February 1996 Table Of Contents
Letters
Drugstore boxes destroying Buffalo neighborhoodsTo the Editor:
On Bailey Avenue alone, from Walden Avenue to Kensington Avenue, there are three properties that the Rite Aid Corporation, gunning to be the nation’s largest drugstore chain, caused to be bought and built upon.
One in particular is very noticeable to me. I remember when the three older buildings were torn down at Walden and Bailey Avenues to make way for a parking lot and a Rite Aid.
The building is flat-roofed, brown, rough-faced concrete block with few windows. This took the place of a three-story Mansard-style building and two other business/residential buildings. The Rite Aid building now stands empty, blighting a neighborhood with a property too large for any neighborhood merchant to take on.
Farther north on Bailey is another abandoned Rite Aid of similar look and effect. I can’t remember what was there before, but this flat-roofed box is now empty as well.
On Bailey and Delavan, there stands a brand new white building with the huge Rite Aid logo starkly taking over where Unger’s Inn (“Buffalo’s Best Beef on Weck”) and Louie’s hot dog stand once stood. Once a local developer secured and built on that corner, the two earlier Rite Aids, perhaps all of 10 years old, were abandoned, adding two more empty buildings to the Bailey Avenue landscape.
Rite Aid came to the Lovejoy neighborhood about 8-10 years ago. Three buildings came down on Lovejoy and North Ogden Streets. One was a historic Mansard-style building that housed a furniture store, another was a house, and the third was Pizza John’s.
On that corner now stands a flat- roofed, brownish box of a building with few windows and a parking lot. And it is taking over another historic building: what used to house a jewelry store and is the homestead of a lifelong Lovejoy resident is to be demolished. In its place will be an addition to the Rite Aid store.
We were told by the developer that two aisles of groceries would be added to the drug store in a much-needed larger building. The company is losing money, we were told, and would have to close without this addition and the seniors would have no place to get their prescriptions filled.
Threats of losing the last pharmacy in our neighborhood, allegedly unfulfilled promises on Fillmore and Leroy (where the local developer was the target of community protesters charging racial bias), empty boxes on Bailey Avenue–where will it all end?
How many more permits will the City of Buffalo give to neighborhood-destroying chain drugstores before the zoning ordinances are changed? When will elected officials wake up to the fact that retail greed is at the expense of the residents and taxpayers?
Maybe more of us should form a picket line.
Marge Thielmann Hastreiter
Buffalo
B&B owner finds ‘Main Street’ article valuable, seeks advice
To the Editor:
Manchester House Bed & Breakfast recently joined the Preservation Coalition. I sent the Main Street article [Cities can boom or bust, July/Aug.] to our Niagara Falls Main Street Business Association.. Now I know why we have all those empty stores on Main Street, and I thought others would be interested, too.
The article referred to problems brought about by codes outlawing ‘mixed use,” typically thought of as a store with residential space above. As a B&B owner, I’m experiencing this problem, too. Our local building inspector won’t let us use our attic (which contains two nice bedrooms with hardwood floors and a bathroom–left over from the days when the house was a doctor’s office and residence) for residential purposes. We’d like to use the bedrooms as our private quarters.
I’ll research this as a winter project to see if there isn’t a legal way to use the space. Any input on the fire/building code restraints on residential use in a mixed-use building –magazine references, books, real people to talk to with experience on this etc. –would be appreciated.
Carl Slenk
Manchester House B&B
653 Main St.
Niagara Falls, NY 14301
71210.65@compuserve.com
