Scoopers

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

October 1995

More Buffalo Scoopers

St. James Place porch saves a life

From A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb, by Philip Langdon, now out in paper ($14) at local bookstores: “The benefits of a second-floor porch were impressed upon me one hot Labor Day weekend when friends from Pennsylvania came to visit and spent much of the holiday on our second-floor porch. In the evening, as we sat drinking ale, a car came down narrow St. James Place, its engine making a metallic sound – ching - ching - ching –which drew our attention. Looking down, my friend Charlie Madigan and I saw the car creeping along in front of us, perhaps going three miles an hour. It scraped the sides of one parked car. Then it scraped a second car. At this point we realized the driver was drunk and shouldn't be at the wheel of an automobile. Charlie ran down the stairs, caught up with the car, and persuaded the driver to pull over. Charlie soon learned the driver's name, talked to him about being Irish, and in a couple of minutes convinced him to entrust him with the car keys. That evening the driver never reached the corner – heavily traveled Elmwood Avenue, where he might have gotten into a serious collision. The episode left me with an increased awareness that sociably designed houses, oriented toward the street, can help people in ways no one is able to foresee.”

Follow the trail of the Blue Buffalo

You may have wondered about the blue buffaloes that have appeared on downtown sidewalks. The Blue Buffalo Trail is a new downtown walking tour. It may make sense in a stream of consciousness way (There are those folk who think Buffalo comes from the French beau fleuve, or beautiful river. The river looks blue. Ergo, blue buffalos. Or maybe there are color-challenged bison. Or depressed bison.)

The trail is the brainchild of Nicholas Cushner and Mark Goldman, restaurateur and raconteur. Inspired by Boston's Freedom Trail (a red stripe), the duo brought the idea to Mayor Masiello, who suggested the bison silhouettes.

The mayor inaugurated the trail on July 25th by painting the last Buffalo (which may yet rival the Golden Spike in importance) in front of the restaurant La Péché on Main Street..

Goldman wrote an accompanying 25-page booklet called Walk Buffalo. Get one at the CVB. The initial printing of 10,000 is reportedly going fast.

Cushner is planning a bigger and better guide, as well as one for Elmwood Avenue.

Great Northern owner pleads hardship; profit was $796 million
The Wall Street Journal reports that Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. (ADM) chairman and CEO Dwayne Andreas had a salary of $3,610,000 for the fiscal year ended June 30. Further, ADM had profits of $795.9 million on revenues of $12.7 billion. This works out to a profit of $2.18 million per day. ADM has pleaded ‘hardship’ in order to get a demolition permit for its landmark Great Northern Elevator on the Buffalo waterfront. The city and its preservation board have agreed with ADM.

Be careful, you might get what you wish for

It is almost like viewing damage assessment photographs, comparing pre-1970 Niagara Falls with 1980 Niagara Falls. In that decade Niagara Falls (NY) wiped out a huge swath of its downtown, including every single building on Falls Street (the main shopping street) between the Nabisco plant and the Niagara Reservation, except for a bank at Third Street. Many houses and apartments were destroyed as well, permanently reducing the value of the South End as a place to live.

This was to boldly create a tourist economy. Well, what do us Federal and New York State taxpayers get for all this? The September 12 New York Times: “About five minutes from the falls stands the city's downtown, and it is not pretty. There are some offices, several empty stores, one tattoo parlor, little else. ‘There is really nothing, nothing at all,’ said Sylvia Virtuoso, who owns an upholstery shop and is the president of a local merchants association.

“Small wonder then, that Niagara Falls is hoping to open a casino to bring in more tourists and keep them. Bridgeport, Detroit, the Catskills–you can draw a road map of the most desperate cities and resort areas in the country by tracking plans for casinos, the same way plans for convention centers pinpointed downtrodden downtowns 20 years ago.”

Amazing then, that there are people walking the streets advocating Buffalo recast its downtown to create tourist “attractions.” You know, like downtown Niagara Falls, which, after two decades of effort, is chock full of attractions which don't attract.

The citizens of Niagara Falls now carry on their somewhat diminished lives elsewhere, as do the tourists, thanks to a tourist industry in the vanguard of demolition and economic-salvation-through-water-slides-and Pleasuredomes.

Allentown, West Village, East Side row houses could get tax credits for rehabs

The Historic Homeownership Assistance Act of 1995 introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 1662) and the Senate (S. 1002) would give owners of residences listed on the National Register of Historic Places a 20% Federal Income Tax credit to those who rehabilitate a unit or buy an already rehabilitated unit. The unit must be the owners principal residence. A minimum of $5,000 in rehabilitation expenses must be documented to qualify. To date, both majority leader Newt Gingrich and minority leader Richard Gephardt have co-sponsored the House bill, while locally, Al D’Amato has co-sponsored the Senate version. But the bill is languishing in both houses, with basically no action taken since the introduction in May.

Buffalo has hundreds of residential units which would qualify, including those within the Allentown and West Village Historic Districts, and several rowhouse developments in the Masten District. Developers can rehab a qualifying property and sell it to a homeowner with the credit. In addition, taxpayers with with little or no tax liability can convert the credit into a mortgage credit certificate, and get a rate reduction from the lender.

Terminal study stonewalled in city hall

At a May rally sponsored by the Preservation Coalition (Buffalo Preservation Report, June/July 1995), Fillmore District Common Council member David Franczyk announced the city would be undertake a $50,000 engineering study of the Central Terminal to determine the building's structural condition and estimate repair and mothballing costs.

While the initial steps for the study, such as the creation of an advisory committee and the preparation of a Request For Proposals (RFP) were soon done, the process ran into a stout wall as the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency has repeatedly failed to approve the funds for the study. Some BURA members have questioned whether the individuals who own the Terminal can receive the benefit of a city-funded study. (Do the names Seymour Knox III and Robert Rich, Jr. ring a bell?)

The study is being coordinated by Preservation Coalition member Scott Field, Housing Director at the Polish Community Center.

Revamped RR stations draw crowds

Speaking of huge railroad stations, a crowd of 65 people gathered at the Spaghetti Warehouse on October 1 for a lecture on railroad station rehabilitation projects nationally.

The peripatetic Council member Franczyk was also present to give a Central Terminal update. So protracted and multifaceted has the process been, that in explaining it, the prolix politico resorted to the words deus ex machina, Machiavellian, labyrinthine, and Byzantine in the same sentence. And he wasn't talking about the architects. Franczyk indicated the city could take the building back in a tax foreclosure as early as Oct. 23, but is unlikely to do so because of liability concerns. Further, a lawsuit by the owners against the IRS to force it to comply with federal law and move into the building is now before a federal court.

Utica architect Michael Bosak, who has studied railroad stations nationally and is writing a book on Utica's Beaux Arts Wunderstation, showed examples of station adaptive reuses in Chattanooga, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City, Washington, and Albany. Afterward he said he just as easily could have shown slides of small town rehabs or large city stations that continue as active stations. Some were close to downtown, some were distant. Some cost $10,000,000, some cost $160,000,000. Some were done with relative sophistication, some were “imaginative.”

Each one was viewed as a money-sucking white elephant: plaster falling, rainwater pooling on floors after falling through stripped roofs, etc. He made reference to the station in Portland, Me. that was toppled in 1961, a fact that brings blood to a boil in Portland even today, where stores sell posters and postcards of the demolition. Urban planner Alex Herlovitch related the history and meaning of railroad stations in general.