Kicking Old Buildings

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

October 1995

Kicking Old Buildings

Dear Doctor,

Earlier this summer I read an article on a revamped shopping plaza on Jefferson and William. The reporter collared a woman there who seemed thankful the thing was there while old buildings across the street, though occupied, looked shabby. Didn't she realize she is a victim of the capitalist dialectic?

Whoa. This is a preservation column, not one on political economics. We do grant the two overlap much more often than we'd like. But your thesis is intriguing.

Intriguing because that plaza can't seem to attract a new chain grocery store to replace the old chain grocery store because the old neighborhood around it has some 10 doddering and tottering grocery stores which are much better located to the overwhelmingly pedestrian customer base. Intriguing because so many of the stores in the plaza are owned by chains. Some of the chains are of a type that specialize in “servicing” poor neighborhoods. What if all that money was directed to those locally owned businesses across the street in that handsome but worn line of buildings? How the hay can any of those businesses survive? Allow me to provide just one scenario.

William Street itself at this point is a six lane divided arterial. Imagine yourself to be unable to walk easily — arthritic, nursing an injury, watching a baby, or — how do you say? — Fat and lazy. You ask a child to pick up some bread and milk and use the change for candy. You're going to think twice about sending that tyro across William Street and then through that expanse of parking lot to a store with a bunch of strangers hanging but.You’ll do what any responsible adult will do—send the child to a nearby store that doesn't require crossing a busy street and where folks know him or her. The total bill may be a few cents more and the store a bit shabby, but the convenience and familiarity is worth it.

Now, long-dead congressmen who wrote various and sundry housing and urban development bills at the behest of real estate developers and the construction industry hated and feared this tableau because they didn't understand it. Modern day federal bureaucrats just can't be bothered, and local types just fill out forms for whatever program they can get money for.

I am not saying that is exactly how things have developed at this particular place, but the landscape just reads that way. One side of the street, the once failed, once renovated 1950s plaza with chain stores. On the other side of the street (the sunny side, I might add), a strip of 1880s three-and four story buildings. and some smaller ones. A Jewish poultry and fish market selling live poultry, two generations after the local diaspora to Amherst. Three food markets right next to each other. Amazing.

So you ask yourself, why are people spending $5,000,000 on renovating a plaza to house colonial outposts of national chains, while the locals across the street get nothing, first when the plaza was built, and now when it is renovated?

It could be Uncle Joe who runs the beer and chips joint keeps his financial records in a cigar box. Maxine, who runs the grocery next door keeps the inventory in her head. Another shop owner looks funny. Even though they keep on keepin’ on all these years, and are obviously much more successful than, say, the airline industry, no one wants to give them any money or advice to improve their stores. In fact, these local heroes are an embarrassment, and a lot of people would rather they just go away. Talk about blaming the victim.

This kind of thing can even happen without the contagion of federal money, out of sheer habit. For example, the mammoth superdrugstore chain that wants the city to abandon a street so they can put in a drugstore that is going to suck the living livelihood out of any number of local pharmacies. What the colonizing store is saying is that it cannot compete with the local stores on a level playing field. So it is asking that the playing field be literally changed to accommodate its formula for taking over the local market. Crazy world, ain’t it?

But I digress.

•The Preservation Prescription for William Street: Spend $5,000,000 on giving those local businesspeople a means to renovate their buildings. Go ahead. It will work. Study it if you want, but there is a remarkable pedestrian flow which is sustaining these places.

•Follow-up. The ‘permanent’ dumpster a reader complained about is gone from Franklin Street in Allentown.

Bad news is that two remain in Delaware Park.

And the medical waste dumpster (some may confuse it with the building itself) is still there, behind the medical offal that is a children's Hospital clinic.

Incidentally, it is worth observing that the soon to be completed Children's Hospital addition obviously has much better architectural effect. Do you think the hospital was sensitive to the sensibilities of Oakwood Place and potential donors, while scorning the LWS clients? Of course not. I am not really a doctor, but I play one in a newspaper.

May Hippocrates strike me down for saying this, but maybe cities would have been a lot better if federal funds were not available.