Take the Variety Tower, please (rear). The size, ugliness, and parking needs of building make it undesirable.

Moving Children’s Hospital to High Street near Main, a plan floated in January by the hospital, could benefit both Elmwood Avenue and Allentown. It would benefit Elmwood by removing – and the owners should be required to do so – some overly large and depressing architecture and creating some valuable space for new residential development.

Allentown could benefit if the city leverages the move to get the streetscapes of Main and North Pearl Streets sensitively “repaired” in the zone closest to High and Goodrich Streets.

Children’s itself would not actually be in Allentown, but on a long-blasted site that could use some infill of its own.

This will require some civic-mindedness on the part of Kaleida Health (Children’s parent), strong will on the part of residents, and a visionary wielding of carrots and sticks by the city, likely over several mayoral terms.

The Children’s dental clinic, a three-story, H-shaped building on Bryant Street, and perhaps part of the outpatient complex on Hodge Street, would lend themselves to apartment conversion. Much of the rest of Children’s is without redeeming architectural value and would be hard for a developer to convert to housing or office space without demanding an ocean of adjacent parking.

These leave some overly large and depressing parking lots and one hell of an ugly parking ramp. But parking lots can be mitigated and, considering the damage is already done, some might find it handy to have 1,000 public parking spaces in the area. It also leaves the equivalent of two square blocks in the midst of Buffalo’s strongest real estate market. Less traffic, more parking, and more tax revenue. Can you ask for more?

On the other side of Main Street, the city and the hospitals have effectively bombed out any neighborhood that was there (Quietly, Michigan Avenue is being systematically denuded of houses and residents). Architecturally, the mind-numbing banality of the 1960s and 1970s has been improved by the passage of time and keener competition, as witnessed by the Roswell Park reconstruction (the most difficult architectural problem this town has seen in quite some time) and the Pillars Hotel (better scaled and detailed than, say, Grandma’s Pancake House). It’s a good thing, too. One would not want a repeat of Children’s Variety Tower: a bold synthesis of cast concrete and naugahyde.

Sensitive infill on this Allentown lot would help North Pearl (rear) and Main Street (foreground).

North Pearl is harmed by its exposure to the backsides of commercial buildings fronting Main and their parking lots. Allentown’s opportunity lies in leveraging the hospital construction. Grandma’s Pancakes, for example, can go.

This aspect of preservation planning demonstrates that selective demolition and new construction, strange as it may seem in Buffalo, can have a positive impact on a historic neighborhood.

As far as the city is concerned, well, there are a lot of people around City Hall who just groove on big projects. Federal programs are geared for big projects. The problem for neighborhoods is that they have always needed little ones. Not this time. Something big has been dropped in the laps of the residents and, if they are committed, something good can happen.