Newsletter of the
Preservation Coalition of Erie County (Home Page)

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June 1995

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Walking in Buffalo

The piles of stuff at the foot of the stairs waiting for a trip upstairs, is an indication of friction of space where physical effort, rather than linear distance, is significant.

The mode of transport makes a big difference. Trains, planes, and automobiles reduce the friction of space in certain ranges and increase it radically in others (for example, a door-to-door trip from downtown Buffalo to downtown Niagara Falls by jet would take almost as long and cost as much as such a trip to New York. Also, drive-through supermarkets, tried in the 1920s, are vastly more inefficient than walk-through supermarkets)

Friction of space has many variables. Linear distance (in fact, it is often called friction of distance), time consumed, effort, cash cost, physical capacity of the pedestrian, perceived distance. It works at various scales. Christaller’s path-breaking study concerned how friction of space led to the creation of central places in southern Germany, but it works at any level, in your kitchen, neighborhood, etc.

It's this economy of emergent entrepreneurs and families just trying to make job–a living–for themselves, that has powered trading since the days of the Italian city-states and the Dutch Republic. The merchant class grows out of the underdog economy. Kinship ties, a good idea, and hard work–rather than political connections, government intervention, and bank loans–are characteristic.

Very place-specific. Walking

You see this on Niagara Street in places where the bakeries are. A vegetable market, a hair salon, two wholesale bakeries, the Vargas restaurant, and, a new type of business, a store offering telecommunications services to people without phones–voice mailboxes (essential for getting a job), faxes, etc.

Cities have the disturbing habit of backing the 800-pound gorilla. 800-pound gorillas can ‘make things happen.’ But when the huge gorilla dies, what then? Downtown is a gorilla graveyard, and all the little tiny, quirky retail spaces that supported the underdog economy are gone. Downtown is a dead ecosystem as far as emergent entrepreneurs are concerned.