Visitors and residents entering Buffalo from one of the city’s main gateways from the east, Route 5, have a new monument to greet them. How have we chosen to greet the traveler? A Gateway Arch? A Statue of Liberty? Indeed, a Space Needle? Or, more modestly, Peter Max signs a la the Customs Service’s?

No, the welcome mat is a superdrugstore (Walgreens) with a super parking lot. A chain store Pandora’s box from out of town. (As Ross Perot would say, the sound you hear is that of money being sucked out of Buffalo.) The developers made some cosmetic changes to the standard Walgreens box, but would not consider incorporating an existing Art Deco building or placing the new building at the curb instead of behind the usual sea of parking.

The vanquished building, last housing a Ford dealership, was a peppy roadside gem. The central part of the building was a semi-circular showroom of clear glass enframed by black carrara glass. On top of the showroom were two progressively smaller 12-sided drums of milk glass trimmed in thin bands of carrara, which were internally lighted. At the top of this jazzy wedding cake once stood a massive Mustang radiator emblem. The tower acted to organize what in fact were two buildings, one oriented to Main Street, the other paralleling Windemere Avenue. It was a neat and characteristically Buffalo solution to dealing with the many local streets which meet at less or more than 90° angles (the Niagara Mohawk building at Genesee and Huron is a prominent example; the former Liberty Bank branch at Kensington and Bailey is another North Buffalo example).

There is some irony here. The demolished building bore a distinct resemblance to the Walgreens Pavilion at the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago. Chicago is Walgreens’ hometown, and the theme of the fair was “A Century of Progress.”

Compounding the irony was the prelude to the demolition. Walgreens, the colonial master scouting for another Buffalo outpost, said it could not build at Main and Kenmore given the site conditions. That was fine with the family-owned neighborhood drugstores already there, but the city supported Walgreens instead, abandoning a block-long section of nearby Windemere Ave.

Perhaps the best gateway symbol for the Walgreens site would be a large sucker, celebrating Buffalo’s embrace of the status of a neo-colonial economy.

Meanwhile, Common Council Member David Franczyk has convened a panel to study “big box” architecture and make recommendations for a city-wide design review process. The efforts won’t come a moment too soon, but it’s already too late for the intersection at Main & Kenmore.