February 1996 Table Of Contents

Fresh take on the waterfront: ‘landfront’
by Tim Tielman

In a working paper issued in the late fall, the Masiello Administration’s waterfront planning group broke through a perceptual barrier which has hobbled all past waterfront plans: the waterfront as somehow an entity unto itself. By the simple expedient of visualizing the area as “Buffalo’s historic landfront,” it shifts some perspective to land uses, and away from wheeling gulls, festival tents, and themed “attractions.” The old process, which shaped the “product” to fit preconceived packaging, is known as “gulls for the gullible” by detractors.

The new focus is on the littoral zone as a part of downtown, and how it can best serve downtown. This has the potential to yield a much richer, more urbane setting. Previous plans saw the surrounding city and suburbs as simply a source of consumers. Terms like “public domain,” heretofore only seen and heard describing new planning philosophies elsewhere, make their Buffalo debut in this document.

The public domain is both literally the land owned by the public and the penumbra of public policies which shape private land use.

Cataclysmic change vs. Adaptive change

‘New Urbanism’ principles are also evident in the document. For preservationists, this has particular bearing in how the Cobblestone District and Joseph Ellicott District are treated. The paper eschews the temptation to go the conventional “do-it-all-at-once” route in favor of a gradual, adaptive approach. That’s a practical way of managing change with a lot of empirical weight behind it.

How South Park Avenue and Ohio Street are handled will be crucial to the Cobblestone District, as will Erie Street be for the Joseph Ellicott District.

At the core of the principles seems to be an understanding of both the futility of sudden overwhelming change and its undesirability. For a city of limited resources, the financial and social costs can be too high. We do not have the luxury of making big, irreversible mistakes.

So this calls for level-headedness, a move away from the ‘archi-porn’ of previous efforts, and this is what the city’s new thinking appears to be giving us. It is perhaps less steamy—no ships pulled deeply into a compliant shore, no bold architectural breast beating—and thus perhaps less riveting to those inclined to that type of thing