Author: RaChaCha

RaChaCha is a Garbage Plate™ kid making his way in a Chicken Wing world. Since 2008, he's put over a hundred articles on here, and he asked us to be sure to thank you for reading. So, thank you for reading. You may also have seen his freelance byline in Artvoice, where he writes under the name his daddy gave him [Ed: Send me a check, and I might reveal what that is]. When he's not writing, RaChaCha is an urban planner, a rehabber of houses, and a community builder. He co-founded the Buffalo Mass Mob, and would love to see you at the next one. He represents Buffalo Young Preservationists on the Trico roundtable. If you try to demolish a historic building, he might have something to say about that. He is a proud AmeriCorps alum. Things you may not know about RaChaCha (unless you read this before): "Ra Cha Cha" is a nickname of his hometown. (Didn't you know that? Do you live under a rock?) He's a political junkie (he once worked for the president of the Monroe County Legislature), but we don't really let him write about politics on here. He helped create a major greenway in the Genesee Valley, and worked on early planning for the Canalway Trail. He hopes you enjoy biking and hiking on those because that's what he put in all that work for. He was a ringleader of the legendary "Chill the Fill" campaign to save Rochester's old downtown subway tunnel. In fact, he comes from a long line of troublemakers. An ancestor fought at Bunker Hill, and a relative led the Bear Flag Revolt in California. We advise you to remember this before messing with him in the comments. He worked on planning the Rochester ARTWalk, and thinks Buffalo should have one of those, too (write your congressman). You can also find RaChaCha (all too often, we frequently nag him) on the Twitters at @HeyRaChaCha. Which is what some people here yell when they see him on the street. You know who you are.

The way we invoke the name of Frederick Law Olmsted around here, you would think that he and his partner, Calvert Vaux, brought forth landscape architecture and park design as a kind of received wisdom from on high. And perhaps rightly so. But while we should take their principles very seriously, they are received wisdom only in the sense of being derived from nature, and especially from human nature. Thankfully, their principles aren’t as inscrutable as some of the other wisdom humankind has claimed to have received from on high. They don’t have to be interpreted for you by a…

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One of the perks of writing about a city on the upswing is getting to be present when efforts that have been in the works for decades finally come to fruition. There is nothing quite like the expansive joy of ardent believers who kept at something year after year, plugging away, never giving up hope, seeing things come together at long last. Last Friday was exactly one of those days, with over a hundred present to celebrate progress on Seneca Bluffs, and make some more. As I toured Seneca Bluffs – a “Natural Habitat Park” – and saw some of…

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Summer is a great time to be by the water, and is also a popular time for family reunions. On a beautiful late-summer day, The Environmentalists Formerly Known as Riverkeeper gathered their large, extended family at Canalside with the Inner Harbor as a backdrop. As often happens at family gatherings, they had some big, important news to share: there would be no more Buffalo-Niagara Riverkeeper. From now on, the organization would be known as Buffalo-Niagara WATERKEEPER. According to Buffalo Business First, the name change reflects an expanded focus to all of the region’s waterways, beyond the Buffalo River, Scajaquada Creek…

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If you’re like me, you’ve been to and through Delaware Park dozens if not hundreds of times. And you probably think you know the park pretty well. Especially if, like me, you’ve read Dr. Frank Kowsky’s indispensable book on the work of Olmsted and Vaux in Buffalo and Western New York. (If you haven’t yet, do so – it really is essential reading about how the Buffalo we know today came to be.) But how well do most of us really know Delaware Park? Not as well as Jim Mendola, that’s for sure. After taking a recent Second Saturday Walking…

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On January 9 about 120 residents attended a public meeting at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society to hear from the New York State Department of Transportation (DOT), their paid consultants, and an advisory committee about options for “downgrading Route 198 to a neighborhood parkway,” according to the Buffalo News. Among ideas discussed were adding stoplights, restoring Agassiz Circle at Parkside, getting rid of the spiral footbridge, reconfiguring or removing on-ramps, and beautifying bridges. Among issues discussed were speed limits, accommodating traffic volumes, and expanding the scope of the study beyond its limits from Grant Street to Parkside Avenue.…

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It’s highway or the highway, was the recent message from Governor Cuomo to Buffalo on the 198 redo, delivered this month by surrogates such as former Syracuse Mayor Matt Driscoll, Commissioner of the New York State Department of Transportation (DOT), who later in the month moved on to head the Thruway Authority. Like a 1950s dad telling us that if we don’t like the meal our mother put on the table we can go to bed hungry, he told the Buffalo News that if the community opposes their “final” plan the DOT will take millions of dollars of federal funding…

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At the very moment the eclipse was dimming the daylight in Buffalo, I got an up-close look at a project brightening a prominent “daylight factory” on Niagara Street. I found the Mentholatum Building swarming with workers – a hundred on site a day, I was told – transforming it from industrial to residential use on an ambitious schedule. It’s on track to be move-in ready by January 18, I was told by Andrew Schwartz, Senior Marketing Manager for the developer, Ciminelli Real Estate, who met me on site. If their other recent projects such as the Sinclair are any indication,…

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In the peaceful confines of a suburban park last weekend, amid the aroma of barbecue, I heard a harrowing war story of the Allied WWII bombing campaign in Europe. It came not from a veteran of the war, as you might expect, but from a man who, as a boy, had been trapped in Berlin as it was pounded by air raids. Bruno Barsi (now of South Buffalo) and his mother took shelter in the U-Bahn as wave after wave of heavy bombers made the daytime sky dark. Unlike many, he was able to escape the destruction of the city…

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In February 2016, the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy received a call from the office of a state legislator with a history of support for efforts to downgrade the Scajaquada Expressway. That night there would be a public meeting at Buffalo State where New York’s new Department of Transportation (DOT) commissioner, Matt Driscoll, would announce DOT’s plan to remake the park-scarring highway. Driscoll was well-regarded in governmental and environmental circles for his work in Onondaga County, especially with upgrading stormwater infrastructure. He had a get-it-done reputation, and the Governor, who also likes getting things done, had charged Driscoll to get results…

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Buffalo Rising isn’t in the habit of posting about happenings in the suburbs, but it’s not every day that a foreign government heaps a helping of Buffalove on our city (more on that below). If that just happens to happen slightly over the city line in Cheektowaga, we’ll still take that, thank you. And so it happened that I found myself in The Land of the Pink Flamingoes last weekend, taking in the annual Pulaski Day parade, taking a swim in a sea of red and white. It was an easy visit. Just blocks from home, I caught the 22…

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