Buffalo Rising Online

I just drove past that building yesterday. It would be beautiful restored but I doubt that it will happen in that neighborhood. Its a shame. I would love to see the broadway / fillmore area restored.

p_cif stole the words out of my mouth..

it still said stranskys when i went by it in 2005.

It's not the neighborhoods themselves that have destroyed the East Side, but rather the people who live there. No, I'm not saying everyone on the East Side has destroyed it, but the destruction was caused by the inhibitants. Trash filled lots, graffitti and vandalism don't happen on their own. As we reinvest and clean up these neighborhoods, where will the people go that destroyed them in the first place? The obvious answer is to a new neighborhood in that they will also destroy in time.

I hear ya, the goo goo dolls stransky building is grand, but i think most of the east is buffalos worst problem. I am from East Delavan, and we still have our house there, ok. we put 17,000 into a roof for it, its right on the main street. How many people would do that for a house on the east side? especially when the guy next door abandons the property. The east side starts with the terminal, lets get that going, it will be a while before the neighborhood where johnny rzeznick grew up in, is any good. But lets try, start with broadway and fillmore. and the terminal, i was at the halloween party there and they just gave the money to charity, that building needs help. If gas goes to 5 bucks a gallon we should start with the trains again. Lets bring buffalo back.

make a nice parking lot but I don't think anyone would leave their cars there...

With that attitude we can just bulldoze buffalo, its 40 square miles, bigger than toronto, amazing how we shoot ourselves in the foot around here, in toronto or new york or houston or anyplace else, people are in line to buy in the city, thats why are taxes are soo high, everyone is paying for all this empty space, and we have 42 governments, when most big cities annexed their suburbs, buffalo gave the suburbs the freedom to have their own governments, police, fire etc. and being different than everyone else, has given us these results..... we deserve it.

Hey Calitrana, I was just in one of those precious suburbs such as Amherst and Williamsville. Found it nothing but sprawl and bland neighborhoods. Take a walk on Lincoln Parkway or Chapin, Windsor, Richmond, etc... Tell me if you see anything comparable to your tack housing... Buffalo is a beutiful city and should be part of the whole region. Why you people can not see the forrest through the trees I will never understand. So guess I am agreeing with you at some point of your confusing post but the thought of bulldozing out city is obnoxious.

Hey Auburner, your constant whining about the suburbs is obnoxious too. Take a walk down some of the selected streets in Amherst and Williamsville and you will find the same beauty that you find on Lincoln and Chapin. I am not advocating for the suburbs, but I think you need to get a grip on the reality of the situation. You want everyone to believe that the suburbs are the enemy, that their planned communities are an affront to the integrity of Buffalo. Take a walk on the East Side or in South Buffalo and tell me what you find. Do a tour of a few houses along Baynes, Harvard, Lafayette, or most of the neighborhoods in Buffalo and tell me how different it is from the suburbs.

It is people like you, with your constant attempts to denigrate the suburbs with hopes that it will make us look past the 90% of our city that is in need of attention and focus on the 10% that is livable and beautiful. I don't believe that you can see that forest through the trees.

Scarman - Remember that Graffiti is art, it is a form of self-expression that has no impact on Quality of Life, property values, or people's perception of the city. |sarcasm off|

Suburb bashing is just ridiculous. I live in the city, and have for the past 14 years. You know what? I'm over it. I'm over the constant noise, the garbage, and not always feeling so safe. I'm tired of going into stores and restaurants in the city that are filled with loud, ubnoxious, classless people. City living is great for some, but not everyone wants to deal with the crap that city living so often brings. When I was younger it was exciting. Now that I'm a 30-something I'd rather be able to sit in my living room without hearing people fighting and swearing outside, and wondering how badly my property value is going to decline. If I could afford it, I'd be in Tonawanda or Amherst right now. I'm all for the city and all the positive things it can bring, but you have to understand it's not for everyone. Don't criticize things based solely on your opinion of what's good or bad, or beautiful or ugly.

that's funny, scarman, b/c my house keeps going up in value (more than double from what i bought it for less than 10 years ago), and i just went outside and you could hear a pin drop. enjoy your lazyboy

was driving down Main Street recently and noticed nothing happening with Notre Dame De Lourdes Cathedral as a matter of fact its window is open to the elements...yet its adjacent to the Midtown arts Center....now this would make a great post....and it would be wonderful to expand the arts center into NotreDameDe Lourdes for performing arts, community meeting hall or sculptural display.....but if we ignore it much longer then the end result will be demolition.

Preskop,

Stop talking about places you know nothing about. Baltimore and Richmond are in much worse shape than Buffalo?!!

Come on.

Hey Bradon and all, I was not subburban bashing, I was only stating the fact that this community needs to come together as a whole in order to survive. New York, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island all saw it. Boston, Brookline, Watertown, Charlestown all saw it... That was the point of my post. Perhaps I was a bit of a stuff in talking about the "track housing", I stand corrected in that and you are right. But if Buffalo wants to survive it should come together as one.

In fact, I would make an argument about including Southern Ontario in the Buffalo DMA. It is so unfair that BuffaLO media gets so undervalued on Madison Avenue when in fact has a footprint far larger than Nielson or Arbitron give it.

Again, I am sorry for my words that I now regret and thank you for pointing that out. You are correct and I was wrong. But I still love the city, however.

That was Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic church at Main and Best ("Notre Dame de Lourdes" on the cornerstone)--I think it's been abandoned since around 1992. I was baptized in that church.

RPreskop. Are you a Racialist?

I think artspace should try to do an Annie DeFranko....with it and use it as a display space for sculpture or ats or meetings.

This is one building we just cannot demolish....thanks for the picture george!

oh and one other comment, if they ended the Kensington at Jefferson/Best instead of Elm/Oak.....if thet removed the downtown access from I-190 to the Hamburg and Louisiana instead of Elm/Oak.....

THEN THE ENTIRE STATE OF THE INNER EASTSIDE WOULD CHANGE AND STABILIZE.

WE ARE ONLY TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE DRIVING AN EXTRA 1 (MAYBE 2) MILE TO ACCESS THE EXPRESSWAYS...

THE STATE OF THE NEAR EASTSIDE IS THE FAULT OF OUR CURRENT EXPRESSWAY SYSTEM.

Another terrific post from Steel about terrific buildings. I can't believe how many commenters here think that Broadway is a lost cause and gosh, it's just too bad. The key to reviving Broadway is to retain as many of these well-ornamented masonry commercial buildings as possible, button them up against the elements, and hand-sell them to investors who fall stone in love with them, especially relos from big cities who consider Broadway ridiculously quiet and safe compared to where they came from.

This pattern repeats itself again and again in front our faces but we refuse to recognize and exploit it as an economic development strategy: our cheap, funky old buildings are our best, most appealing bait for new investment, new residents, and new businesses.

"Steel, referring to the one on the left, is it the building you like so much or is it the facade? Because under the richly detailed and wonderfully ornamented front skin, this building is just another old brick box"

I'm not surprised that STEEL has not responded to this question yet. Examining these buildings too closely might lead to the conclusion that they are actually not that impressive at all.

Preskop, seriously, you need help. God help you, because you are deeply, deeply disturbed.

I have worked for both Richmond and Baltimore for more than thirty years. I think I have a little more knowledge than you.

I love the facade and I love the brick box. I love the simplicity and extravagance combined. I love the history they bring with them and the thought of a guy crafting these buildings 100 years ago and buying his kid a toy on the way home from work. I love both buildings for how they work with each other and with the street. I love that they are so amazingly intact ( Especially the orange building) in the face of so much devastation. I love the potential they hold and I even love the crazy color.

What I don't understand is why my calling attention to these two beauties would elicit such a snide comment from you Davvid. These are not master pieces of architecture. No city is solely made up of master pieces. It is the simple in between buildings that make for great cities. That's what these are.

Davvid, a building needs to do WAY more than just be a precious trophy object sitting in space. Cities cannot function without brick boxes that can be reused by many different people for many different things for many generations, while still contributing grace and dignity to the streetscape. I'd rather have a dozen of these than a dozen Gwathmey-Siegels.

I don't think my comment was snide. Denizen made a good point at the beginning of this discussion and I wanted to highlight it. I didn't mean to hurt anyones feelings.

“It's not the neighborhoods themselves that have destroyed the East Side, but rather the people who live there.” This is an over simplification that dilutes the responsibility of government policies subsidizing the growth of the suburbs and the middle class that choose to follow those subsidies. I’m not saying it was “wrong” to do so, I’m just asking that the all admit to the social class environments we now have in all of our old cities and their suburbs. We sit back and want to believe that cities were all magically dysfunctional and got what was coming to them but it’s not that convenient.

For years we had the government subsidizing the building of homes for the poor in the cities while subsidizing the moving of the middle class out to the suburbs with FHA mortgage policies through the 30s, 40s and 50s and highway building (be it green field suburban ones or neighborhood decimating urban ones.) The middle class was drawn out of the cities leaving a poor tax base behind. It’s a no brainier that the city with be left with higher taxes, reduced, over burdened services and more crime.

We can also add in an education policy that says you must go to school in the district where you live and you get the mess we have today in the city schools. No matter how well a school is run, if it is filled with poverty laden children from broken homes it will under perform. So what result do we get? People must move to new neighborhood to put their kids in a better school thus widening the schools performance gap and now the health of the neighborhoods as a whole. This was made even worse through school desegregation which magically ended at the city line. In trying to desegregate by race they also did it by class since blacks as a whole were poorer than whites. What options did middle class parents have than to move to the suburbs where they were immune to the desegregation (since they have hardly any minorities to discriminate against so there was no need to desegregate). When later subsequent law suits were filed to try to spread the desegregation the suburbs, they were once again allowed to avoid it because, once again, they “never segregated to begin with”. Its easy to do when you are made up primarily made up of one class. It was just another gov't policy putting a nail in the urban coffin. No longer could a good city neighborhood be chosen to be assured a good school. Choice? Good neighborhood outside the city. Next up we can add road building and zoning laws. Roads were funded out of general funds while transit systems were still mostly privately funded with fees capped by the municipalities that were competing against them by building toll-free roads. Now we have all of them long defunct with gov’t trying to rebuild on its own what it killed to a society too spread out to make mass transit work for anyone. Why is it spread out? Zoning laws that prohibit shared use thus requiring large parking lots and massive roads and no ability to live without a vehicle. Stick in the highways drawing out the middle class that could afford vehicles and devastating stable urban neighborhoods they were cut through. The jobs then followed that development outward leaving those unable to afford transportation and the city as a whole in an even bigger hole.

These are just a few ways the gov't puts the city at a disadvantage. These are the policies that gave the cushy class segregation upper hand to the outlaying suburbs. Why do we expect those left behind with little money to invest and keep things up when those with money just packed up and left? Why shouldn’t everyone be expected to follow the same path as the rest of the middle class? Aren’t they just following the precedent set by the high and mighty that were there before them who are now pointing their fingers?

As we can see, these suburban policies that fueled their growth will also fuel their own demise. The sickness is evident in the disinvestment of Cheektowaga at the city line. The higher classes will keep moving outward because we subsidize it with new wider roads, highways and schools. Progressively lower classes will replace them until land goes vacant like the east side of Buffalo. As for the two buildings, we can only hope for them, along with the survival of St. Ann’s (the amount of highly detailed stained glass windows in there leaves one speechless). The entire set up is laid out for the city to be a subsidized mess with no amount of money able to fix it without metropolitan policy changes. Buildings like these will feel the effects. It’s the way we set it up to make it cushy out in the suburbs for us. Feel free to enjoy the benefits, but don’t act like its not all of our mess.

Bin...some interesting thoughts.

All these opinions about buildings, but no one asks for more information. How can someone offer a reasoned opinion about these two, without knowing how much they would be to own? Guessing about how long it will take for a neighborhood to come back is just that, guessing. Making estimates for weatherizing, security, a roof, etc. combined with the initial investment, is the beginning of due dilligence. Estimating the spread between what a business would pay, per square foot, to be here vs. some other location in the city, would also help. But, I guess it's easier to just post ..."i like the city...."..."no...I like the suburbs".... it does get a bit tiresome.

Thanks for the REIT stuff, Biniszkiewicz. I never heard of this before. I think you should write a feature-length piece about them, with pictures of nearby REIT-funded restorations, and offer it to BRO.

Bin... I agree that getting an existing business to move here would be difficult. I was thinking (although not stated very well) along similar lines to your earlier comments. Get 3 or 4 people doing something (for example software) that might be interested in building sweat equity in their own office space, vs. paying rent. I realize many things have to fall in place for this to work.

I have property in Allentown that it took me a number of years to 'bring back'. Respectfully, if it had cost me $100 per square foot, I could not have got it done. (With a more certain outcome now, as far as rents, financing would be an option where it would not have been back then.) I think for the buildings pictured here, you'd be looking at pouring your time and effort into it, and then either be able to occupy it with your own business (one that does business over the web vs. walkup), or if the neighborhood has improved a bit, offer as rental.

Does the city own these?

wll put chris69, b/c I always thought that this area should look at modifying, not taking down, the kensington, 190, etc. As much as I would like it if the 190 along the waterfront is removed, or if the 33 is downsized through delaware park, I'm afraid that's not going to happen. taking smaller bites like chris69 proposed makes a lot of sense to me. Anyway, little old me always takes broadway when I have to go into Cheektowaga. I much prefer it to the 33, it takes only a few more minutes drive, and I find a strange beauty in the old, abandon buildings along broadway.