk. Preservationists, environmentalists, neighborhood activists, and just plain residents would find common cause in this issue. [This article, as it appeared, with illustrations, in the Winter 2006 issue of our newspaper, Greater Buffalo, is available by clicking on the link that follows.]

Download demo_tway_sheet.pdf

Sure, it has been discussed before, even studied. But it always has been with the understanding that the Niagara Section of the Thruway would merely be moved and supersized to modern standards (i.e., a 70 mph design speed and infrequent but huge interchanges). That is not what we need. We need it gone, and a boulevard-like road replacing it.

There is now also some urgency to the question, for the long-running debate about whether and where to build another international bridge is coming to a head in the Final Environmental Impact Statement stage. The Campaign for Greater Buffalo supports a low-level lift bridge between the historic communities of Black Rock in the U.S. and Bridgeburg in Canada. A high-level bridge and its attendant ramps connecting to the Thruway would insure the continued existence of the Thruway and the decline of the neighborhoods it goes through.

Buffalo is the only major city in the east and midwest where the sun sets over water. We live in a resort and we don’t know it. That is because the Thruway  is a wall of concrete and a wall of noise inhibiting our enjoyment and economic wellbeing.

Around the country cities are dismantling freeways to gain access to their waterfronts. Grand public parks and esplanades, some stretching for miles, fill with people from all walks of life. This in turn attracts real estate investment, stores and restaurants, and increased tax revenues. Buffalo ought to take advantage of this trend.

We can improve our economy by removing destructive waterfront highways and replacing them with parks, housing, and community retail. As we speak, Portland, Oregon is removing an expressway along the Willamette River and creating a spectacular public waterfront funded by tax revenues from $600,000,000 in private development attracted by the park. Fort Worth has torn down an elevated Interstate, built parks, and is now seeing renovations of long-neglected historic buildings and new construction. San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway was damaged in an earthquake. Rather than rebuild it, citizens demanded it be torn down and replaced by a ground-level boulevard. A truck fell through New York’s West Side Highway. Citizens rejected rebuilding the eyesore and had it replaced by a boulevard. Today the 5-mile-long, $300,000,000 Hudson River Park connects every single street it touches with the Hudson, thousands of people flock to the park daily and high end housing is sprouting where once there was only dereliction.

Boston, Cincinnati, Hartford, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee are some of the other cities removing, relocating, or covering their highway blight. The projects are funded by tax revenues from adjacent development and new state and federal programs, like the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century.
The key to making headway on the project may be to first construct a boulevard in Black Rock and Riverside, which would create the logic and opportunity to remove the Thruway north of Scajacquada Creek when the time comes for a major reconstruction. Such a ‘Black Rock Boulevard,’on unused railroad property from the old Black Rock Yards straight north to the Youngmann Expressway in Tonawanda could be built for about the cost of the public subsidies for the current Bass Pro retail store proposal downtown.

This needs the approval of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The boulevard, similar to downtown’s Elm-Oak arterial, would create the means to abandon the Thruway. Acre upon acre of prime waterfront land would be gained for park use.
Trucks would no longer traverse local streets to get from the Thruway to industrial plants in the rail corridor, because the boulevard would get them there directly.

The lower Scajacquada Expressway can then be removed between. Grant St. and the Black Rock Canal, and replaced with a parkway and greenbelt to the Boulevard along the northern edge of the old Pratt & Letchworth brownfield. This will shield the adjacent neighborhood from the site. It will also free Scajacquada Creek from the expressway, which now actually has support piers directly in the creek bed. The confluence of the creek with the Black Rock Canal would be an expansive space for parks and attractive housing.

The next step would be to build new parks on freed land connecting Riverside, Delaware parks and a Niagara River Park between downtown Buffalo and Lewiston. In areas where the highway simply cannot be removed, i.e. from the Peace Bridge to Scajacquada Creek, the Riverwalk should be rerouted to the Black Rock Canal shore (instead of along Niagara Street). Every single street that used to run down to the water should be reconnected to it by means of pedestrian bridges.

Lastly, the Thruway should be converted to a boulevard and park along the West Side, exactly like the old West Side Highway along the Hudson in New York has been made into West Street. This, in fact, has just been put in the city’s most recent masterplan.

In New York, West Street is a ground-level boulevard with a central median,  and a new linear park, the Hudson River Park. It stretches for a length of 5 miles, connecting with the Henry Hudson Parkway in the north at Riverside Park and West Street in the south at Battery Park City. Every single Manhattan cross street is connected to the boulevard, allowing easy neighborhood access to the water. The result? A seismic upthrust in quality of life resulting in, so far, hundreds of millions of dollars of residential development and a great new social space for an entire region.

Where would the money come from to finance this? Besides the sources mentioned earlier, there are state Transportation Bond Acts (one of which, giving almost $2 billion to upstate road projects, was  approved by voters in November 2005). Then there are the periodic, massive federal transportation acts which regularly amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. Getting money for roads is easy. Just about everything else is hard (including school lunches for needy children).
Why this is is nicely explained by Douglas Rae in his outstanding City: Urbanism and Its End: “Only on points of near-perfect national unanimity does the federal government act with concerted force...such points of consensus are apt to be ones on which massive consumer interests and major producer interests converge. One of these is the hegemony of the automobile, and another is the sanctity of the detached single-family home-neither of which has been friendly to our cities, both of which have been backed and sustained by governmental initiatives of stupendous proportions. When policy runs with the grain of capitalism-as it does with the automobile industry and the building trades and once did with the railroads-the full powers of a continental state can be mobilized.”

But preservationists supporting road projects? Thirty years of preservation, environmental, and social justice laws and battles have forced mitigation packages for road projects to include public goods that otherwise would go begging. This road project could cure a persistant blight, create new parks, increase the value of historic housing stock, revitalize traditional neighborhood shopping districts, and set off a virtuous spriral of investment. That seems like a good way to achieve preservation by non-traditional means.

National Trust Urges Buffalo to Reject Bass Pro

National Trust for Historic Preservation President Richard Moe, fresh from a visit to Buffalo in late June, has written Mayor Byron Brown, urging him reject a proposal for a Bass Pro megastore that would on the site of the historic Central Wharf. The wharf is part of Buffalo’s historic Canal District, the infrastructure of which was slated to have been completely reconstructed by this fall. A new Naval Museum, bowstring truss bridge, and a re-watered Commercial Slip have been completed, but all other work on the site, including a network of stone streets and a public park on Central Wharf, has been halted by state officials because of the Bass Pro proposal.

The National Trust joins a lengthening list of organizations voicing their opposition to Bass Pro and urging completion of the project as planned. The organizations include The Campaign for Greater Buffalo, Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper, The Preservation Coalition of Erie County, The Niagara Frontier Chapter of The Sierra Club, The League of Women Voters, and Voice Buffalo, a network of religious organizations.

In his June 13 letter, Moe praises the city’s “rich and diverse historic character,” and preservation-based development, which he saw as an invited guest of civic leaders hoping to snare the National Trust Annual Conference for 2011. The city is competing with Philadelphia and Hartford, with the National Trust expected to announce a site in October. Moe state’s that it is the Trust’s understanding that the heritage-based plan was “guiding the redevelopment until Bass Pro demanded the site right on the district’s waterfront,” and that the Trust does “not believe that the City should allow Bass Pro to consume such a critical and sensitive piece of waterfront property...Because it is totally out of keeping with the scale of and vision for the Erie Canal Harbor District, the proposal would needlessly defeat the great work underway to revitalize Buffalo’s waterfront, and the hopeful, inclusive planning process that preceded it.”

The Campaign for Greater Buffalo, which has led the fight to protect the Canal District and complete the 2004 Master Plan for the site, is grateful for the Trust’s support. “This affirms the national importance of the site and the interest of people far beyond Buffalo in the welfare of our part of the national heritage. The Trust’s slogan is “Protecting the Irreplaceable,” and that is certainly what we ought to do here,” says Campaign President Paul McDonnell.

Concerned about the Bass Pro/Benderson Proposal for Buffalo's Canal District? Here's who to write.

Letters count a lot more than emails or faxes. Write away!

The Buffalo News: Everybody’s Column, The Buffalo News, 1 News Plaza, Buffalo, NY 14240. Let the public know what you think!

Governor Elliot Spitzer via Laura Monte, Department of State, 65 Court St., Buffalo, NY 14202. ECHDC is a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), a state agency. The governor controls the boards of both.

Senator Chuck Schumer, 130 S. Elmwood Ave., #660, Buffalo, NY 14202. A lot of federal money and federal approvals are involved.

Congressman Brian Higgins, 726 Exchange St. #601, Buffalo, NY 14210. Biggest public advocate of Bass Pro proposal.

Mayor Byron Brown, 201 City Hall, Buffalo, NY 14202. Nothing bad happens UNLESS Mayor & Council transfer Canal District to ECHDC. Tell the mayor and council that should not happen.

The Buffalo Common Council, c/o City Clerk, 1308 City Hall, Buffalo, NY 14202. See above.

Bass Pro owner Johnny Morris, 2500 E Kearney, Springfield MO 65803-5048. Tell him Bass Pro is not welcome in Canal District.

Buffalo Must Not Sacrifice Its Rich Inheritance in Canal District

By Roy Mann, Senior Principal of The RiverStudio, author of the Erie Canal Heritage Waterfront Feasibility Study and Plan of 2000. This article appeared in slightly different form in The Buffalo News.

Big cities make big mistakes; great cities make few of them. That’s why they’re great – and stay that way.

The Bass Pro development plan is a grave error, based apparently on a conviction that sales tax revenue and the prestige of a national sports goods store will more than compensate for the loss of the treasures of the historic waterfront. Visions of public enjoyment of a transformed Central Wharf have been painted in rosy swatches. Intentions of homage to the city’s significant historic past have been warmly recited.

The problem is that the Bass Pro building and parking ramp will deaden the area, rather than enliven it. Retail stores close typically at 9:00 in the evening. Their storefronts and sides, particularly with big-box entities – where ground level street-edge floor areas are too valuable for the company to lease out to restaurants and such that cater to street pedestrian traffic – turn lifeless and discourage pedestrian circulation and interest. Parking structures, visible from and adjacent to the street, are even more detrimental. Not only are people disinterested in reaching restaurants, entertainment venues, and other evening offerings overshadowed by such realities, investors shy away from opening public-dependent businesses in their vicinities. Evening entertainment – which begins to live and breath at nine – has little chance at thriving.

Streetside pedestrian activity is not of real value to a sports goods store, where customers’ cars and trucks, essential in the carrying away of purchases, govern store planning.

One question that might have been asked: Could Buffalo achieve a comparable total sales tax revenue for the Canal District’s 12 acres by implementing the 2000 Erie Canal Heritage Waterfront Plan? Without running the numbers for this alternative, there is no way of knowing whether the Bass Pro plan is the best for Buffalo – in economic terms alone.

Contrary to Erie County Executive Joel Giambra’s statement on March 30 that the Bass Pro program “is very similar to the design standards that Roy Mann articulated in his (2000) plan,” the new design echoes the past only in a pale cosmetic sense. No one passing a big-box store with façade gestures to the 19th century will understand that the structure is a legacy of Buffalo’s storied past. The vastly more important potential of historic replication or simulation, with contemporary, economically profitable uses housed in buildings externally expressive of the structures of the old Canal District will have been wiped off the chalkboard. The foundations of those lost buildings have recently been exposed with the tantalizing promise of replication – or simulation, a promise that now seems about to be buried yet once again.

The old Canal District’s assets – Commercial Slip and its Bowstring Bridge, the traces of Prime Slip, Central Wharf, Prime Street, Hanover Street, and the Lackawanna’s railroad bed are not simply an aggregation of artifacts of interest to local preservationists. They are an American legacy, the focal point of mid- and late-19th century national growth, when the Erie Canal tied into the Great Lakes and two million hardy pioneers took the first leg of a journey that moved through prairie schooners to the saga of the nation’s entire western development. This is an adventure, if told in a Canal District that wears a convincing historic mantle – not false veneer, that will draw historic sightseers, tourists, weekenders, leisure-timers, diners, and shoppers from considerably farther than a simple two-hour driving radius. In our 2000 studies, we recognized the potential of a revitalized Erie Canal heritage waterfront to draw robust numbers of visitors from Cleveland, Toronto, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York City – and beyond. Support for downtown Buffalo’s dining, entertainment, retail, and hospitality sectors would be substantial.

The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 was signed into law after urban renewal bulldozed vast posterities in America’s cities in the post-war years – Buffalo among many others. Boston, rather than tear down its three decrepit Quincy Market buildings in the ‘60’s, elected to restore their exteriors and bring new retail and restaurant life to their interiors. The project’s chief proponent was, interestingly, a private developer, the first of a new wave of investors who grasped the great potential of historic areas to restore public confidence in older downtowns while meeting entrepreneurial aspirations. He was James Rouse and the Quincy Market conversion, named Faneuil Hall Marketplace, has taken its place in history as one of the most successful enterprises in the annals of American urban redevelopment.

Buffalo cannot restore the buildings of the old Canal District, razed to the ground in the 1900’s. Replication and simulation of the District’s structures at its peak are possible, however, and compatible both with historic site preservation and with the kind of dramatic economic transformation that a James Rouse might dream.

For Buffalo to sacrifice its inheritance, this legacy with a promising future based on a prodigious past, would be an unfathomable and costly mistake.

The Bass Pro Museum Scam

Unreported in the mainstream media is the fact that the public is going to be on the hook for $14.8 million to build a museum for Bass Pro in the Canal District as part of the Bass Pro/Benderson $130,000,000 subsidy package. The giveaway is being orchestrated by the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation (ECHDC, but it might as well be LOOTers, Leaders Of Our Town). One may recall that one of the chief benefits being hyped by Buffalo officials years ago regarding Bass Pro - a predatory retailer whose business model depends on public subsidy - was that the store would be so huge it would include a Great Lakes museum, for free.

Well, read the fine print. The "Pre Development Agreement" offered up by ECHDC (available for download in an earlier posting) includes a requirement that the museum be publicly financed. This so-called museum would be staffed not by professionals, but by Bass Pro employees. It is to be, in effect, a sales environment. The cost to the public also has an ongoing,  open-ended component: the public must make up any operating deficit the museum incurs. There are no ceilings or safeguards against abuse in the agreement. In other words, Bass Pro could not charge for admission, call all employment and utilities as operating expenses, deduct net profits of museum-generated sales, and stick the public with an annual bill. There is nothing stopping Bass Pro from hiring 20 people at $100,000 annually and claiming a $2,000,000 annual deficit on salaries alone.

It turns out this museum scam is not unique to Buffalo. It is a scam both Bass Pro and Cabela's, another hunting-and-fishing predatory retailer, have carried out in other towns and cities. In "Not Very Sporting: Outdoor Sporting Goods Retail Subsidy Scam" in the Sept/Oct 2006 Multi-National Monitor (http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2006/092006/leroy-sports.html), Greg LeRoy outlines Bass Pro's approach. Here's an excerpt:

Central to the business plans of Cabela’s and Bass Pro is their need to keep shoppers in the stores for a long time — to help some customers justify a long drive, no doubt — but mainly to maximize the size of their purchases. And a key to their success in keeping people in the stores for a long time is the creation of a pseudo-“museum” experience. The trouble is, these ersatz “museums” sprinkled throughout the stores are often built at the expense of taxpayers — and sometimes they are even owned by local governments!

The idea of a public “museum” existing as scattered fragments inside a big-box store violates the definition of a museum held by groups such as the Association of American Museums. Its definition calls for “a legally organized nonprofit organization or government entity” with “a formally stated and approved mission,” “paid professional staff,” and a “program of documentation, care and use of collections and/or objects.” It also contradicts the Association’s ethical guidelines for when a museum seeks support from business. Those guidelines call for “content control and integrity,” “avoidance of conflict of interest,” and a written, publicly accessible policy on business support.

Cabela’s and Bass Pro use a variety of legal gambits to structure these deals. In some cases, economic development subsidies are dedicated specifically to building the “museums.” For example, a tax increment financing package in Hooksett, New Hampshire included $4 million (out of $18 million total) for four “museum wings” at the corners of a new Cabela’s store. And Glendale Arizona’s $16.7 million package for Bass Pro included $10 million for the “museum,” aquarium and Conservation Mountain, [a display of stuffed animals].

Hazelwood, Missouri jacked up its tax on hotel guests — so that combined state and local taxes now exceed 18 percent — to help generate $5.82 million for a city-owned “museum” within a Cabela’s. One irate taxpayer wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “It is ironic that Hazelwood is paying Cabela’s $5 million to build a nature museum in a mall that was built on 500 acres of green space and about 50 acres of wetland. Before long, there won’t be any place left to use the stuff Cabela’s sells. Maybe we can take our new tent and cooler and go camping in the nature ‘museum.’”

In some cases, the company uses a state’s condominium law (enabling two entities to own pieces of the same property) to deed the “museum” part of the store over the local government. Since it is publicly owned, the “museum” part of the property is normally exempt from property taxes. This is reportedly the plan in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, where local officials approved a $23.5 million package for a Cabela’s, 15 percent of which is to be declared a tax-exempt “museum.”

In two recent cases, state legislators voted to amend state laws specially for the chains. The South Carolina state legislature overrode a vehement veto from Governor Mark Sanford, amending its tourism promotion act by extending subsidies to as many as four “extraordinary retail establishments” if they include “an aquarium or natural history exhibit or museum.” Governor Sanford was so incensed by the proposal, enacted for Cabela’s, that he mailed letters denouncing it to three dozen locally owned outdoor sporting goods retailers in the state, and he wrote legislators that it was a troubling precedent because the state had never before subsidized retail investment.

And in Ohio, the state legislature enacted a special “impact” retail subsidy for a proposed Bass Pro store in Rossford, though not by name. Instead, the law grants a lavish sales-tax rebate to a retailer that, among other things, dedicates at least 10 percent of its facility to “educational and exhibit activities.”

On top of the sales-tax rebate, Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) committed $1 million for the construction of an “outdoor education center” at the store. The money is to come from hunting and fishing license fees and from federal excise tax rebates.

A DNR spokeswoman notes that Ohio state law forbids the funds from subsidizing any retail operations, but “outdoor education” is another thing.

“They [Bass Pro] teach everything from nature interpretation to angling skills and hunting safety,” she says. Bass Pro says it will invite school groups and scout troops for field trips.

Buffalo Going after Shrinking Hunting and Fishing Market

There's Smart Growth, then there's Dumb Non-Growth. The Bass Pro/Benderson imbroglio in and around Buffalo's Canal District, composed of a $130,000,000 in upfront handouts for, among other things, a character-destroying big box Bass Pro proposed for what is planned to be a waterfront open space.

There is a long and sorry history of chuckleheaded projects in Buffalo and across the nation concocted by desperate politicians, greedy real estate developers, compliant bureaucrats and sharky consultants posing as "development" experts. Throw in cheering boosters in the mainstream media, and you get counter-productive, counter-intuitive projects.

The day after the March 30 meeting of the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation (ESHDC), which featured more spin than an F5 tornado, the NY Times published an article about the decades-long decline in fishing licenses ("Fish are Biting, but the Anglers Aren't"). In other words, our various governments, the city, county, state, and nation, are picking winners in a private market that is shrinking. The losers? The public that finances these crackpot schemes, and the Mom-and-Pop hunting and fishing stores, as well as chains which do not accept subsidies.

The Times article reports that fishing licenses have declined 20% from 1990 to 2005, even as the U.S. population continued a strong upward trend. Hunting licenses, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife statistics declined almost 8% in the same period. There are about twice as many fishing licenses issued in recent years than hunting licenses.

Download the "People's Plan" Under Construction that Bass Pro Threatens to Derail

The Bass Pro/Benderson debacle being shilled about by the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation (ESDC) is a gross abnegation of the public trust represented by the Final Supplemental Environmental  Impact Statement of the Erie Canal Harbor Project (signed by the Federal Transit Administration, the NFTA, and the parent of ECHDC, the Empire State Development Corporation), and its companion Master Plan. Can't remember all that? Just call it the People's Plan, because it was the result of a citizen-brought lawsuit and a judicially mandated and very inclusive public review process. Click on the link to download the master Plan that is being built right now, and click on the images to see sketches of what the Canal District could be.

Download Final_Master_Plan_Report.pdf

Fishy Business: Buffalo's Bass Pro/Benderson Deal Threatens Canal District

It is the sweetheart deal to end all sweetheart deals. On March 29, officials of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) subsidiary, the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation (ECHDC-falling asleep yet?), a public authority, announced an agreement to agree on fleecing the public by doling out well in excess of $100,000,000 in public money for a development project of big boxes and faux historic buildings that would obliterate almost half of the length of the historic Central Wharf and the rights-of-way of the Prime Slip and Prime Street, and eliminating the central public gathering space, all contrary to a hard-fought public consensus. That's just for starters.

The spin was embedded in the press release issued on March 29 and at the ECHDC board meeting the next day. For example, officials and politicians crowed that the public subsidy to Bass Pro, the chain of big box outdoors stores, was reduced by more than half, from an earlier announced $60,000,000 to "only $25,000,000." In fact, by the time all public upfront costs are toted up, they will likely exceed $120,000,000. And it's show-me-the-money money: all public funds are to be secured before Bass Pro or Benderson build anything. There is no similar demand put on the private interests.

Here's a preliminary list of public obligations based on "Pre-Development Agreement"€ between Bass Pro, Benderson Development and the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation (a public authority and subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation). Benderson Development will receive the Aud Block, Donovan Block, Webster Block and the entire development area of the Canal District for $10.00 (ten dollars); Bass Pro will receive a new building,  control of the Central Wharf and control of a new yacht basin, for nothing, for a minimum of 20 years. Benderson and Bass Pro must share area maintenance costs with ESDC, with Bass Pro's share not to exceed $300,000 annually. That $300,000 is to be paid to ECHDC, not the Business Improvement District agency empowered to mainatin the area, Buffalo Place, Inc. The pre-development deal calls for all of lower Main Street, including the Canal District, to be exempt from Buffalo Place charges.

As-yet  undetermined financial obligations
# Demolition of Donovan Building
# Site preparation on Central Wharf to include Bass Pro building pad and all utilities
# Demolition of Erie Canal Harbor Metrorail station
# Construction of new Metrorail station located one block south of existing Erie Canal Harbor Station*
# Provision of two surface parking lots to Bass Pro for customers with recreational vehicles

Open-ended undetermined financial obligations

# €œ"All necessary remediation, abatement, and removal work to be performed on the Aud and the Donovan Office Building as required for demolition."€

# Remediation of "any environmental conditions...necessary for development..."€
# Any additional incremental costs associated with contruction on Aud and Donovan sites as a result of the
Hamburg Drain

Stated and estimated costs: $95, 800,000
$25,000,000 Bass Pro store**
$14,800,000 Bass Pro museum**
$34,500,000 parking ramps***
$4,000,000 Benderson "tenant improvements"**
$7,500,000 Yacht basin at foot of Main Street to be made available to Bass Pro free of charge****
$10,000,000 Demolition of Memorial Auditorium*****

In addition, $46,500,000 will have been spent on public improvements in the Canal District by the end of this year.

Foregone revenue
# Difference between market value of Aud Block, Donovan Block, Webster Block, and Canal District blocks and the $10.00 received from Benderson Development.
# Difference between recreational, aesthetic, and social value of Central Wharf as public space and Central Wharf as non-revenue-producing private space.
# Sales taxes on construction of Bass Pro store
# Real estate taxes on Bass Pro store
# Sale or lease payments and real estate taxes on surface lots to be controlled by Bass Pro

*The current "Events-Only Station" on the site of the proposed new full-fledged station, was built with a $7,000,000 appropriation secured by former congressman Henry Nowak.
**Pre-Development Agreement
*** Estimated construction costs based on national and regional construction industry figures
**** Based on estimates for earlier, smaller “South Basin” and the relocation of Buffalo Sewer Authority pumping station.
***** ECHDC news release, 3/30/07.

This estimate is of 4/16/07.

Richardson and Olmsted’s Picturesque Masterpiece Threatened

The Buffalo Psychiatric Center (originally the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, then the Buffalo State Hospital) is the product one of the greatest artistic collaborations in the nation’s history. It is a work of one of the greatest architects America has produced, Henry Hobson Richardson, and the founder of the profession of landscape architecture in the United States, and its greatest practitioner, Frederick Law Olmsted.

The Buffalo Psychiatric Center was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and the buildings declared  a National Historic Landmark in 1986. That is not stopping Buffalo State College officials from trying to ram a wholly unsympathetic campus expansion project down the throats of an unsuspecting public. It features a largely windowless metal-clad box/blob combo by modernist starchitects Gwathmey/Siegal.

The Asylum, planned from 1871 to 1875, was produced with each man in his prime: Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux had recently designed New York’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and were at work on their seminal Buffalo park and parkway system. Richardson, of gargantuan physiognomy and talent, would be propelled by his Buffalo work to the front rank of American architects.

Richardson died in 1886, too soon to see the project through to completion. The western pavilions, erected in the 1890’s, followed his design. Outbuildings, including the Women’s Kitchen, summerhouse, greenhouse, and a male staff dormitory (destroyed), were designed by Buffalo’s own man of eminence, E.B. Green. A laundry building (destroyed) and a magnificent powerhouse (altered beyond recognition) were also designed by Richardson.
While the importance of Richardson and his contribution to the work is generally appreciated locally, Olmsted’s is not.  This is largely due to the depredations the landscape has suffered over the last 75 years, itself partly a function of the failure to understand the artistic inseparability of the landscape and buildings in this, one of the greatest works of the Picturesque built in America. Indeed, the work is locally known as the Richardson Complex, acknowledging the architecture alone.

The landscape has been mauled at every turn, and that has effected the perceived viability of the now-abandoned buildings and caused them to suffer. The landscape is seen as so much open land, available for roads, parking lots, and college construction and expansion. It is a story familiar to Buffalo: Olmsted’s grandest parkway, Humboldt, was destroyed in the 1950’s for highway construction, and Olmsted’s Front, Riverside, and Delaware, and Humboldt parks were severely compromised by highway construction. None of these incursions could have been built without the enthusiastic support of the community’s leadership.

Today, strenuous, expensive, and frustratingly slow efforts are being made across the city to mitigate the effects of those long-ago decisions and to reclaim our parks and heritage. It is not only highways which are targeted for removal: An unsympathetic building which blocked an important view was recently cleared in Front Park, and an apartment building — built to “save” the Darwin Martin House in the 1950’s — was recently bought and demolished as part of the restoration and reconstruction of that historic site, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, himself a disciple of Richardson.

Buffalo State College is presently seeking to expand the campus in a way that will do irreparable harm to a great cultural resource. It seeks to erect a massive building (larger in footprint than the original Albright Art Gallery, its 1962 addition, or Buffalo State College’s Rockwell Hall) of severely inappropriate style and materials within the bounds of Richardson and Olmsted’s great Picturesque collaboration.

The college is leaping over a physical and psychological barrier at an extraordinarily sensitive site: The intersection of the only remaining corridors in Olmsted’s grand scheme of green space for Buffalo. Building there will inflict severe historic, cultural, artistic, and aestheticdamage that cannot be undone. What this project needs is thorough public review and a vetting of ideas. There is $100,000,000 on the table, appropriated in 2004 by the state legislature, to both restore the Psychiatric Center’s historic resources and fund a Buffalo State College expansion. The implementation of the latter must not compromise the former.

This irreplaceable National Historic Landmark continues to deteriorate while Buffalo State College's plans, occurring in a vacuum with total disregard for the historic and cultural context, would destroy key elements of the Richardson/Olmsted collaboration and jeopardize the restoration of Olmsted’s grand vision of a continuous swath of green space from Grant Street to Main Street

The beginnings of the Buffalo State Hospital lay in Olmsted’s vision of shaping the city through the physical conjoining of three institutions into one thematic Picturesque whole. The first piece was Forest Lawn cemetery, a very large large exemplar of the rural cemetery movement, designed in the Picturesque aesthetic in the 1850’s. The second was a 350-acre tract of land that would be the city’s main park, again in the rural style (this phrase had greater recognition in the United States than its kin, picturesque). The third, if Olmsted and his local patron — district attorney, businessman, and political artist William Dorsheimer — could manage it, would be a scenic rural asylum. Olmsted thought the synergies of pooling the open space of the three institutions were obvious.

As Alex & Tatum state in Calvert Vaux, Architect & Planner (New York, 1994), “The choice of the park site in north Buffalo was a considered one, between two large adjacent green areas, Forest Lawn Cemetery and the grounds of the State Insane Asylum, intending to preserve for Buffalo an extensive, permanent rural area.”

Dorsheimer engineered an offer by the City of Buffalo of over 200 acres of land for the State Hospital on the condition the hospital commissioners located the institution where Olmsted and Dorsheimer wanted it. In late 1869, at a meeting held in the offices of the Buffalo Parks Commission, of which Dorsheimer was a member, the hospital commissioners accepted the offer.

This was a very significant act, for the local commissioners of the asylum contravened the locational guidelines of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII), which the commissioners themselves had adopted as “the proper basis upon which the different sites should be considered and the final determination made.” Asylums, according to the AMSAII, should be located not in a city, but in the countryside.
In his history of the Buffalo State Hospital, The Eclipse of the State Mental Hospital (Albany, 1996) George Dowdall writes: “Why did the commissioners violate the first and simplest of the AMSAII propositions? Their decision was not a simple miscalculation of the direction that Buffalo’s growth would take, but quite the opposite. The asylum commissioners were meeting in the offices of the Buffalo Park Commission, just then embarking on a dramatic intervention in shaping Buffalo’s growth...

“The answer can be found by examining Olmsted’s plan for Buffalo...The plan’s title refers to both a ‘Park System’ and a ‘General Plan of the City.’ The ‘State Insane Asylum’ was intended to be part of both. The Asylum is on the north end of Richmond Avenue...which links several of Olmsted’s major circles. Its grounds are the west border of Buffalo’s largest park...”

Buffalo’s business class, embodied in Dorsheimer, was very consciously creating civic institutions meant to last in perpetuity. As Dowdall says, as “an observer noted at the ceremony laying its cornerstone, the Asylum was viewed as an important part of the social development of the city of Buffalo: ‘The decade of years from 1870 to 1880 will stand in the future annals of the city as an epoch in which a spirit of enterprise...sprang into full life and vigor, and by the inception of grand schemes of public improvement, convinced the public mind that the growth and prosperity of the city depended upon the successful forwarding of works designed to benefit, instruct, and amuse all classes of citizens...’ Olmsted could not have said it better himself.

By early 1871, Dorsheimer further had engineered the selection of the young architect Richardson to design the buildings of the asylum, in collaboration with Olmsted. It was city-shaping on a majestic scale: together with Delaware Park and Forest Lawn, the asylum constituted over 800 acres of artfully designed meadow, wood, lake and stream.

The asylum was a scenic composition, one in which the architecture and landscape are inseparable. It was conceived so, as perhaps the American culmination of the Picturesque, which started in England in the late 1700’s. However spellbinding Richardson’s buildings are, they were but a component of a larger scheme. It is a tragedy that we experience them in isolation, reduced. Unless and until the Olmsted landscape is restored and reconstructed, we shall be denying ourselves a civic treasure of untold value. Buffalo State College, in its willful ignorance, threatens a key component of this composition, one whose importance has only increased with time.

The interplay of buildings with landscape was central to the Picturesque aesthetic. As the movement’s codifier, Sir Uvedale Price, set down in his influential Essays on the Picturesque (London, 1793), in the introduction to his Essay on Architecture an Buildings as Connected with Scenery, “Ornamental Gardening is so connected with Architecture and Buildings of every kind, that I am led to make some remarks on that subject also: at the same time I must acknowledge with respect to architecture, that I have never made it my study as a separate art, but only as connected with scenery...” Price then proceeds for more than 200 pages to define the Picturesque as the melding of architecture and landscape.

As architecture and landscape were deemed of a piece, it was natural that landscape designers sought partnerships with architects from the beginning. Humphrey Repton, an English landscape designer and theorist whom Olmsted read closely along with Price, for a time partnered with the noted architect John Nash. Repton was among England’s greatest landscape gardeners (the term landscape architect came into use with Olmsted after the Civil War). Nash, for his part, “made it his business to purvey the Picturesque on a wide scale and in a manageable form,” according to David Watkin, in The English Vision, The Picturesque in Architecture and Landscape Design (New York, 1982). Repton himself, says Watkin, “was more keenly aware than [mid-18th century landscape gardener Capability] Brown had been that architecture was, as he put it, ‘an inseparable and indispensible auxiliary’ to landscape gardening.”
Advancing the unity of architecture and landscape in America was Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852), a landscape designer whose Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841), and Cottage Residences; Or a Series of Designs for Rural Cottages, and Cottage Villas and their Gardens and Grounds (1844), among others, are still in print.

Downing was friends with the prolific Scottish designer and author J.C. Loudon, who published collections of Repton’s writings in the 1840’s. Downing met the young architect Calvert Vaux on a recruiting mission to England in 1850 and brought him back to Newburgh, NY as a partner. Downing died in a steamboat racing explosion in 1852 and Vaux continued Downing’s practice until moving to New York in 1857. A year later, entering the competition to design Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Vaux sought out Olmsted as a partner. That year the new partners also entered, and won, the completion to design New York’s Central Park. This partnership of architect and landscape architect was to last 20 years, with a 2-year interregnum while Olmsted went to California to supervise a large landholding.
In Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux achieved what some would call the “picturesque dream of architecture growing out of the soil” with Vaux’s designs for the Belvedere and other structures.

Olmsted’s work with Richardson was not a formal partnership. Rather, each man was part of a team of two. They were to collaborate on several “picturesque dreams” until Richardson’s death. None even approached the Buffalo project in size. One of the signature features of the Buffalo work is the manner in which the Medina sandstone and brick buildings spring directly from the earth, with no intervening pavement or contrasting foundation. The great chocolate-colored, rough-faced cliffs of stone found their only counterpoints in nature. Olmsted and Richardson demonstrated that lithic monumentalism could also be indelibly romantic and characteristically American. The asylum was a fusion of the manmade with nature, not a subjugation of nature by man.

The Picturesque principals that Richardson first put into practice at Buffalo ran through his later influential work on railroad stations, Shingle Style houses, and small libraries and civic buildings. This has been recognized only rather recently. “Beginning in 1955 with Vincent Scully’s The Shingle Style, in which the New England domestic design of the 1870s and 1880s was recognized as a unique phenomenon in which form draws upon intimate linkage between architecture and landscape, Richardson’s work has come to be viewed as seminal to this process, ”  writes Margaret Henderson Floyd in Henry Hobson Richardson: A Genius for Architecture (New York, 1998). Henderson continues:.” The architect’s exposure to the culture of the American landscape through his friend and mentor Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) has thus been established as one generative force behind his design psyche...”

So, one had three ambitious men, masters of the arts of politics, architecture, and landscape, setting about founding great institutions meant to endure in perpetuity for the purpose of advancing democratic ideals and the city itself.  While dozens of such institutions were being built across the country in the first wave of professionalized public treatment of the mentally ill, and Olmsted often wrote of the therapeutic value of designed landscapes, Olmsted got the opportunity to only work on five.  Olmsted prepared the planting plan for the asylum in 1874. Another copy was requested by the asylum commissioners in 1877 and sent by Olmsted. It is the only plan created and signed by Olmsted that survives.

Indeed, it is the only such plan which was definitely built. A fortuitous discovery of large-format prints of a 1927 aerial survey of Erie County confirmed, in March of 2006, that Olmsted’s plan was, indeed, implemented, and that parts of it survive to the present day.

Richardson and Olmsted’s preliminary plan of 1871 was completed in great fidelity by 1895. It consisted of roughly two halves. The southern half contained the main buildings with their attendant parklands, while the northern half contained farmland. The whole was contained by a landscaped circumferential carriage drive that ran along Elmwood Avenue to Scajacquada Creek and then southward to the parkland south of main buildings once again. Olmsted described his intent in his 1871 report to the asylum commissioners, “A road is also proposed to cross the property from East to West, back of the buildings, from which branches would communicate with the various outbuildings, and with the administration court. All the grounds north of this is proposed to be enclosed by a ring fence for tillage and hay fields. The park and all the border ground on each side of the circuit road between the tillage ground and the boundary or the creek might thus be kept permanently in turf and pastured. The whole would also form a pleasure ground...”

Examination of the 1927 aerial photograph shows some changes to accommodate growth in the institution. The reception function was removed to a large freestanding building oriented to Elmwood Avenue in the late 19th- or early 20th century. The intersecting hipped roofs of its southern pavilion provided an appropriate transition with the Richardson buildings. The new Reception Building was set back between two branches of Olmsted roadway, sufficiently far from Elmwood to retain the park-like aspect Olmsted intended. The larger circuit drive, however, was interrupted by this time, having become the public Scajacquada Parkway along the creek. The section along much of the western edge of the asylum was also removed, possibly to accommodate the mechanization of the farm operations. A smaller circuit remained, however, combining Olmsted’s East-West road with the intact portions of the original carriage circuit sketched out in 1871.

Large changes, however, were in the offing. In 1919 Buffalo’s Commissioner of Public Works proposed an “Educational Center” for the asylum’s farmland. The Education center was to house an expanded State Normal School (which was outgrowing its, again, its building on Jersey Street), an elementary school, high school, vocational school, and a State Normal Vocational School.

By 1928, construction had begun on the State Normal School, which was to become Buffalo State College. The first four college buildings were opened in 1931, including Rockwell Hall, which was built closer to Elmwood Avenue than the rambling Reception Building it replaced.  Rockwell Road was rather crudely laid out rigidly east-west, which was to become the psychic border between what was now called the Buffalo State Hospital and the college. 

This had serious consequences for Olmsted’s landscape, as examination of a 1957 aerial photo mosaic reveals. A new Reception Building had to be built for the State Hospital. Architecturally it referenced Richardson’s nearby pavilions and displayed fine brickwork, but it broke with Olmsted’s building orientation by adopting an orthogonal stance and matching Rockwell Hall’s reduced, though still generous, Elmwood Avenue setback.

Shortly thereafter, a massive Medical-Surgical Building was erected south of the new Reception Building. This building was of cookie-cutter design, matching buildings erected at other state hospitals at the time. It was placed in what must have seemed a logical spot: the open space of Olmsted’s great meadow. It was demolished recently, although no attempt has been made to landscape the resulting open space, let alone restore its Olmstedian features.
The Medical-Surgical Building also resulted in two very large parking lots being built atop Olmsted’s grand carriage circuit, destroying its coherence. These lots remain, and in fact have been expanded.  The carriage road north and south of the lots, which evidence suggests was of crushed stone, was either allowed to become grown over or was covered with soil and seeded, leaving a grassy meander between the groves of mature trees that survived. A new roadway, placed tightly around Richardson’s male (eastern) pavilions, was built to maintain the ability to drive around the grounds.

The late 1950’s saw the Scajacquada Parkway destroyed for an eponymous expressway, removing the last piece of the Olmsted landscape north of Rockwell Road. On the Psychiatric Center grounds, the intrusive and unsympathetic Strozzi Building was erected west of the Medical-Surgical Building in the early 1960’s. In 1969, in a tragic loss for American architecture, the three easternmost pavilions (Men’s buildings C, D, and E) of Richardson’s main building were destroyed. Buildings C and D were replaced by mostly single-story structures that in their orientation, form, and and materials were wholly unsympathetic with not only the remaining Richardson buildings, but every other building around them, to say nothing of the landscape. The site of Building E was simply covered with dirt and seeded with grass. Medina sandstone foundation remnants were visible at the surface in the summer of 2006.

Also in the late 1960’s, Richardson’s muscular powerhouse was cruelly altered, and other buildings were abandoned and allowed to fall into disrepair, including Andrews Hall and E.B. Green’s Men’s dormitory and Women’s Kitchen. Since 1974, the Richardson buildings were abandoned, save for the Administration Building. That was abandoned in 1994. Finally, Buffalo State College was permitted in the 1970’s to pave a very large portion of the former Women’s Garden and farmlands for student parking negatively effecting the views of the grounds from the northwest.

What was happening at the Buffalo Psychiatric Center and Buffalo State College in the postwar period was unique only in its particulars. The indiscriminate destruction of America’s built environment through Urban Renewal and highway construction led directly to the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and national and state registers of historic places.

Protection of historic resources in New York State was strengthened by the State Environmental Quality Review Act. These laws were meant to protect sites such as the Buffalo State Asylum, which, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.. The buildings by Richardson were further declared a National Historic Landmark in 1984. That is  the highest honor and greatest protection the United States offers.

It is then disturbing to realize that Buffalo State College and other state bodies have planned an expansion of the Buffalo State campus south of Rockwell Road, in the area that was Olmsted’s forested grove, and that has by attrition become the very nexus of Olmsted’s grand vision of 1871 as the only remaining link between the parkland of the original asylum and Delaware Park and Forest Lawn beyond. Buffalo State’s declaration that no public review or comment is necessary to proceed with its expansion because no environmental resource of consequence will be harmed by their action is preposterous.

The project as it stands not only would irretrievably destroy the last fragile tendril connecting Olmsted’s grand system together, it would allow a building to be built that is brutally ignorant of its physical and historic context and woefully inadequate to the high standards of Olmsted and Richardson. Without a front door or so much as a window on the Elmwood Avenue (eastern) elevation, and with nothing but blank wall and metal louvers facing the Elmwood community to the south, the present design has raised public concern on urban design grounds as well. Picturesque it isn’t.

Without public review, there would be no opportunity for improving the project in a way that gives Buffalo State College the facilities it desires while allowing the orderly reconstruction of the publicly owned historic resources that are already funded and making a lasting contribution to a better urban environment. There will be no opportunity to redress the loss of mature trees on the site.

After construction of the proposed expansion, there will be no historic remnants preserved, subsurface or surface, on the project site. All of the historic resources on the site and the views to and from the site will be destroyed.
The varied views of the buildings through foreground, middle ground, and distant landscape elements are at the very core of Olmsted and Richardson’s collaboration. To destroy a key vantage point is to irretrievably change the art itself.

Lastly, without public review, we must forego forever the opportunity to meaningfully reconstruct what is now a virtually missing element: the Olmsted landscape. We would be throwing away a chance for a great public park, one that would not only serve the Upper West Side, which needs it, but would increase considerably the marketability and viability of the Richardson buildings themselves.

This Richardson Park is the “big picture” resource that needs to be built. Everything else should be made subsidiary and harmonious with it.