Buffalo Rising Online

Collin-

The reason you knock these down is to allow for something amazing to happen.

This is not a rebirth. This is the delaying of the inevitable. Look who is buying these. RiverWright business is based on the Ethanol scam. If you look into all of the alternative options, you will see that Ethanol is not even close to being a good choice. In fact it is a large scam and a house of cards. Ethanol is simply not a scalable solution and will not last. Not sure how long it will take for people to figure this out but it WILL happen.

Look who is buying the "Lake and Rail" site...Whitebox Commodities Holdings Corp. This company is not in the business of making anything. They simply want to buy low, hold until they can sell high. Around the same time people figure out corn is not the way to go, you are going to see both sites just as empty as they were 2 years ago.

All for what. A couple hundred jobs? Jobs that are purchased with energy breaks so the net sum to the local taxpayer is nill? Rather stupid if you ask me.

As for your comment that there is nothing down there....well duh! Go back 5 years when almost all of the river was dead. For some reason the pinheads felt that it would be a good idea to keep these things up for historical value. That is BS!

I loved the idea of saving one to three of them for a conversion away from non industrial use. The challenge is there are more than 3. What developer in their right mind is going to spend millions converting one of these when the view is of a working industrial site or a empty industrial site?

Bringing back these sites to industrial use that has no long term viability is just another mistake in the long history of mistakes made in Buffalo. As the old saying goes, in for a penny...in for a pound.

In my opinion what does this mean...well it means the Buffalo river is going to be delayed from being cleaned up until these operations die on the vine. It means that the only realistic use for the remaining sites is industrial and Buffalo is not having much success in getting that to come back. Well unless you want to pay them off with cheap power at the taxpayers expense.

Sony-

Those things were already in Buffalo but they left. The reasons why they left have not changed and they are not coming back.

The question should be what do you do with a grain elevator that is no longer in use? Take the f*cker down!

I know people will say that some are in use today. This is correct. However, as I pointed out before, they will eventually be empty again. When that happens, take the f*ckers down!

MJ-

While I can see where you are coming from, I would ask you to look at the big picture.

The demo of buildings in the city, specifically in the city core, is a bad thing. This I will agree. The reason why this is bad thing is because those buildings can be restored and used used for either the same original intent or something similar. The Webb is a perfect example of this. The other thing to consider is the buildings in the core have some significance in terms of design and could not be built again.

Even some industrial sites can be reused for a different purpose because their bones allow for it. Look at the countless warehouse conversion projects for an example. Even when these sites are empty, they do not look _as_bad_ as an empty grain elevator.

Grain elevators are very unique in design and extremely difficult to re-purpose. If Buffalo would have had 1-2 it still would have been difficult to find a use outside of returning to their original purpose. Buffalo, as we all know, has more grain elevators then it will EVER find a purpose for.

Lastly, a developer has less of a concern in developing next to a shovel ready site in comparison to developing next to a grain elevator. With all of the challenges in Buffalo, why needlessly keep some that can be removed?

RiverWright purchased the site for 180k a couple of years ago. This alone shows you how much the market values these things.

Let me throw this out there for all. Lets just pretend that RiverWright never happened. Here is what I would "dream" of seeing.

The set of elevators at the foot of the 1st ward where Ohio and Louisiana meet is converted to a hotel. The peninsulas that Child Street and Katherine Street are on are completely cleared up. These peninsulas are converted to a golf course, with 9 holes on each. The hotel would be for the course with pedestrian bridges connecting the 3 sections. As you know, on the other side of the Katherine Street peninsula is a glorious natural preserve. I think some AMAZING views would be had.

A pedestrian walkway of 15ft would front both sides of the river from the inner harbor to where South Park crosses the river and all the way back out to the outer harbor.

Next, the city gives General Mills enough tax breaks and helps get enough discount power to get them to move south to on the water. This area already has shipping canals and shovel ready land.

What this would do is make the need for the skyway non-existant. The "island" that the General Mills site is currently located on could be converted to a park...an original name like Island Park could be used.

With ALL of the industrial sites gone from the river, it could be cleaned up. Development could like the river, with views of a park in between, a golf course and Tifft to the south, a Gateway bridge to the north (if it ever gets built), the city skyline to the east and of course Lake Erie to the west.

Call me a dreamer but THIS IS A PLAN. Not just a single item but an entire vision. Come up with something better?