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

Spring 1999....TABLE of CONTENTS.....Vol. 22 No 3



Death Star: In the wrong place, convention center could be killer

By Tim Tielman

Just one of the unheralded buildings in the path of the mother of all big boxes: Ferguson Electric on Ellicott Street


Imagine a 300,000 square foot Rite-Aid (new Rite-Aids are actually about 14,000 square feet) occupying four square blocks of downtown. Imagine public streets closed or “tunnelized” for 600 feet. Imagine water, sewer, electric, and phone lines rerouted. Imagine unionized printing plants in the path of this mother of all big boxes shutting down and throwing scores of people out of work. Imagine blocks of unheralded buildings leveled. Imagine the years-long disruption. Imagine a developer getting a tax exemption on all construction materials and the building itself. Imagine it costing $140 million to build. Pretty bad, eh?

Now imagine yourself paying for it.

And imagine yourself guaranteeing to cover any operating losses, which are forecast to reach $2 million annually.

Get ready, because the bold leaders of our town are going to bat for some hotel owners and convention industry types (whose salaries are paid by the bed tax imposed on hotel owners) who want to build a new convention center downtown, and have published two “studies,” one on feasibility, one on sitting, that call for a publicly funded convention center to be built occupying four blocks from Huron Street to Broadway and Washington Street to nearly Oak Street.

Heywood Sanders, a professor of urban studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, says, “The feasibility study is clearly flawed, and the center proposal something of a standing joke.” Mitchell Harwitz, a UB economist, also reviewed the feasibility study and found, that while the “multipliers” used to forecast economic impact were cautiously conservative, the estimates of increased attendance based on a new, larger facility were unsupported. The current convention center attracts about 55 convention goers per day, the estimates are 310 per day by the year 2010, or a six-fold increase over current use. By that time the accumulated operating deficit (according to interpolations of numbers in the study) would be almost $20 million.

This raises a number of questions which the public deserves to have explored before a large amount of money is spent and four square blocks of downtown are demolished when other sites are available. Full-throated public discussion rather than a two-handed jam down the public’s throat.

The Preservation Coalition has looked at this issue. Considering all the questions raised – not the least of which is whether it is worth building at all – it would seem prudent, if built, that it be built elsewhere. See Center Belongs on Lehigh Valley Yards in this issue.



Convention centers in Buffalo and Niagara Falls – we have had at least four publicly funded halls, the current centers in Buffalo and Niagara falls, Memorial Auditorium and the Broadway Auditorium – like sports arenas and stadiums, do not generate street activity that causes tertiary economic activity – retail and restaurants. In fact, a very good argument can be made that they cause a decrease in tertiary activity in their immediate neighborhood.

“The feasibility study is clearly flawed, and the center proposal something of a standing joke.”

-Heywood Sanders

This is for three reasons: expropriation of existing buildings to build the structure, competition with private businesses once the center is open, and physical properties of the structure in relation to surrounding activities.

The problems begin with the expropriation of existing buildings, which contain businesses and, sometime, apartments. In the case of the current convention center in downtown Buffalo, six buildings were demolished, including the Tucker and Andrews building on Court Street and a Second Empire-style town house which last contained Ace’s Steak Pit. The demolished office buildings had generated a large amount of pedestrian trips, both from many and varied people who worked in them, but also from those who visited them during the course of the workday. (According to figures published by the Regional Plan Association of New York, mixed use office buildings generate far more traffic per square foot than anything but retail and restaurants.)

With the elimination of these buildings, downtown lost a dense, efficient arrangement of people and services (many of the displaced businesses relocated far from the downtown core, some moved nearby but lost the heavy pedestrian stream they once had and went out of business, or some simply cashed out). Lost was more than a square block of people who went about their business for 250 days a year, all day. The same thing happened with the construction of the old convention hall (renamed Memorial Auditorium after WWII). The same thing will happen with a new one on the so-called Mohawk Ramp site.

For example, Holling Press, which has been an anchor on Washington Street for the majority of this century, may be a candidate for a cash-out. Between 30 and 40 union jobs would be eliminated, as well as office staff. Even if the work is absorbed by printers elsewhere, they would not be contributing to the vitality of downtown.


Competing with private business

For the lunch and banquet trade, the publicly-subsidized convention center is in direct competition with private restaurants, clubs and banquet facilities.

The very large majority of all users of convention centers is locally based. According to Convention and Visitors Bureau figures, in recent years only 3% of users are convention goers. The rest are locals: Rotarians and Weight Watchers there for regularly scheduled lunches, people going to consumer and trade shows like the auto, home, and craft shows, and various banquets. Despite what the Convention Bureau says in its press releases, these events do not “pump x-thousand or x-million dollars” into the economy. It is spending that is simply shifted from other businesses within the area.

For the lunch and banquet trade, the publicly-subsidized convention center is in direct competition with private restaurants, clubs and banquet facilities. Further, trade and consumer show operators use food service within the center to either defray their costs or to keep people inside the building at the show. Their interest is in enhancing “site captivity,” just as sports arenas, zoos, mega-bookstores, and old-fashioned department stores and modern malls do: provide food, and the customer stays on site longer, which translates into more money.

In fact, it is when the centers are not being used that they can be said to contributing to the economy in a limited way as attendees disperse to restaurants or hotels for socializing or deal-cutting. This activity is picked up by establishments (at marginal cost to the establishments, which is important) which are far enough away from the “dead zone” around the center to have a year-round and day-long trade base. Chippewa Street, for example, developed such a trade base over the last four years and the resulting conglomeration now attracts convention-goers. Would Chippewa Street attract them if the center were located anywhere else downtown? Yes. Just as Bourbon Street, Times Square, and River North attract people from convention halls miles away in New Orleans, New York, and Chicago.

Closing of Genesee and Mohawk Streets in 1977 for Convention Center added hundreds of feet to trips between Niagara Square and Main St. between Huron and Mohawk. Long frontages with little of no public access also reduced pedestrian traffic. Fewer poeople made it to Main to run errands or eat lunch, contributing to closures.

Biggest planning mistake since last convention center

The Site Selection Study says, with an absolutely straight face and no proof, that a new convention center would generate economic opportunity around it. Indeed, “impact has already started,” since the preferred location was announced. Convention center boosters ignore the desolation in evidence around the old center.

While we cannot be certain the construction of the current convention center, Memorial Auditorium, and the Broadway Auditorium contributed to the decline of the neighborhoods around them, it is clear they did not turn the fortunes of their neighborhoods around. That evidence stares us in the face in Buffalo and Niagara Falls (which has the dream arrangement that supposedly guarantees success – a megaplex of convention center, hotel, shopping mall, and purpose-built public plaza, all connected with weather-proof tunnels, bridges and arcades – that in 25 years has only created a ghost town of isolated, architecturally clashing buildings and related bankruptcies).

Convention halls are very large special purpose buildings which simply do not belong to the multiple use zones that make downtowns healthy or carry the seeds of revival. That prime land is best left to enterprising citizens and the tax rolls. A Mohawk Ramp convention center would be the biggest planning mistake since the last convention center.



How large blocks can create a 'Dead Zone' around them
People live here: Christmas decorations adorn apartment in building that would be demolished.

Jane Jacobs, in her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities lists four necessities for generating and perpetuating economic diversity, which she posits as the reason cities exist. They are to have: 1) primary mixed uses, 2) small blocks, 3) aged buildings, and 4) concentration. These produce the preconditions of economic success.

The convention center plan violates all four economic preconditions: It would have one use, it would create one gigantic superblock out of six smaller blocks (compounding the error of the old convention center superblock west of Main), it would eliminate all buildings of all ages, and it would scatter all the existing businesses and their visitors to the winds, helping to subsidize the sprawl that is killing us all.

Here is Jacobs paraphrased to illustrate the need to create more small blocks in downtown Buffalo, not fewer:

The advantages of small blocks are simple. Consider for example, the situation of a woman working in the Crosby building at Mohawk and Franklin, on a long block created by the Convention Center. She avoids the forbiddingly dark and crooked path that squeezes between the old, grand YMCA building and the Convention Center. She goes southward along this 1000-foot block to reach the stores on Main Street or the metro rail. She goes northward to Chippewa Street, perhaps, for lunch. She may very well never enter the adjacent blocks of Pearl Street or Delaware Avenue for years.

This brings grave trouble. We have already seen that isolated, discrete street neighborhoods are apt to be helpless socially. This woman would have every justification for disbelieving that Pearl Street or Delaware Avenue or their people have anything to do with her. To believe it, she must go beyond the ordinary evidence of her everyday life.

So far as her neighborhood is concerned, the economic effect of these self-isolating streets is equally constricting. The people on this street and the people on adjacent streets can form a pool of economic use only when their long, separated paths meet and come together in one stream. In this case, the nearest place where this can happen is the Court or Huron streets, [neither of which is a traditional commercial street, and both of which have been blasted by urban renewal into 30-year parking lots and office buildings]...This is a typical arrangement for areas of city failure.

This stringent physical segregation of regular users of one street from the regular users of the next holds, of course, for visitors, too.

Let us consider, instead, the situation if these long north-south blocks had an extra street cut across them – not a sterile “promenade” of the kind which exists here and in other superblock projects in abundance, but a street containing buildings where things could start up and grow at spots economically viable: places for buying, eating, seeing things, getting a drink. With the extra street – Mohawk Street reconnected – the Crosby woman would no longer need to walk a monotonous, always-the-same path to a given point. She would have various alternative routes to choose. The city would literally have opened up to her.

The same would be true of people working (or living) on other streets for those nearer Court Street heading to Chippewa or the Federal Building. Instead of mutual isolation of paths, these paths would now be mixed and mingled with one another.

The supply of feasible spots for commerce would increase considerably, and so could the distribution and convenience of their placement. If among the people on Delaware there are a third enough people to support a sandwich shop, the same might be said of the people on Franklin and Pearl. Now there would be a possibility that they might do so around one of their additional corners. As long as these people can never pool their support nearby except in only one stream, such distribution of services, economic opportunity, and public life is an impossibility.

In the case of these long blocks, even people who are present in the neighborhood for the same primary reasons are kept too much apart to permit them to form reasonably intricate pools of city cross-use. Where differing primary uses are involved, long blocks are apt to thwart effective mixture in exactly the same way. They automatically sort people into paths that meet too infrequently, so that different uses very near each other geographically are, in practical effect, literally blocked off from one another.

Distance decay: As distance increases, number of people walking given distance decreases. Closing streets and creating large blocks has a direct impact on inhibiting pedestrian activity.

Manhattan figures are of people traveling from two office buildings; Edmonton figures are of those traveling from many points within the CBD. These trips reflect workday activities such as shopping, eating and errand running, as opposed to special purpose leisure trips like attending a concert or sporting event.

The average Edmonton trip was 870 ft.; the median trip was 400 ft. The average Manhattan trip was 1,720 ft., with a median of 1070. One might surmise Buffalo pedestrian trips to follow Edmonton pattern more closely than Manhattan pattern. Closing Genesee St., for example, adds 40% (several hundred feet) to the distance someone must walk from City Hall or the Statler Building to Main & Huron.

A new convention center, by elongating blocks, would only serve to make Main Street more inaccessible for pedestrians on surrounding streets. The result: an expansion of the Dead Zone.

- Source: Urban Space for Pedestrians, by Pushkarev and Zupan

A “joke' of a feasibility study

There are reasons other than negative preservation impact and negative urban impact to call a convention center into question. Many of those revolved around the rationale for building public meeting halls in the first place, i.e., they induce people from out of town to sleep over night and thus spend money on hotels, food, entertainment, transportation, and shopping that would not otherwise occur. Heywood Sanders, the urban studies professor, in the dozens of such studies he has seen, finds them almost invariably overstating economic impact and public benefit. He finds the Buffalo study a “standing joke.”

Most convention centers, from Boston to Houston to San Francisco, handle 30 to 50 conventions annually. (This is distinguished from trade shows in which specialized products and services are offered to specialized buyers; from consumer shows attracting the general public, like the auto show or home show; from concerts and benefits, which are ticketed events; and from meetings, which are local and civic functions, scheduled meetings of organizations, seminars, and non-ticketed social gatherings.) In a local economy in the tens of billions of dollars, as Buffalo’s is, the net economic impact of conventions is rather small. In terms of capital expenditure on the part of county taxpayers, on the other hand, it is significant. Do convention centers offer the taxpayer a good return on investment?

The Preservation Coalition has begun looking into the matter. It has posted the Feasibility Study, the Site Selection Study, comments on the Feasibility Study by UB economic professor Mitchell Harwitz on the web, and will add more documents as time allows.


Some highlights: