Demolitions Mar Drastic Urban Renewal Efforts in the mid 1950s
In his new book, CITY ON THE EDGE, Mark Goldman writes in detail about the impact of urban renewal on downtown Buffalo from the 1950s to the present. What follows is an excerpt from that material.
Demolitions Mar Drastic Urban Renewal Efforts in the mid 1950s: Downtown Buffalo, meanwhile, continued to struggle. Throughout the 1950s politicians and planners in the city, as in the rest of the nation, became increasingly desperate, seeking salvation in ever larger, ever more expensive, and ever more disastrous policies of urban renewal. For those who cared and thought they knew, the renewal of the city, its downtown and its neighborhoods, could be found only in big projects and large-scale developments. Only these types of ventures, they argued, had the potential to renew large areas and to make the kind of impact, both real and symbolic, that they felt was necessary to improve the struggling city Lewis Mumford, the great guru of urbanism, seemed to have agreed. Writing in the New Yorker in 1955 (how, it is interesting to ponder, did his readers in New York City respond to the advice he proffered?) Mumford insisted that the only way for the city to compete with the “lure of the suburb” is by “rebuilding the interior of the city with gardens and parks and open vistas so that it too will be desirable and habitable.” “Rebuilding” required demolition, and throughout the 1950s, whole blocks in downtown were cleared. The goal of such demolition was often nothing more than increasing parking capacity.
In 1951, Common Council president Peter J. Crotty, who earlier in the year had proposed the widening of Delaware Avenue from Niagara Square north to the city line, suggested the demolition of two square blocks of lower Main Street for the creation of a thousand-car parking ramp. Not only would this help the businessmen there, Crotty said, the surface lot would be “an enhancement.” He argued that “the area needs beautification” and should “be rid of the semi-slums there.”
Most downtown business interests—bankers, real estate developers, the Chamber of Commerce, and the press—agreed that municipally owned and operated parking ramps were critical to the future of downtown. In October 1951, the Common Council approved the creation of a municipal parking agency and authorized a $3 million bond issue for the construction of three of five proposed parking ramps. Mayor Joseph Mruk was thrilled, believing that these ramps were somehow a cure-all that would, he said, lead to “the preservation and expansion of existing trade; the stabilization of existing business trends and the prevention of decentralization of business and shopping."
The conversion of building sites to parking lots occurred at the hands of private owners, too, who, like those who came before and after them, realized a higher rate of return on their properties. The most infamous case occurred in 1950, when despite editorials in newspapers throughout the country and a few faint-hearted efforts locally to save it, Frank Lloyd Wright’s world-renowned Larkin Administration Building was torn down so the owners could build a parking lot. The building had been deteriorating for years, abandoned by its owners and neglected by the authorities. An article in the Buffalo Evening News, which featured a photograph of the crumbling building with all of its windows broken and shattered, bore the headline: “City’s ‘White Elephant’ Falling to Ruin…No use for Larkin Building in sight.” The article told the full story:
The five story brick structure, once the most modern office building in the country, gradually is approaching a state in which it will be entirely useless. Every double-paned window is shattered. The tall iron gate which graced the entrance has toppled from rusted hinges. The iron fence topping a low brick wall around the structure went into a war-time scrap collection. The Larkin Building, a headache to the city since it was acquired in tax foreclosure proceedings in 1945, cost $4,000,000 to build and was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a nationally famous architect. Offers to purchase it for around $25,000, far less than its assessed valuation of $239,000, including land, have been turned down. A national advertising campaign that cost $6,000 brought inquiries but no offers. The state rejected a suggestion that the building be converted for emergency housing and the county took no action on a proposal to make it headquarters of the Welfare Department. Two years later, in 1949, The Larkin Building was sold to the Western Trading Company of Buffalo for $5000. They would, the company promised, demolish it, erecting in its place a storage facility for trucks.
It was not, it seems, that the owners did not know its value or its worth; it was just that they did not care enough to do anything about it. For years, fabulous buildings, so many of which had lost their value in a city hit by economic depression and then stunned by suburbanization, buildings whose absence we mourn today, had been coming down, usually for parking lots. This devastating process, which deprived future generations of the great treasures of the past, accelerated in the 1950s.
The price was high; the losses irreparable. Acquisition of the ramp sites and demolition of the buildings proceeded quickly. Reporting in the spring of 1954, the Evening News said: “A sizeable chunk of Buffalo’s history will be powdered into dust when wreckers’ hammers begin thudding against the buildings at Main and Seneca streets, clearing the way for municipal erection of off-street parking facilities.” With some sense of regret and loss, the paper described the building at 215 Main Street, which was being demolished: “The granite structure with its second floor façade of Greek columns and heavily cross-barred windows, was built in 1894, obviously as an ornate financial center.”
Also demolished for a parking ramp that was built at Washington and Eagle was the breathtakingly beautiful Hotel Buffalo, which through the 1920s was the city’s proudest and most elegant hotel. Down, too, came the Germania Insurance Building on the corner of Main and Lafayette Square. A six-story cast iron building built in 1875, it would have, had it been allowed to stand, rivaled any building in New York’s SoHo, the country’s great district of cast-iron architecture. Bought by the Tishman family of New York realtors in 1956, who planned to build on the site a contemporary, Miesian box of a building, The Germania did not come down without a fight. “The wreckers,” the Buffalo Evening News reported in August 1957, “who still will have to tear it apart with acetylene torches, will learn that in the 1870s good buildings were not put up to be torn down.”
Allan Tishman could not wait. “We’re excited about it,” he said. “We’re anxious to get the first brick off the old building to remove any doubts there may be about a new building going up.” Tishman had big plans for the site: it was to showcase a twenty-story glass, curtain-walled building, which was designed by the internationally known New York modernist, Emery Roth. It was to be the first skyscraper built in Buffalo in twenty-five years.
The Germania Building was not, at least according to the Buffalo Evening News, going to be missed: “[T]here are few left to shed any tears as it comes tumbling down.” The same also seemed to be true when, in early 1959, M&T Bank bought back from the Federal Reserve a building that the bank had built in the 1880s (image from WNY Heritage Press). The bank needed, it said, “more customer parking.” It was a heartbreakingly beautiful building, built in an imposing Greek Revival style and surrounded on three sides by monumental marble columns. Insley Smith, in charge of the Buffalo branch of the Federal Reserve, was pleased. “We’re glad,” he said, “that the M&T bought it because it is in a position to utilize the property to the best advantage of that area of Buffalo.”
In September of the same year, the Kellogg Building, a stately four-story Federal style brick building at the corner of Niagara Square and Delaware Avenue, which dated to the early 1830s, was also torn down for parking. The owner, Darwin Martin, Jr. said that a new parking lot was needed. Martin, whose father had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build his home, known today as the Martin House, “regretted,” he said, “that no economically feasible plan had been found to preserve it.”
Some, like Irving Saperston of Saperston Real Estate, would go further still. Saperston, like the other big downtown real estate companies, rarely saw a renewal project he did not like, particularly when new construction was involved. In a speech delivered to the Chamber of Commerce in 1958, Saperston advanced yet another plan that had the backing and support of many of the downtown real estate interests. The goal, as always, was more parking and easier traffic flow. The target, as it had been almost fifty years before, was Lafayette Square, which along with the elaborate Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument Saperston planned to demolish. In its place, Saperston would build an underground parking garage with space for more than a thousand cars. Gone, too, if Saperston had had his way, would have been downtown’s last farmer’s market, the Chippewa Market, which would have been replaced by a four-square-block surface parking lot. According to the Saperston plan, traffic flow would be enhanced by the conversion of most downtown streets to one-way traffic. But Saperston’s plan was not all slash and burn. For downtown to thrive, he said, children must be brought downtown. “Bring them back,” he proposed, “with clowns, prizes, suckers and free movies.”
it's about time I read an article where someone started naming names. Who were the criminals/idiots who did this to our City and are their progeny still with us responsible for making decisions?
Funny, 50 years later. We still haven't learned.
I cannot wait to pick up this book!
Depressing- so much for 'progress.'
Reading articles like this make want to cry and beat the crap out of those responsible at the same time. Taking a stroll through the WNY Heritage Press and seeing all that we have lost, how can anyone not understand the "preservationists" when all this proof of "progress" stares us all in the face?
A majority of citizentry around here yells about the same old gov't ways, yet are constantly promoting the type of development highlighed above. Knock it down, parking is needed! Ugh..
when is this book going to be available? the publisher date is 1/2/07 but it is not available on amazon yet?
i loved "high hopes" when i found it in a box of my dad's old books and i've been looking forward to this book for over a year.
when is this book going to be available? the publisher date is 1/2/07 but it is not available on amazon yet?
i loved "high hopes" when i found it in a box of my dad's old books and i've been looking forward to this book for over a year.
Well this article is an extremely strong argument for expanding our historical districts and creating some architectural guidelines to blend new infill construction in historical districts.
This article is also an extremely strong argument to rebuild some on some of the things that are uniquely Buffalo
-such as rebuilding the Pan Am Expo Gates
-such as rebuilding the Erie Canal Wharf District
-such as rebuilding the Larkin Administration Building
-such as expanding upon our famous Buffalo Row houses on Delaware by building more
-such as rewatering some of the South Buffalo Canals such as the Ohio Basin
-such as re-activating the Central Terminal as a multi-modal station and linking it with a light rail extension to the airport
-such as rebuilding Shelton Square and Lafayette Square and the liberty pole
-such as restoring the original street grid, parkways, circles, etc. Infact, Niagara Street could easily be converted to an Olmstead Parkway.
All our Buffalo projects need to incorporate that which is uniquely Buffalo.
Lastly, lets remember and take forward one last thing. Lets look at the former neighborhoods demolished for Urban Renewal and tell developers that this is where they can demolish and rebuild. This concept of infill development justifying more urban demolitions is ridiculous.....
It is very obvious that urban renewal failed because there was too much emphasis on accomodating automobiles which resulted in horrible, disasterous decisions to demolish perfectly good old buildings just to lay out hideous asphalt surface parking lots. Tearing down old buildings and replacing them with new buildings is progress, tearing down old buildings to put in parking lots is not only idiotic but also insane. What the hell where the so-called business and civic leaders thinking back in the 1960s. Overdependence on the automobile is not only ruining cities it is also destroying all of America.
Goldman for President.
Looks like downtown in the 1950s never got many clowns or prizes, but it sure did have a lot of suckers.
Who could oppose "renewing" the very heart of downtown Buffalo?
Demolition didn't "mar" urban renewal, it was the very basis of urban renewal! What is especially creepy is the glee with which it was undertaken. Almost like an episode of mass hysteria.
P.S. Lou, Olmsted (note correct spelling of name) did not design Niagara Street and his firm is now defunct. Maybe Niagara can be a parkway but it cannot be an Olmsted parkway.
Speaking of "glee", the " theatre" of urban renewal--the announcements, the rhetoric, the ceremonies that accompanied demolitions--were ritualized, orchestrated, dramatic, almost operatic. In April, 1963 following the demolition of the jewel-like c. 1865 Greek Revival Western Savings Bank building at Main and Court, there was a ceremony for the ground breaking of the new building. Gathered here, in addition to the two hundred or so politicians and businessmen in attendance, were the local clergy. Dressed in a full-flowing purple rovbe was the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese. Standing next to him was the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese and next to him the rabbi of Temple Beth Zion. The latter pronounced that the new buiding was "a tangible testament reflecting the stability of our community." How could this process, blessed and sanctified as it had becomme, possibly fail?
Oh, my. Demolishing half your downtown? "All part of God's plan!" That anecdote about bishops and rabbis is *especially* creepy.
- Big fan of putting back the liberty pole at the inner harbor.
How about putting the Lions back on the bridge by the 198.
how about move the current psych hospital some where else, take down that hospital and rebuild the rest of the wing of the richardson complex that was torn down.
Zombo, I didnt even know they tore down a wing of the Richardson....if they did....darn...they most definitely should put it back. Move the psych hospital to ECMC when it closes.
The “urban renewal” of the late 50’s and 60’s was a disaster for the City of Buffalo. First, we had the Ellicott District public housing project which demolished an entire neighborhood and replaced it with these hideous buildings that were dysfunctional from Day 1. Urban Renewal in the Ellicott District produced large fallow fields like there are now on the East Side with these towers, configured as 4 towers connected to a main building, looming over the fields. Any intelligent observer knew this project was a disaster but its defenders said it was a typical (in NYC, I suppose) contemporary housing project. Eventually, some of these buildings were abandoned and then most were torn down. A few of the towers were rehabilitated, with several units being combined into 1 unit Townhouse or town homes were built on some of the former tower sites with new streets named after significant Buffalo blacks. Other parts of the demolished tower sites now house new row houses like the ones built in the last 5 years on South Division.
George Post was one of the many good architects from outside Buffalo who designed significant structures in the city's downtown. The 2 most significant were the original Central Library and the Erie County Savings bank. They were replaced by a library with a mundane 1960's look and by the Main Place Mall. Does anyone think those are improvements? And then there is the story of one of Buffalo's true architectural gems, Louis Sullivan's Guaranty Building. Jimmy Griffin thought that there was nothing significant about this building and wanted to have it torn down. It took the intervention of Senator Moynihan to stop the demolition.
I always wondered who the idiots were that were responsible for taking down the Larkin.
Those buildings would be so incredile if they were still standing. What a tragedy.
Regarding the Guaranty Bldg. It was Mayor Makowski not Griffin that wanted it torn down. Griffin along with Moynihan was involved in the saving of that building using UDAG funds.
And it amazes me that people STILL think that preservationists try to save too much. Looking back and you realize the preservationists in this city failed.
I am thankful that we saved what we did. A trip to Detroit is all you need to take to see what our future could have been:
-imagine Shea's gutted having a 3 story parking garage installed in the hulk with the ornate plaster ceiling exposed to the elements and falling away,
-imagine the birthplace of Ford Motorcompany (the first aproduction line) demoed for a parking lot,
-imagine the Motown building demoed in time to create parking for the last Super Bowl.
I came back home 1,000% in a better mood about Buffalo, what we've done, and what we can still do. Luckily the rot didn't cost us everything that makes us unique and I am thankful that we even have that to work with.
Well it was a group insanity or as I call it mass dis-association.
The late 50s and the 60s was an explosion of new medicine, new materials, new technology and new babies developed during WWII research labs for the military and finally being commercialized.
But was also a mass dis-association from McMarthy, Korea, WWII, holocaust, Nazis, the missing generation (between WWI & WWII), the mustard gas of WWI, etc. People wanted clean lines and individualism....
It wasnt just cars...and unions...it was the convergence of alot of things that people were receptive...and it took Jackie Kennedy standing up for Grand Central Station to make preservation movement and tradition respectable...even so it took the preservation movement 25 years...to even gain a margin of influence with governments and developers
Good point Matt P. I'm thankfull our downtown don't look like Detroit. I've been there once and that was enough. Huge buildings (Think Statler Towers, Rand Building, Liberty Building) all vacant and rotting away. No thanks, Buffalo is in much better shape.
Now that the Brass Pro deal is toast (the more I think about it the better off we'll all be) why not use some or all of that money to reconstruct the Larking Administration Building? I'm sure it wouldn't be cheap, but it would be money well spent. And it would actually be usable. Who wouldn't want their office in a one of a kind office structure? One of the City's greatest buildings brought back to life. What better way to continue the "Rebirth" of Buffalo. Multiply the Darwin Martin house fanfare X100.
Mark,
This idea of reconstructing the long gone Larkin Building is idiotic. Granted it was a horrible mistake to allow the demolition of the Larkin Administration Building but it is all said and done probably long before any of us were born. You have to learn from these mistakes and move on. To waste hundreds of millions of dollars to reconstruct something that was torn down well before our time is senseless. Whoever came up with this stupid, idiotic idea of reconstructing the Larkin Administration Building needs to get a life and drop this economically unviable, silly proposal. This is another example of Buffalo wanting to live in the past and refusing to embrace the future which is hurting this city. Furthermore, not everyone is a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright.
If we don't do something about the Richardson Towers soon we can add that to the list of beautiful and priceless buidlings gone.
Orton pl,
You are 100% correct about the nightmare possibility of losing the Richardson State Hospital complex. A coulple years ago, I suggested that the historic Richardson complex be renovated and converted into a state government office complex since the state planned on decommissioning and demolishing that ugly as sin Donovan Office Building. The Richardsons is already state owned property so it would make perfectly good sense to turn it into a state office complex. The infinite wisdom of our state and local political leaders did not agree with me on this one for no legitimate reason whatsoever. Instead they much rather hold this gorgious, historic landmark hostage to rapid decay and endless delays and waste their thoughts and our tax dollars in turning it into an Olmsted School or dorms for Buffalo State neither which panned out yet. I am a fan of H.H. Richardson and this hospital complex along with the City Hall in Albany are among his best works.