GreaterBuffaloBlog

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.

A Vision to Restore an Olmsted Landscape, Repair Richardson, E.B. Green buildings: Richardson Park

It is not often that a community gets $100,000,000 to spend on civic improvements. That happened two years ago last month, the state legislature approved, and the governor signed, a budget bill that allocated funds for the restoration of the Richardson 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. Yet in those two years, little of that money has been spent, and this irreplaceable national resource continues to deteriorate.

The governor has recently appointed an advisory committee to recommend what should happen on the site. The committee should begin by recognizing the primacy of the historical, cultural, and architectural legacy of the property and help set up a non-profit corporation devoted its restoration, similar to the Martin House Restoration Corporation and the Central Terminal Restoration Corporation (It can hardly happen another way: as a National Historic Landmark, no state or federal funds, regulatory powers, or policies can be used which would harm the property).

Time’s wasting: last summer a significant building by E.B. Green became a victim of “demolition by neglect,” walls of Richardson’s brick buildings are actually breached and falling down, and plans are being made which jeopardize the restoration of Olmsted’s grand vision of a continuous swath of green space from Grant Street to Main Street.

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 the architects report, 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? A proven model is a public-private entity that would carry out improvements over time, and to make the operation self-sustaining and tax-paying. Worth examining are the Presidio, a sprawling former Army base with a collection of historic buildings and landscapes in San Francisco, and the former Hudson Valley Psychiatric Center, which has just 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 bird's eye view of a Richardson Park concept appears at left. This concept accomodates a new Burchfield-Penney Art Center on the foot print of Richardson's demolished Men's Ward E (in white, along the ring road on the right)

Above all, no planning or construction can go forward without the public review mandated by the State Environmental Quality Review Act. This is the only way the public gets a legitimate chance to make deliberative decisions and explore all “prudent and feasible” alternatives. (left, Buffalo State College's campus expansion is highlighted in blue, while the footprint of the Burfield-Penney building itself is in black). The present proposed expansion of Buffalo State College has not been publicly reviewed.

Olmsted and Richardson were giants. Restoring their vision, standing on their shoulders, we can be giants, too.
                                                                                                                                                                            --Tim Tielman

The Big Dig: Campaign for Greater Buffalo seeks Volunteers for Largest Ever Artifact Recovery Operation WNY

Unless the public can rescue them, thousands of historic artifacts taken from the terminus of the Erie Canal in downtown Buffalo will be crushed under the tracks of bulldozers at the Town of Tonawanda landfill. The Campaign for Greater Buffalo is undertaking an all-out, all-volunteer public effort called the Big Dig to recover as many artifacts as possible.

The event is to take place on Saturday August 12 and Sunday August 13, 2006 from 9am to 4pm and is open to those 12 and older. Participants will be able to take an artifact home. There is a $5.00 registration fee.

Volunteers are being urged to bring gloves, sunscreen, water bottles, leaf and garden rakes, shovels, and bottle and dish scrubbers. Individuals and groups wishing to volunteer must contact the Campaign at 716-884-3138 or C4GB@aol.com to register. Volunteers will be assigned a two-hour shift.

The operation will consist of recovering, cleaning, sorting the artifacts, most of which will consist of oyster shells, bottles, ceramic dishes and jugs, and small metal articles. The artifacts were deposited between 1825, when the canal opened, and 1926, when the Commercial Slp was filled after construction of a large storm drain in its bed.
There is a need for empty liqour boxes to hold recovered bottles, and newspapers and small boxes to protect miscellaneous fragile objects.

Donations to sustain the volunteers are also being sought, from portable toilets to hot dogs and hamburgers and people to grill them.

Artifacts will be collected for later display at the Canal District and elsewhere

Over 200 dumptruck loads of artifact-rich debris has been dumped.

The Campaign for Greater Buffalo found out about the proposed disposal last autumn and was unsuccessful in getting an agreement with Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) officials to do the recovery operation on-site.

Historic Washington St. Houses Threatened by Allen St. Extension Plans

The Buffalo News reported today that the corporation that runs the Buffalo medical campus between the Fruitbelt and Allentown has acquired four houses on Washington Street for the purposes of demolishing them and extending Allen Street eastward into the medical campus to Ellicott Street. The sloppily reported story claimed "officials" had launched the plan three years ago and that the houses, nos. 945, 941, 933, and 929 Washington St.—as well as, apparently, the vacant lot at 927 Washington, the site of the controversial demolition of the Anna Beck House several years ago—"are directly aligned with what would be an extended Allen Street." That is, in fact, not the case. (Click on photomap below). The houses run south of where an extension of Allen would intersect with Washington, which runs perpendicular to Allen Street.

Image to left shows the site. Bottom left is 929 Washington, bottom right is the existing streetscape, photographed from the existing walkway connecting Main Street with Oak Street (Click on the images to enlarge). Building a roadway will require demolishing the current Allen St. transit station and building a new one. Total cost is unknown, although it is reported that $100,000 will be spent on a feasibility study and $6 million on design work and "initial construction." It is unknown what else the money can be used for if the feasibility study proves the roadway infeasible, or even what the objective and public benefit of the project would be, other than to create a another vehicular  "gateway" for the complex, which stretches from Virginia Street north to East North Street, and from Michigan Avenue west to Washington Street. Also unknown is whether the gateway objective could be met with an enhanced pedestrian corridor and the containment or elimination of parking lots, which contribute to the general blight and dehumanizing nature of the streets within the complex, discouraging pedestrian activity and integration into the surrounding neighborhoods.

The Campaign for Greater Buffalo opposes the demolition of these historic houses. It is planning to hold a public meeting and site visit soon. Details to come. Interested in saving these houses and improving the way the medical campus is integrated into Allentown and the Fruit Belt? Call The Campaign at 716-884-3138.

 

Good News on Cyrus Eidlitz's Webb Building

With his public announcement last week that he has a purchase agreement with Carl Paladino for the historic Webb Building on lower Pearl Street, developer Rocco Termini may perhaps thwart the demolition that Paladino has sought for years, and restore a great building on what is a unique streetscape in Buffalo and perhaps the nation. The Webb, at 90-92 Pearl Street is perhaps the finest, and one of the last, examples in the city of the Richardsonian Romanesque applied to commercial buildings. It is also the last remaining Buffalo work by the prominent New York City architect Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz. Termini hopes to convert it to a mixed use building, with ground floor commercial and upper floor residential space. He must first repair the damage Paladino wrought, and the city turned a blind eye to, by allowing rainwater to flow through the building for years.

The Webb Building was commissioned in 1888 by Marine Bank chairman and business titan Jewett M. Richmond (1830-1899) and was completed the following year. The brick and stone structure is a fine example of an arcaded building, in which the elevation is articulated by grouping the windows beneath a series of arches. (H.H. Richardson, of course, fathered this style. His 1886-87 Ames Building in Boston is, similar to the Webb Building, rendered in brick. Also in both, the arches rise the entire height of the office floors, and, according to architectural historian Vincent Scully, “it is only a step to Sullivan’s most advanced skyscraper, the Guaranty, in Buffalo, of 1895.” How fortunate Buffalo then is to have this building situated, like an illustration in a timeline, on Pearl Street between the Civil War-era structures to the south and Louis Sullivan’s great Guaranty Building to the north, comprehensible in one glance.

In geography and chronology, not only does the Webb Building point the way to the Guaranty, it stands at the head of a row of earlier Italianate structures. To its north, beyond a parking lot, stands Green & Wicks’s Dun Building of 1894. a skyscraper in height, if not style. Then, on the next block, the Guaranty. Buffalo is the only city in which a person can stand in one spot and take in the march of architecture and technology from pattern-book commercial buildings with load-bearing walls to the first pure skyscraper. The Webb Building is pivotal in many ways to that story and the future of Pearl Street and lower downtown.

Late 19th century commercial structures of this description are still common in New York City, but most of those built in Buffalo during the same period were destroyed during the Urban Removal period, which for Buffalo lasted into the 1980's (some would argue it still carried on, in a kind of cold war mode, as a means to fund local development agencies. See the J.N. Adam coverage below). Architect Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz (1853-1921), was the son of Leopold Eidlitz (one of the most important American architects of the mid-19th century), who along with Richardson was responsible for the redesign of the state capitol in Albany in the 1870's. The prolific younger Eidlitz was most noted for the 1896 New York City Bar Association and the New York Times building of 1903-1904, for which Times Square was named. 

In Buffalo, Cyrus Eidlitz triumphed over none other than Richardson himself in the 1884 competition to design a grand civic library for Lafayette Square. The magnificent Buffalo Library was tragically demolished in 1961. (Richardson's design placed second to Eidlitz’s Richardsonian design.) Eidlitz also designed the Iroquois Hotel (1887), a commanding hostelry which stood at Main and Eagle until the 1940s. His star could not have been brighter when Richmond hired him to design the Webb (named for a principal tenant). The supervising architect for all three of Eidlitz's Buffalo buildings was August C. Esenwein, one of the city's leading architects of that era.

The destruction of the Webb Building would have been a great architectural loss to a city that has already lost far too much of its priceless inheritance. Pounding it to dust would have been rued by the general public and all those who cherish heritage and its tourism potential. Will Buffalo’s establishment, now howling to get the J.N Adam (AM&A’s) buildings demolished, ever learn? The Webb Building, if it indeed joins the string of downtown buildings being converted to residential, may yet stand as another example of good things coming to those who wait.

Character of charming Coe Place threatened as Belmont Shelter seeks demo of Ward House

Coe Place is one of Buffalo’s distinctive but overlooked streets. Only one block long, it is lined by tall and narrow Victorian houses on 28-foot lots. Together with a narrow street width, the house rows form a quaint, well-defined streetscape unique in the city. The Hamilton Ward House, at 19 Coe Place, has current pride of place as the anchor house on the south side of the street, which runs west to east between Main and Ellicott streets. It was constructed in 1891 by skating rink operator and Coe Place founder George Chadeayne. With an engaged tower extending a full three stories, it is the most distinctive house on a distinctive block.

The Ward House has been vacant for a number of years but is in solid condition. It is threatened with demolition. The Belmont Shelter Corporation bought it at a recent auction for, reportedly, $3,000. It plans to demolish the house, which abuts the corporation’s parking lot.

The house was once owned by Hamilton Ward, Jr. (1871-1932), a prominent Republican politician who served as New York State Attorney General from 1928 to 1930. He was the only Republican to be elected to statewide office at the time Franklin Roosevelt was elected governor, and was a prominent Buffalo citizen for decades. He was a veteran of the Spanish American War, and the founder of Spanish War Veterans in 1906 and was its first national commander. He delivered the address at the city’s memorial service in honor of President William McKinley at Central Presbyterian Church in September of 1902, one year after the president’s assassination. Ward’s father, Hamilton Ward, Sr., also served as Attorney General in the 19th century, and was a member of the House of Representatives (he drafted the letters of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson in 1868).

A prominent conservationist, Ward was instrumental in founding Allegany State Park. He also founded the Erie County Parks Commission in 1924, was its first chairman, and was the primary mover in establishing Como Lake, Chestnut Ridge, Emery, and Ellicott Creek parks.

Ward’s son, Hamilton Ward III, served as a judge in the New York State Supreme Court from 1946 to 1960, and was the Administrative Judge of the 8th District from 1962 to 1966.

The Hamilton Ward house is the most prominent and conspicuous structure in a compelling and historic streetscape. Coe Place was built as a private enclave in 1890 and 1891 by George Chadeayne, who turned to real estate development after his skating operation on the site failed. The current roadway was once a private, brick-paved path, constructed by 1889. The houses are all single-family Queen Annes on narrow and shallow lots. Those on the south side, including the Ward House, utilize material from the demolished skating rink. The compactness of the lots helps create the unique flavor and sense of place.

The neighborhood around Coe Place is the target of major upcoming public investments, including a $16 million artists’ loft project, Artspace, financed by the City in the former Buffalo Electric Vehicle Company building on the corner of Main. As part of the spin off of that effort, the City is planning significant improvements along Coe Place, including a reconstruction of the street in brick in a distinctive herringbone pattern. The City anticipates a significant impact on housing rehabilitation on Coe Place once the Artspace project is completed in early 2007. The Hamilton Ward House would be a likely recipient of that anticipated spin-off.

Coe Place would qualify as a local landmark district under several criteria. The Queen Annes of Coe Place, constructed by a single builder in a span of two building seasons, form one of the best stylistically consistent bodies of architecture in Buffalo. The Hamilton Ward House, in particular, exemplifies the historic, aesthetic, heritage and cultural characteristics of the city, and is identified with a person who significantly contributed to Buffalo’s development.

Belmont Shelter, contacted by a concerned citizen, has reportedly offered to sell the house for what is has spent on it, but has attached a deadline of one week to find a buyer and close a deal. The Campaign for Greater Buffalo is offering to broker a sale to a sympathetic buyer, but without any ultimatum. Saving buildings is a methodical and often serendipitous process, and inisisting on arbitrary timelines severly limits the market for a given property. The Ward House deserves better. Breaking up the streetscape, especially on the edges of the block where 19 Coe is located, would negatively effect the street’s irreplaceable character.
                                                                                                                               —CHRIS HAWLEY

Richardson going Nowhere Fast.

By Tim Tielman
Eighteen months ago there was so much hope for the Richardson Complex. After two tries, Governor Pataki submitted, and the Legislature approved, an $80 million plan to save the largest building H.H. Richardson ever designed, plus grounds by Frederick Law Olmsted and outbuildings by E.B. Green. This was only accomplished after community pressure and a law suit against the state.
Now it appears that the complex will go through yet another winter of crumbling without so much as a dime spent on stabilizing and repairing the collapsing walls and roofs. Passing a budget item and actually spending the the money are two different things, and it looks increasingly like neither the Governor or the Legislature has any intention of spending money on anything but the central Administration buildings and the stone pavilions. The brick pavilions and outbuildings can continue to rot and fall down. Or burn down, as E. B. Green’s beautiful Men’s Home of 1895, did on June 10. Next? Green’s last standing building on the site, the Community Store. Is the old policy of benign neglect still in force? Assemblyman Sam Hoyt perhaps said as much, when he stated that “you can’t save everything.”

The Campaign files Lawsuit to Protect Elk Market area of Old First Ward from Seneca Casino Complex. 2nd H-O- Mill Building Demo began on Christmas Eve.

By Tim Tielman
The Campaign for Greater Buffalo History, Architecture & Culture is joining the Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County in its lawsuit against the U.S. Secretary of the Interior and others to prevent the construction of a Seneca Nation casino complex in the Old First Ward neighborhood of Buffalo. Other plaintiffs include residents and business people from the Old First Ward and the Cobblestone Historic District. Campaign President Richard Berger crafted two of the five complaints, those dealing with historic preservation and environmental protection.The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday, January 3. The Campaign seeks to halt further demolition at the Seneca’s chosen site, nine acres of land east of the Cobblestone District in what was Buffalo’s first wholesale meat and produce market, the Elk Street Market, dating to the 1850’s. The Senecas began demolition of a brick and steel mill of the historic H-O Oats complex on Dec. 8. Despite the best efforts of The Campaign, the filing comes too late to stop the demolition of the second mill on the site, a reinforced concrete building from 1928 that The Campaign regarded as particularly important to save. Demolition of that building began on Saturday, December 24, Christmas Eve. Courts were closed that day, Christmas, and Monday, Dec. 26. By Tuesday the demolition was well advanced and irreversible.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, seeks to have the action of the Secretary of the Interior and other federal officials that approved the incorporation of the site into the territory of the Seneca Nation of Indians declared null and void and enjoin them from proceeding with any activities on the site until they have complied with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), and the Indian Regulatory Gaming Act (IGRA). The plaintiffs are challenging the action of the defendants which effectively allows the construction of a gambling casino on lands of historic significance without appropriate environmental review or historic consultation and in violation of NEPA, NHPA and IGRA.

The National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act are the bedrock laws that protect historic resources across the nation. As such, The Campaign is seeking an order directing the Secretary of the Interior and other federal officials to perform immediately their non-discretionary duties under NEPA and NHPA, as well as IGRA.

The Campaign efforts in the lawsuit are focused on violations to the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act which are having a negative effect on the historic and cultural resources. The decision of the Secretary of the Interior approving the application of the Seneca Nation to include the Elk Market site in its territory and to permit the development of a gambling casino was a major federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment, and therefore required the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement.

The National Environmental Policy Act requires that all agencies of the Federal government include in every recommendation or report on major Federal actions a detailed statement by the responsible official, including a statement as to the environmental impact of the proposed action, any adverse environmental effects which cannot be avoided should the proposal be implemented, and alternatives to the proposed action. In particular, NEPA requires that the Environmental Impact Statement discuss the impact of the alternatives on cultural or historic resources.

The Secretary of the Interior and other defendants have failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. The defendants issued no assessment of the potential environmental effects of the demolition of the H-O Oats grain elevator and mill, nor of the construction and operation of a gambling complex on the Elk Market site. No comprehensive historic, archeological, or architectural survey of the area, the site of Buffalo’s first wholesale food market and its associated streets and buildings, has been undertaken. No draft environmental impact statement was prepared for the project, and the public and governmental agencies were not afforded the opportunity to comment on the project’s environmental effects, nor were alternative sites considered as required by NEPA.

In addition to the violation of NEPA, The Campaign also is concerned with violations to the National Historic Preservation Act. Section 106 of the Act requires the head of any federal agency having direct or indirect jurisdiction or licensing authority over a proposed Federal or federally assisted undertaking, prior to the approval of the expenditure of any Federal funds thereon, or the issuance of any federal license therefore, to take into account the effect of the undertaking on any district, site, building, structure or object that is included or eligible for inclusion on the National Register. The Secretary of the Interior and other federal officials have failed and refused to comply with the requirements.
The NHPA specifically includes Indian tribes within the jurisdiction of the Act.

16 U.S. C. 470-1 “It shall be the policy of the Federal Government, in cooperation with other nations and in partnership with the States, local governments, Indian tribes, and private organizations and individuals to—
use measures, including financial and technical assistance, to foster conditions under which our modern society and our prehistoric and historic resources can exist in productive harmony and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations;
provide leadership in the preservation of the prehistoric and historic resources of the United States and of the international community of nations and in the administration of the national preservation program in partnership with States, Indian tribes, Native Hawaiians, and local governments; ……..
(6) assist State and local governments, Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations and the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States to expand and accelerate their historic preservation programs and activities.”
Pursuant to 16 U.S.C. §470(a)(d) the Secretary is authorized to “establish a program and promulgate regulations to assist Indian tribes in preserving their particular historic properties.”

The Secretary of the Interior and other federal officials violated the NHPA by failing to consult with the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation as required prior to permitting the Buffalo site to be incorporated into the Territory of the Seneca Nation:
“The head of any Federal agency having direct or indirect jurisdiction over a proposed Federal or federally assisted undertaking in any State and the head of any Federal department or independent agency having authority to license any undertaking shall, prior to the approval of the expenditure of any Federal funds on the undertaking or prior to the issuance of any license, as the case may be, take into account the effect of the undertaking on any district, site, building, structure, or object that is included in or eligible for inclusion in the National Register. The head of any such Federal agency shall afford the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation established under part B of this subchapter a reasonable opportunity to comment with regard to such undertaking.”

The nine-acre site proposed for the Seneca gambling complex is in the Old First Ward of Buffalo, where the City of Buffalo was founded at the confluence of Lake Erie, the Niagara River, and the Buffalo River. The site is located in a part of a significant cultural landscape which includes Buffalo's historic harbor and waterfront. It is located in proximity to the historic western terminus of the Erie Canal. The U.S. Department of Transportation and others have, in the past seven years, committed over $40,000.000.00 to the reconstruction and development of a Buffalo’s fabled Canal District here.. Reconstruction of the Commercial Slip and historic streets and wharves is underway.

The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, was a technological innovation which facilitated commercial development of Buffalo, the Great Lakes and the Great Northwest and vaulted the city of New York to preeminence on the continent. The Canal transformed the economy of the nation and set development patterns which railroads and highways merely intensified. It was the key engine to the development of America in the mid nineteenth century.

Beginning in the 1850’s, rail transportation began to supplement and eventually overtake waterborne transportation. The Buffalo Harbor reflected these changes as Buffalo became a major railroad center, as well as the most important inland shipping port. The Buffalo waterfront became the nexus of rail and water transportation, greatly speeding the delivery of fresh foods and meats, among other things. Buffalo’s population was skyrocketing, as was that of its market area. It became necessary to create a wholesale food market in the area. The site chosen straddled Elk Street (now South Park Avenue), where the tracks of the New York Central and Delaware, Lackawanna & Western (DL&W) met waterborne transportation. The DL&W, one of a host of keenly competitive railroads operating in Buffalo in the 19th and 20th centuries, gained control of the north shore of the Buffalo River from the Elk Market to Erie Basin in 1873. In 1917, it opened its second Buffalo terminal, stretching from the foot of Main Street to the Elk market area. The magnificent and technologically innovative trainsheds still exist.

The DL&W Terminal, the Canal District, the Cobblestone District, and the old Elk market area are precious local resources that are destined to be destinations for tourists from around the nation and world as well as local residents. This cultural landscape extends to encompass the grain elevator complexes which are the defining and unifying landmarks of the entire area. The insertion of a large gambling complex in the midst of this historic area will spoil the character and integrity of one of America's most distinctive cultural landscapes.

The proposed gambling site includes the historic H-O OATS grain elevator and mill buildings. The H-O mill opened in 1893; the buildings on the site as of 12/1/05 date from 1912, 1928, and 1931. The grain elevators and mills of Buffalo are considered to be the most distinctive type of architecture in the city. Buffalo's collection of grain elevators is the largest in the United States. In 2002, the New York State Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation declared the H-O OATS complex, and other Buffalo area grain complexes, to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

The proposed gambling site is adjacent to the historic Cobblestone Historic District. The Cobblestone District consists of streets and buildings dating from the Civil War era and has been designated a historic district by the City of Buffalo. Part of the District is currently being renovated for residential use. The development of a gambling complex will have an adverse impact upon the redevelopment of the Cobblestone District.

A gambling complex at the Buffalo site will have grave adverse effects upon the human environment in the area. It will attract increased automobile traffic and attendant noise to a neighborhood that has recently been redeveloped for residential living. In addition, the casino will operate to the early hours of the morning, making the neighborhood unsuitable for family residential living. Gambling casinos have also been associated with rises in prostitution, violent crime, and gambling addiction.

Feds Trying to Rush Demos. Seek to Bulldoze Balcom-Chandler House, Erlanger Building, risking Big Hole on Niagara Square

Preservationists could not be blamed if they viewed the public review process for the proposed federal courthouse a sham. Now that sham could become a flimflam if the feds go ahead and demolish the block of the Joseph Ellicott Historic District before funding for the entire project is complete. The $100,000,000 project has not been able to muster full funding for three federal budgets. Instead, it got some money in the last budget, and it is expected to take one or two more budget cycles, at least, before full funding is in hand. Yet eminent domain proceedings moved forward on all buildings and properties on the site, and the possibility exists that Buffalo will be stuck for an indeterminate amount of time with a hole in the streetscape where historic buildings once stood. What if, given the uncertainties of the federal budget, the Buffalo courthouse keeps getting bumped? What if, at the end of the day, it is decided to simply retrofit the existing courthouse?

As it stands, the Federal government’s actions represent an unprecedented dismissal of the City of Buffalo’s efforts to protect its heritage, undermine decades of local preservation efforts, and contravene a civic understanding—how to build on Niagara Square—older than the city itself. The physical heritage to be lost includes the narrow and twisting Flint Alleys, paved in stone blocks, the Georgian Revival Erlanger Building, designed by the architects of Grand Central Terminal, and the Balcom-Chandler house, Niagara Square’s last original structure.

Built only 20 years after the incorporation of the City of Buffalo, the circa 1852 Balcom-Chandler house was built by local brick potentate Philo Balcom of bricks of his own manufacture.It is also the sole survivor of the early founding period, when houses of civic leaders surrounded the square.

Campaign Landmarks East Side Block

Joe Violanti is the owner of Buffalo’s newest designated landmark: the Dellenbaugh Block, three buildings which occupy a block of downtown Broadway between Michigan Avenue and Nash Street.
Violanti called The Campaign for Greater Buffalo after the City of Buffalo designated his neighborhood (it includes the Michigan Street Baptist Church and the Rev. J. Edward Nash House) an Urban Renewal area. Violanti wanted his block landmarked, because of his concern that the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency might forcibly gain control of his property and perhaps demolish all or parts of it. That concern was not misplaced: soon after designation, BURA “harvested” the famous Club Moonglo at Michigan and William.(there is a reason some preservationists call it the Urban Removal Agency)
Campaign member Mike Rizzo (author of the just-released Through the Mayors’ Eyes, a history of Buffalo mayors) handled the research and documentation. The block is named for Frederick Dellenbaugh, an early German immigrant and physician who had his home and office built at 173 Broadway circa 1842 and lived there until just before his death in 1891. The original house with its hip roof is visible on Nash Street, behind the storefront added in the late 19th century. A Deco restaurant occupied the storefront in the 1930’s. The most conspicuous part of the block is 163 Broadway, built in 1884 (pictured). It once contained Buffalo’s first 24-hour pharmacy, and the offices of prominent African-American physicians.

YWCA, modern rarity, for sale

There were few buildings designed in the humanist modern tradition in Buffalo. The YWCA at 190 Franklin Street is one of them, and a good one (another is the J.N. Adam store, right). It was designed in 1951 by Duane Lyman, possibly Buffalo’s most accomplished architect of the mid-20th century. The sale raises concerns because four nearby buildings sold in recent times were demolished for parking, including the early 20th century building immediately north of the Y, which last housed the New York State Department of Labor.

Further, the building is in that parlous point of its history when it no longer seems up-to-date to the general public and is not yet appreciated as aesthetically valuable. Part of this has to do with breakdown of aesthetic coherence through gradual unsympathetic change. Here, the interior furnishings have become a mishmash and the sweeping window bands on the exterior have been modified with colored reflective glass and exterior air conditioners. A similar process is going on in the Central Library, where that building’s best feature, its furnishings, are being jettisoned in favor of a Barnes & Noble motif, complete with Corian® countertops.

A sympathetic Y-buyer would play up the 50’s associations with properly scaled and styled furniture, walls, and floors. It could be cool.

Paladino demo’s last Deco

Developer Carl Paladino in a patented quickie demo, demolished the last Deco Restaurant in Buffalo, at 389 Washington Street, next to the landmark Hotel Lafayette. This act was enabled by the Buffalo Preservation Board, which failed to put the demolition request on its agenda. With no public notice, the demolition occurred in early February.

The building, an eclectic gem of 1930’s De Stijl and 1950’s “Coffee Shop Modern,” featured a vertical ashlar stone slab and four horizontal bands, two of which intersected the slab. The principal horizontal was stainless steel, with the word “restaurant” spelled out in attenuated, sans serif stainless steel letters. The main body of the restaurant was fronted in glass, recessed under the horizontal bands. The tiny lot is vacant and for sale.

The chain got its start in 1918 with an 18-year-old Cold Spring boy, Gregory Deck, who was casting about for ways to pay tuition to Canisius College. He threw an old table and his family’s charcoal grill onto a wagon, bought some hotdogs, condiments, and rolls, and walked uptown 2 1/2 miles to Main and Lisbon, where he fired up the grill and waited for train and trolley passengers. It was a new neighborhood with little competition. Deco, though artful, actually does not refer to the architectural style. It is an amalgam of Deck’s last name and his “co-” workers, according to the Buffalo History Works. The business grew like topsy, with full-fledged restaurants across the state and in Toronto. The city of Buffalo alone had 50.

Deco’s were highly dependent on the urban lifestyle of crowded sidewalks and quick turnover. The chain was bought by Sportservice (now Delaware North) in 1961. The Washington Street location was the last Deco to close, in 1979. It was last occupied by the Sugar and Spice restaurant. For a detailed look at all things Deco, go to www.BuffaloHistoryWorks.com.

Federal Courthouse Design: The Terrorists are Winning

A rocket has landed in the backyard of 10 Downing Street, the British Prime Minister’s residence. A bomb has destroyed part of the core of Manchester; suicide- and terrorist bombers strike with regularity in Israel. Yet fiercely democratic England and Israel, long targets of terrorist acts, do not react with sweeping measures that, if implemented, would undermine the citizens, cities, and civic life they would protect. Things are done differently in the United States, where a set of post-9/11 federal building guidelines, heaped on top of post-Oklahoma City guidelines, is already changing the way Buffalo looks, functions, and feels, and not for the better. It is happening across the country. Indeed, a writer for The Financial Times of London recently observed (after the London Underground bombings of July) how the American overreaction to 9/11 itself threatens civil life itself.

Exhibit A in the today’s American way of urban death is the proposed federal courthouse on Buffalo's Niagara Square. The project is being shepherded by Chief U.S. District Court Judge Richard Arcara. Everything about it, from how it was conceived, sited, sold, and rammed through the approvals process shouts ego, hauteur, and hubris. The architect selection process began, as Arcara has said, with he and another judge touring new courthouses around the country that appealed to them. They wanted a bold, modern building. The architect shopping produced KPF (Kohn Pedersen Fox) Architects of New York, a celebrity firm that has developed a speciality in curvy glass towers high on the glitz factor. The starchitect in charge of the Buffalo project is William Pedersen.

Pedersen’s brief was apparently to do the KPF thing, with the post 9-11 guidelines, on a site chosen for its monumental possibilities: the northwest quadrant of Niagara Square. That would be cool.
What we got was a bold, glitzy building with no relationship to to Buffalo, Niagara Square, or the citizens who must live here. It is a lone sculpture on an impregnable plinth. And that is the perception from Niagara Square. The backside, facing South Elmwood and Niagara Street, is a cold metal buttock on a plate. A secure location for the Dick Cheneys