The Community of the Arts Good Neighbor Planning Alliance along with Forever Elmwood hosted an informative community meeting just moments ago in regards to the future Burchfield-Penney Arts Center. The standing-room-only community gathering was heavy on media as well as concerned citizens, who mostly came to support the project though there were a few who also shared their strong opposition.
Those in favor of the plan commended BP for the groups' forward thinking design that caters to the Buffalo State Campus as well as the artistic integrity of the immediate neighborhood. They expressed their thoughts on the modern design and their concern that opposition to the project could delay building what they see as a new standard for future designs in Buffalo. There were a handful of people that attended the meeting who felt that the community was left out of the initial planning stages, and therefore the planners left out the community. One attendee who opposed the plan even likened the gallery to the boiler room building that is currently housed on the state campus.
Tim Tielman (photo) of Campaign for Buffalo was very vocal in his opinion that the plan really does not take into account the future of the HH Richardson Complex/Olmsted footprint. Local architect Charlie Gordon interjected that the project garners a certain artistic thought and an open-minded attitude as to what the possibilities for the building entail. Chuck Banas, a member of the New Millenium Group, spoke of the great architecture in its midst and how the building did not hold up to these design standards. Celeste Lawson (photo) of Buffalo's Arts Council spoke of the Richardson Towers and how at one point people despised Richardson's design, which has now been embraced the world over. She spoke of people's historic opposition to forward-thinking architecture, and how Buffalonians should view the BP project as a sign of positive progress.
Many of the people that embraced the new project today prefaced their input with, "I just moved back to this city and...", which they intended to mean that they were not only back, but they were here to rally behind projects such as this. Dan Sack of Forever Elmwood warned that many hasty decisions made in Buffalo's past have resulted in missed opportunities and tragic endings, such as the 'train to nowhere' and our university that was built on a suburban swamp.
Despite the varying opinions that were shared at today's meeting, the discourse was surprisingly civil. Members of Forever Elmwood made it a point to remind the crowd that today was especially beneficial in that for the first time community forums are actually open to the public and serve as sounding boards for both positive and negative feedback... unlike projects like the Bass Pro deal (among others).
Above all else today, there was definitely an overall feeling in the air that the majority of the meeting’s attendees agreed on one thing... and that was that they wanted to see the BP project built without any sort of major delay. Most people seemed excited about the gallery's plans as well as the pre-announced soft date for the initial shovels to start digging in... hopefully by late spring or early summer.