No Business Please, We're Buffalonians

The Buffalo News summed it up quite well this morning in its article about the soon-to-come lawsuits opposing the Canal Side project.

Here we go again.

All the usual suspects, the preservationists, the deep-pocketed lawyers, and the local celebrities with a megaphone are getting in line. In their zeal to turn Buffalo into a living museum, they're vowing once again to stop any development that the rest of us unwashed might actually enjoy visiting. The theme for this crusade will evidently be "must prevent suburban-style development."

“There’s nothing wrong with putting Bass Pro on the water, but it is essentially a large suburban store being plopped down on the most historic urban site in the city,” said Richard Lippes, board member of the Preservation Coalition of Erie County.

Mr. Lippes has a short memory.  I can recall when downtown Buffalo contained several huge retail establishments:  A.M.&A.'s among them.  And I seriously doubt he would condemn Macy's Department Store, sitting in the heart of Manhattan as too suburban for its surroundings. There's nothing "essentially suburban" about a large store downtown.

Other critics are voicing concerns over the parking garages planned for nearby. 

One business executive said planned parking spaces — a 300-car ramp at Erie Canal Harbor, 500-car parking ramps on the nearby Webster and Donovan blocks, and a 1,000- car ramp on the site of Memorial Auditorium — were too close to the site.

“Parking structures are death to an urban landscape,” he said. “There is no vibrancy, no street activity, no visual appeal. It is like driving a stake through the heart of downtown.”

Rubbish and poppycock.  Properly designed parking garages with space for retail and residential units on the street-side of the lower floors can provide parking for thousands of waterfront visitors as well as contributing to the street's vitality.  If the parking's the problem, that can be addressed easily.

But the "too-suburban" argument is just a smokescreen for this group's real concern.  After all, the last few years have seen many prominent suburban-style buildings go up in the city -- all to some acclaim.  The HealthNow headquarters is the embodiment of a suburban-style office park and the Hauptmann-Woodward building would look much more at home along the 290 in Amherst than it does downtown.  The soon-to-be constructed federal courthouse will sit back from the street pompously and suck any remaining life out of Niagara Square and don't even bring up the ghastly Burchfield-Penney art gallery under construction even as we speak on Elmwood -- though it turns a blank wall towards it.

No, it isn't creeping suburbanism that bothers the Bass Pro critics, the real problem in their eyes is commercialization.  They detest the idea that the merchant class will make money near their just-emerging museum and that a lot of us rubes who know no better will heartily approve.

One letter-writer in the News today expresses their sentiments clearly.

Wonderful! Our myopic “leaders” have done it again, selling our unique claim to fame, our most important historic treasure — the Erie Canal terminus — to retailers and strip-mall developers.

I guess it was too much to hope for that the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp. would actually do the right thing and keep that one small area true to its history. And to top it off, for the honor of having a sporting goods store and other retailers on this sacred ground, we get to pay them!

True to its history?  If we were to keep the Inner Harbor true to its history, we'd make it filthy and crude; we'd build coarse taverns in the shadow of smelly, smoky factories; we'd throw in a few whorehouses and we'd dump garbage into the water each day just before opening time.  The terminus of the Erie Canal was a bustling, gritty place where people came to make their fortunes by any means possible; it was by no means the Norman Rockwellian exhibit under construction now.

A few years back Buffalo commemorated the  100th anniversary of the 1901 Pan-American exposition, and we held parades, dutifully traipsed off to museum exhibits and wrote books that celebrated our prosperous and influential past.  We marveled at the "City of Light" of our ancestors and longed for those days when Buffalo was an important place.

But the centenary carefully avoided what had actually led to the Exposition's being held  and instead treated it rather like the virgin birth -- all of a sudden it was just there.  We celebrated what Buffalo looked like in 1901 as the fastest-growing city in the United States, the first city with electric streetlights and gave little thought to why it was growing.   We were paying attention to our history, to be sure, but we almost consciously avoided studying it to learn how to create a better future. 

I remember chuckling at the sight of society matrons in cleverly-sewn, period dresses (daintily clutching parasols of course) riding down Lincoln Parkway in horse-drawn carriages.  It wasn't history at all, of course, but theater, a play whose cast members would have been horrified at the brute capitalism that made their play-acting possible.

The immigrants and entrepreneurs who flocked to Buffalo on the Erie Canal didn't come here to create a museum for us to preserve, they were too busy building a city -- a city based on trade, manufacturing, opportunity and above all making money.  Commercialism created Buffalo and to deny that is like claiming that that the glaciers never existed and their melting didn't give us Niagara Falls. Commercialization of the Erie Canal terminus won't ruin it -- if anything it will illustrate how Buffalo became great in the first place.

A lot of us here are still trying to build that once vital and growing city.  We respect our past, but we don't fetishize it.  We support preserving our history so we can learn from our mistakes but also so we can celebrate and learn from our successes.

Our self-elected waterfront protectors want to create a sanitized and romantic representation of the Erie Canal that fits into their vision of what modern Buffalo should be. That's what's playing out now on the waterfront. The Canal Side opponents would have us believe that an interpretive center and a plaza which never existed represent historical accuracy which profit-making businesses would corrupt -- but it's their little Disneyland-by-the-harbor that's the real fake.

Comments

[b]

Properly designed parking garages with space for retail and residential units on the street-side of the lower floors can provide space for thousands of cars as well as contributing to the street's vitality.

That's a great point and I'd like to see that added to the plan. Unfortunately it seems the plan currently does not require that or even seem to mention it as a possibility:

http://www.buffalorising.com/2007/04/06/bass_aud.pdf

Hopefully someone pushes for what you suggest.

And yeah it's amusing how some of these people, stating the reason of wanting historcal accuracy, are objecting to the proposed commericalization of the area around what was known back then as the Commercial Slip.

[Keller]

Great post---filthy hippies are ruining Buffalo. I guess Dick Lipp(e)s and Scot Fisher want Buffalo to look like a perpetual 'before' pic.

Dear Hippies,

Buy some historical land and do what you want with it---leave the progressives alone.