Letter from Coalition President Cynthia Van Ness to Walgreens CEO
January 13, 2006
Mr. David W. Bernauer, CEO
Walgreens Co.
200 Wilmot Rd.
Deerfield, IL 60015-4681
Dear Mr. Bernauer,
The Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY) reported this week that Walgreens plans to purchase and demolish a section of Buffalo's most stately boulevard, Delaware Avenue, in order to erect a pharmacy. The buildings in the path of your project date from the turn of the century, are occupied by viable businesses, and are adjacent to a two major Buffalo landmarks, Gates Circle, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and Forest Lawn Cemetery, which hosts one of the nation's finest collections of 19th century funerary sculpture.
This letter is to alert you that the Preservation Coalition, Buffalo's most accomplished preservation organization, plans to fight this project every step of the way. In 1995, we fought you and won. (See:http://preserve.bfn.org/bpr/9506bpr/banbox.html). In 1998, we helped fight your competitor and won. (See:http://www.nationaltrust.org/issues/drugstores/BuffaloNY_Drugstore.pdf).We have already launched a petition and boycott that attracted almost 500 signatures in three days. (See:http://www.petitiononline.com/GatesCir/). More will sign as word spreads.
Specifically, we object to the typical effects of a cookie cutter, national chain store in our historic urban core:
- Driving out locally owned-businesses
- Eliminating mixed use buildings and apartments
- Destroying irreplaceable buildings
- Disrupting our pedestrian-scaled, 19th early twentieth-century urban streets
- Single story, single use econoboxes fronted by excess parking
- Zero sum game: because Buffalo's population is dropping, every new drugstore forces another to close, thus threatening nearby property values with boarded-up big box stores
If you can demonstrate that you can design a store that matches the height, scale, setbacks, and materials of the existing neighborhood, with parking at the rear, or even better, occupies and reuses an existing building, then we will embrace your project. You have done so in other cities. It is up to you whether you wish to be a good neighbor or a despised one to the good people of Buffalo.
Sincerely,
Cynthia Van Ness, President
Cc:
Mayor Byron Brown
City of Buffalo Preservation Board
Marc Coppola, Buffalo Common Council, Delaware District
Preservation Coalition Home Page