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.

After a half decade of mobbing churches all around Buffalo and even in a couple of suburbs, the Buffalo Mass Mob is finally visiting one of the most active parishes in the city: St. Mark in Parkside. Why did it take so long? Certainly nothing against the church – personally, I know some great people in Buffalo public life and community work who are or have been parishioners there. Certainly nothing against the priest – I became a fan of Father Joe Rogliano immediately upon interviewing him last year about the Mass Mob at St. Rose of Lima, where he…

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Note: This article relates to the WNY Walks! Walking Summit happening this week. Details at the end and here. If you grew up in Buffalo, chances are good you’ve heard of a place called “The Hooks”, even if you don’t know exactly where it is – because it’s no longer there. The once vibrant, largely Italian-American neighborhood was wiped away by two of the banes of twentieth-century urbanism: Urban “Renewal” and urban expressways. (Note: Urban Planner Angela Keppel has a good overview of The Hooks here.) Growing up in Rochester, I heard of just such a place, dubbed “Mount Allegro,”…

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Saturday morning, over 2,300 volunteers fanned out across Erie and Niagara Counties to sweep their waterfronts of accumulated trash and dumping. Over a decade or so, Buffalo-Niagara Waterkeeper’s Shoreline Sweep has grown to become the region’s largest coordinated cleanup effort of the spring-cleaning season. 2019’s Shoreline Sweep was perhaps the most notable to date, becoming part of a larger series of events branded as Waterkeeper Weekend, including a major fundraiser and announcements of six million dollars worth of projects to advance the Blueway. It also happened on the heels of major announcements of new plans for the Outer Harbor and…

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UB Professor of Architecture Brad Wales and his Small Built Works initiative have been busy the last three semesters. Best known around town for installations such as artistic bus shelters around the edges of Allentown, the 18th Street Community Park, and the “Front Yard” at the Burchfield-Penney, they have been hard at work creating sustainable designs for affordable infill housing. They showed the results this week at a presentation and reception in a great new west side space: the community room at PUSH Buffalo’s refurbished School 77. This work is the culmination of three semesters of student effort, including a…

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Monday last week, as I was walking through Allentown I came across several groups with bags picking up litter. I realized it was the scheduled Earth Day cleanup we’d posted about. It was one of the first events this year in a growing custom of cleaning up the outdoors in the spring the way folks have always traditionally done indoors. Around the city this time of year neighborhoods and organizations hold cleanups and tree plantings, and if you want to “brighten the corner where you are,” in a way the math is easy: remove trash from the streets and add…

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When I first moved to Buffalo a decade ago, to the heart of the west side, the first person to knock on my door to say hello was a man named Law. He was a former journalist from the country some call Myanmar and some Burma. His work there had earned the ire of the authorities, and he became a political prisoner, then a refugee, and now an American. I have many such neighbors, but have to admit – to my chagrin and embarrassment – that I know few of them and even fewer of their stories. That is why…

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After my recent walk of the Scajaquada corridor, I shared photos on Twitter (at @HeyRaChaCha) along with some of my impressions and initial thoughts. Those became the basis for this recent blog post. When I initially shared my photos and impressions on social media, I was generally happy with the reactions and how many people interacted with the content. Colin Dabkowski of the Buffalo News tweeted, “Follow this man’s peripatetic weavings through the interstitial nothingspace we call ‘the Scajaquada corridor.’ Get lost in his anti-poetry of nonplace.” That’s good (I think). But one local attorney, to prospects of removing the…

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If doing something two years in a row makes it a tradition, then earlier this month I embarked on my traditional spring walk in the Scajaquada corridor. As I wrote last year, there is a brief window after the snow has melted, and the ground has dried enough to walk on, yet the foliage hasn’t popped, that one can get a very good sense of the lay of the land. On my walk last year, my loop was between Elmwood and Grant and back again, on both sides of the creek. This year, I wanted to see the western end,…

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The team at Severyn Development has used the last half year well. After their initial proposal for a vacant lot at Jersey and 14th was widely panned by the community last summer, they went back to the drawing board, as we posted earlier this month. After hearing what the community didn’t want, they held a follow-up meeting that was not so much a charrette as an extended listening session. What they heard was that there was lots of room for improvement in both design and materials. Above all, street-facing garages were a non-starter. And cutting back on the number of…

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Update: According to Feroleto, it’s not at all in a vacuum. The meeting, he says, is one that he was invited to attend by a neighborhood block club (Claremont Ashland and Bird Block Club), and has nothing to do with the Chason Affinity project. Instead, it’s about a proposed turning lane, that the block club proposed over a year ago. The turning lane issue is a function of the Department of Public Works. Feroleto is simply attending the meeting at the request of the block club, so that he can answer any questions that people might have. Update: According to Courtney…

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