This is Part III of a Three Part article. Part I began by noting disturbing similarities between the mantras being used to promote the current bloated tunnel scheme and those used in the 1960’s to sell the original Kensington Expressway to the public. The regrettable role of the Restore Our Community Coalition (ROCC) in promoting this project was also considered. Part I concluded with a look at the unforgivable destruction of the most important link in Olmsted’s landmark design for Buffalo, Humboldt Parkway.)
Part II surveyed some of the controversial methods that have been adopted to foist this costly scheme upon a largely oppositional public. In addition, questions were posed as to what is a proper role for the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy in all of this.)
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
Harry Truman
The course of events on the West Side was greatly affected by the successful, aspirational campaign to “Save Delaware Park.” That campaign was largely spearheaded by the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy (BOPC). It played a vital role in building solidarity among citizens from all over Buffalo interested in saving a treasured Olmsted landmark, Delaware Park. This collective display of support was leveraged to slow down hasty actions regarding the 198 by the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT). It influenced Governor Cuomo’s decision to successfully bring in the wider perspectives of the Greater Buffalo/Niagara Regional Transportation Council (GBNRTC).
Leadership of the Restore Our Community Coalition (ROCC), on the other hand, has seemed almost insistent on cutting itself off from those concerned with a future for the key connecting element in Olmsted’s Landmark Design, Humboldt Parkway. For ROCC these citizens seem to be regarded as “outsiders” whose involvement might interfere with the organization’s exclusionary dealings to cut the quickest deal possible with NYSDOT.
After fifteen years of tireless organizing and engagement it is easy to understand the fatigue and the willingness to settle on the part of ROCC leadership. The truth of the matter is, from their perspective, they have very little to lose. Conditions for residents in that part of the expressway have been so bad, for so long, that it is difficult to imagine any outcome in negotiations with NYSDOT that could result in anything worse for them.
The trouble is the present tunnel/cap ultimatum being pitched by NYSDOT, although it may be just fine for those living in the small area to be covered, will doom everyone else in all the other communities along the expressway’s length to generations more of their suffering. The rest of the city will remain physically divided and future generations will never get to see the wondrous Olmsted treasure that NYSDOT so ruthlessly stole from them.
The larger public has a right to a voice in the making of a decision which will clearly have city-wide, generational consequences. We must insure that this begins at the next “public” meeting. Buffalo citizens must emphatically insist that the meeting be appropriately opened up to allow for true group discussion with the public voicing and sharing of opinions. Meetings should be recorded and made available afterwards to an even broader public as was the case with GBNRTC meetings around the Scajaquada Expressway. The isolation of individual attendees into one-on-one encounters with NYSDOT representatives that characterized the last “public” meeting cannot be acceptable.
Secondly, Governor Hochul must be pressed to follow the example of her predecessor and seek the broader perspective that only a regional planning organization like GBNRTC can provide. Before such an extravagant expenditure of state resources is spent on such a controversial undertaking, the public is owed some explanation of how this project fits into a broader vision for Buffalo’s future.
This is not a time for “everyone for themselves” thinking and remedies. This is time for communities to come together, as they did on the West Side, in thoughtful, united action against the shared disaster that is responsible for the intolerable conditions suffered by the entire East Side.
What is needed is a vision that can be broken down into attainable, incremental steps toward a just outcome for all the communities bordering this divisive infrastructure; communities from North Oak all the way to the Bailey Avenue border. We need an outcome that will eventually reassemble a divided city and return to all its citizens our stolen Olmsted Heritage. We need a plan where each step prepares the way for the next rather than throwing up an insurmountable barrier to further progress.
It is time for the type of transparent, inclusive process that GBNRTC intervention brought to the West Side matter of the 198.
There is no failure except in no longer trying.
Elbert Hubbard
There are those who want to throw their hands in the air and argue that this is a done deal. They say that, at this point, there is nothing that can be done to prevent the citizens of Buffalo from being steamrolled by this expressway once again. I urge them to recall recent developments around both the Buffalo Skyway and the Scajaquada Expressway.
For years both Congressman Higgins and State Senator Tim Kennedy had been arguing that the Buffalo Skyway was obsolete, a safety hazard, too costly to maintain and major impediment to economic development. As Governor Hochul has done with the Kensington Expressway, Governor Cuomo had pledged ten million dollars of state funds toward an environmental study in an effort to fast-track the federally mandated environmental review process. He even went so far as to create a competition and awarded $175,000 in prizes to the participants who came up with the winning designs for a post-demolition Skyway site.
In January of 2021, after his State of the State announcement, the governor’s office issued a press release stating that the environmental study was expected to be completed shortly and, with federal approval, the project would be “ready to break ground this {2021} year.”1 Yet by June of that very same year, all of this progress would be abruptly halted as leadership switched focus to the 33. The lesson, of course, was that circumstances for what once may have appeared a fait accompli could turn on a dime.
A similar lesson is to be learned from our experiences with the Scajaquada Expressway. There citizens endured almost two decades of “final ultimatums” from NYSDOT. These proclaimed that maintenance of the current expressway, as is, was the only viable transportation option for that corridor (sound familiar?). A sudden decision by Governor Cuomo brought in the much broader perspective of the regional planning organization GBNRTC. This organization’s expanded research provided evidence that concluded with a preferred alternative detaching the 198 from its highway connections thereby effectively returning it to the local thoroughfare it once was. This time I will resort to a “Yogism” to make my point – “It ain’t over, till it’s over.”
A community has to have the capacity to envision a future they want, and not just the one they are likely to get.
Unknown
Buffalo cannot allow political pressures and the perceived forced timing of the moment to serve as an excuse for imprudent actions on our part; actions that will rush us into another outcome we will, most certainly, live to regret.
The ultimate aim of Biden’s Infrastructure Bill, as well as that of Governor Hochul, is in reuniting divided communities. They are not committed to the building of tunnels. The Infrastructure Bill and Governor Hochul can, and have, supported highway removal as a means to unification elsewhere. Expressway tunnel building is the obsession of NYSDOT; an organization that, like other state DOTs across the nation, has a myopic preoccupation with 1940’s highway-centered planning.
Buffalo is now poised to enshrine a small section of its outdated 1960’s inner-city highway with a billion+ dollar cap. Meanwhile, with vision far more appropriate to the twenty-first century, cities around the globe have switched their focus to making themselves more pleasant, healthy places to live by successfully removing such disruptive infrastructure from their midst.
Our neighbor Rochester is a fine example. The city recently removed a 2/3 mile section of its Inner Loop at a publicized cost of twenty-two million dollars.2 That sum won’t even cover the cost for two years of the maintenance required for Buffalo’s proposed monstrosity. It took exactly three years of work for Rochester to go from dumping the first load of dirt to completed boulevard. They are already considering expansion.3 Buffalo’s construction and traffic disruption is projected to last at least five years. In Part I of this article, I already discussed factors that all but eliminate foreseeable hopes of a “Phase II.”
For its proposal to dismantle a section of the I-81, Syracuse, has received enthusiastic support not only from Governor Hochul but, – believe it or not – from NYSDOT itself. Yet, donned with blinders, local leadership won’t even consider such a possibility for Buffalo’s future. They submit unquestionably to the NYSDOT/ROCC script that – for Buffalo – such a forward looking approach is not a “realistic” possibility.
Admittedly, the eventual dismantling of the 33 is not something likely to occur all at once. Both Rochester and Syracuse are approaching their removal projects through phased incremental planning. Detachment of Humboldt Parkway from its highway connection, similar to the plan GBNRTC has presented for the 198, might prove a good way to start. A Humboldt Parkway turned back to the local street it once was might provide the same immediate relief for all the Humboldt Parkway residents east of Delevan that the GBNRTC plan will provide Humboldt Parkway residents west of Delevan.
There is no way anyone can feel anything other than the most extreme compassion for the deplorable conditions suffered daily by of those living in the path of this tragic planning catastrophe. I had a taste of it myself. For the first twenty-one years of my life, I lived with my family on Humboldt Parkway. As a youth, I bore personal witness to NYSDOT’s devastation. Incredulously, I watched in horror from my bedroom window as Olmsted’s majestic wonder was transformed into the nightmare it has become. Ever since, I have been bound and determined to let no one forget what was so reprehensibly stolen from our city. I will do my best to see that Olmsted’s masterpiece, as he had originally designed it, is returned to its rightful owners and stewards, the citizens of Buffalo.
Unfortunately, the political situation that has developed can make it awkward for those favoring a more comprehensible approach to speak out. They have an understandable fear of seeming insensitive to human suffering if they fail to fall in line with the insistent haste with which politicians claim this expenditure must get underway. Yet the long-range consequences of this regressive proposal are so dire that it makes it almost a betrayal of leadership to sit this out in quiet deference.
We cannot afford to leave more than a billion dollars of state taxpayer funds and all the private contracts that will ensue to be under the exclusive control of NYSDOT and the leadership of one organization.
Furthermore, we can’t leave the future of our stolen Olmsted Heritage in the hands of two entities neither of which has any interest in ever seeing it returned. ROCC’s Chair, Stephanie Barber Geter, is quoted in the Buffalo News as saying: “We are reclaiming our neighborhoods in terms of easy walkability and lack of air pollution. We will not put Humboldt back the way Olmsted had it, because the reclaiming of these issues are higher on the list.”4
Sadly, Chairperson Geter states this as though there is no choice but to have one or the other. After the example set with the Scajaquada, we must help ROCC leadership to realize that choices need not be as limited as they perceive.
Buffalo has made so many planning mistakes in the past; mistakes that seriously limited options for our future. Additionally, in matters of preservation, Buffalo has witnessed irreplaceable elements of our past being taken from us forever; only recently the Great Northern Grain Elevator is an example.
The same could be true in the case of Olmsted’s Humboldt Parkway except that Humboldt Parkway can easily be returned. We need only consider it worth our effort to make it happen. It doesn’t take rocket science to create a median and plant trees in rows. This can be accomplished and at the same time all the neighborhoods surrounding Humboldt Parkway can be reunited. Furthermore, these neighborhoods can be reunited in a far healthier, more uplifting way. They can be united with beautiful, oxygen-providing, air filtering shade trees similar to those that were destroyed; the same type of trees that have distinguished Olmsted’s gracious West Side parkways for 150 years.
These trees would certainly prove a better, more natural, solution than the untested, multimillion dollar mechanical air filtration paraphernalia required by the tunnel; a tunnel whose ultimate goal, let’s face it, is only to preserve and reinvigorate what a recent Buffalo News Editorial referred to as an “urban infrastructure crime.”5
Once again, Buffalo is faced with one of those “Sixty Year Decisions;” a decision that will be with us for lifetimes to come. We can’t allow political pressures of the moment to – once again – force us into a future we will regret. A hasty, ill-considered decision now could be as burdensome to Buffalo’s next sixty years as has been that tragic decision of sixty years ago.
We must speak out. This time, we need to get it right!
Public Information Meeting for the NYS Route 33, Kensington Expressway Project (Best Street to Sidney Street)
The NYSDOT invites you to a Public Information Meeting for the Kensington Expressway Project to share the latest updates on the project. Two meeting sessions will be held, featuring open house settings with several stations, project leaders, and subject matter experts to discuss the project with attendees.
Date: June 20, 2023
Time: 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM and 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Location: Buffalo Museum of Science
1020 Humboldt Parkway
Buffalo, NY 14211
Room: Adjacent to Cummings Room and Auditorium (use museum’s main entrance)
The same materials will be shown at each meeting session. Materials shown at the meeting will also be available on the project website.
Footnotes:
1. Tom Precious, “Cuomo presses ambitious infrastructure projects, including Skyway removal,” Buffalo News, Jan 14, 2021.
2. Angie Schmitt, “A New Neighborhood Will Replace a Sunken Rochester Highway,” Streets Blog USA, March 1, 2018.
3. Adele Peters, “What happened when Rochester tore out an urban highway,” Fast Company, October 14, 2022.
4. Mark Sommer, “Kensington Expressway project comes into focus, but some say ‘generational’ plan falls short,” Buffalo News, July 26, 2022
5. The Editorial Board: Kensington plan should move ahead while funds and support are available, Buffalo News, December 14, 2022.
Lead image: Olmsted’s Stolen Humboldt Parkway (wnyheritage.com)