Newsletter of the
Preservation Coalition of Erie County (Home Page)
Winter 1997....TABLE of CONTENTS
City Doctor - Ailments
and analgesics
The only places that pedestrian malls tend to be a hit...
retail consultants say, are at the centers of large college towns like Boulder, Colo.,
where there are fewer drivers than normal, or in tourist areas that lend themselves
to strolling, as in Miami Beach and in Santa Monica, Calif. Those cities became tourist
areas because they were amenable to strolling at the same time so many other places
became less “strollable.”
Here’s a paradox: All shopping malls are pedestrian malls. They are much more tightly
designed – like an traditional European street in wall-to-wall dimensions– than the
average American city street, and certainly the 100'-wide pedestrian mall in downtown
Buffalo. The tight design not only cuts down on costs, it is in line with human sensory
capacities, allowing a person to see and often smell what is for sale on the opposite
side of where he or she happens to be walking.
Speaking of Buffalo’s mall…
People like human-scale environments. What is the most human-scaled object of all?
Another human. The Buffalo mall, conceived as an aesthetic solution to perceived
problems, never looked anything but desperately contrived, while it never worked
functionally either: By banning busses and cars, it reduced, by millions of people
per year, the number of humans on Main Street. Not to mention the fact that you cannot
perform the simplest of urban functions, mailing a letter, on Main Street, because
the U.S. Postal Service removed all mail boxes from the pedestrianized street.
Job strife in the ‘burbs
The Wall St. Journal reports that the cars are coming home to roost. The ballyhooed
non-office is being transformed into the 70-square-foot office. The upshot: no parking.
“I think this could have an unknown and unforeseeable economic impact on any suburban
office building that doesn’t have the flexibility to double its parking capacity,”
says a real estate person.
For years, there was roughly a 1:1 ratio between office space and parking space per
person. That figure was 250-300 sq. ft. Now, back offices–customer service, data
processing, etc.– are squeezing employees into as little as 110 sq. ft. It is even
worse in Silicon Valley, where companies are allotting 60 or 70 square feet per person–and
this includes walkways, and other unoccupied space.
Suburban office space will get more expensive. Back office ops can return to downtowns,
if building owners there successfully develop a mass transit strategy for back office
workers, who tend not to need autos for work-related tasks. In any event, they can
walk to lunch. Has anyone seen lunch-time traffic in the ’burbs?
Supportive S.R.O.’s in renovated hotels making a comeback
How much does it cost to house our less fortunate brethren? In New York City: Psych
hospital, $113,000; Jail cell, $60,000; homeless shelter, $20,000; supportive single
room occupancy hotel (SRO), $12,500, including renovating the building and providing
social services, according to Julie Sandorf of the Corporation for Supportive Housing,
which provides seed money for SRO housing. Supportive SROs provide housing, medical,
and social services to the mentally ill, disabled, and formerly homeless single adults.
The housing costs less to run because residents can qualify for state and federal
benefits to help pay rent. The housing is geared to poor single adults. A similar
project for over 20 units has been announced for the former Buffalo Tent and Awning
building on Broadway, a significant Second Empire building.
Architect with B.S. Degree
First Hawaiian Inc. In profile, it looks like the offspring of the Agency Buildings
on the South Mall in Albany, with a nod to the Jetsons. “Materials used in the structure–including
limestone imported from France, granite from Brazil and slate from England–were selected
to ‘give a sense of Honolulu as a place,’ says architect William Pederson. The bank’s
chairman flew to Italy personally to choose the marble for the lobby.
How can hospitals, plants, and other large buildings contribute
to urban livability?
They can build their cafeterias, gift shops, lunch rooms, and other non-core leisure
rooms so that they face the public street or, in suburban settings, the parking lot.
Case in point: The Cortland Line Company’s cafeteria overlooks the parking lot in
its rural community, leading to the apprehension of a murder suspect. According to
a news report, “A number of eyes fell on the stranger and stayed on him until he
disappeared.” The stranger was later linked to a double homicide.
A parking lot can’t feed you
It seems Chicago is so insecure about its image 28 years after the 1968 Democratic
convention that it bulldozed blocks of occupied but shabby looking buildings around
the United Center, in preparation for the 1996 convention. The city simply paved
over the blocks as parking lots. For a one-week show, the poor residents around the
Center now have no convenient food shops. A reporter talked to one: “Mr. Lyles, who
is retired and walks with a cane, does not drive and had to walk several blocks out
of his way to the nearest grocery.‘That’s real hard on the seniors,’ he said. ‘A
parking lot can’t feed you.’“