As I said in my post about last year’s Anti-Gentrification Summit, I’m always on the lookout for good, substantive conversations about gentrification. In the last year, Buffalo has been having them, and this week, on Wednesday, will be another. Especially promising is that these recent discussions aren’t just being held by organizations that are involved in housing, public policy, and activism. A year ago, there was a short-lived but very thinky gentrification reading group that met at Burning Books, started by a thinky person who wanted to think with others about the issue. Over the winter, Assemblyman Sean Ryan convened…
Author: RaChaCha
Saturday, after a cleanup at Linear Park and North Buffalo Rails-to-Trails organized by the University Heights Collaborative and The Tool Library, I spent some time exploring the neighborhoods west of University Heights. Exiting the rail-trail onto Shoshone Street, a cluster of stylish buildings at the corner of Parkside caught my eye. The five buildings were multi-family housing, with beautiful, picturesque, yet simple architectural styling and details that set them apart from other multi-family buildings nearby with more of the inner-ring-suburb, post-war apartment complex vibe that leaves me cold. Eclectic but predominantly Tudor, the buildings were clearly the product of the…
Send this half-baked plan back to the kitchen. As Tim Tielman told WBEN this morning, “it’s a spiffy new building, but it doesn’t change anything.” You wouldn’t go to a podiatrist for a toothache – you’d go to a dentist. You wouldn’t have an urban planner design a dam – you’d hire an engineer. Yet, around here, we have engineers, and organizations run predominantly by engineers, create urban plans. And despite always getting bad results – ranging from substandard to catastrophic – we continue to make the same mistake over and over. So by one classic definition of insanity, we…
Look up from your laptop screen at Sweet_ness 7 and peer out the window at that huge Gothic Revival church. Our Lady of Hope, originally Annunciation Church, is the site of this Sunday’s Buffalo Mass Mob XXVI. The church provides a dramatic backdrop for the destination intersection, where many live and many more visit Sweet_ness 7, Guercio’s, and festivals such as Peace, Love, and Grant Street. With its 170-foot tower, it holds its own against other structures on Lafayette, a street of powerful architecture. Its red sandstone glows in the sunsets seen from Colonial Circle. Built to be the church…
This time of year, when the snow is gone, and the ground has dried enough to walk on, yet the foliage hasn’t popped, is one of the best times for getting out and getting the lay of the land. If your timing is right to catch Mother Nature just after she steps out of her April showers but before she’s had the chance to don her green, flowered robe, her bareness can be revealing. Contours that are obscured later in the year are easy to follow, locations like creek banks are more visible and approachable, and spatial relationships are easier…
Four years of hard work paid off for new Buffalo developer Amy Judd and her husband Mark, with Friday’s ribbon cutting on The Alexandre Apartments. Inside and out, this seven-story former warehouse is a great addition to the loft offerings in the city center. Opening of the Alexandre marks another piece of the 500 Block puzzle falling into place, a saga Buffalo Rising has been covering for over a decade. Ever since the pre-crash proposal by Rocco Termini (with study support from UB) to combine the properties on the block into a single project ran aground, rehab has proceeded building-by-building,…
Attending St. Matthew’s grade school together in a city on the decline, Ben Upshaw and Keith Barnes could hardly have imagined that one day they would be partners in Buffalo’s renewal. But that team effort, and a city back on an upward trajectory, were just what were celebrated at Friday’s ribbon cutting at the former School 63 on Lisbon Street – now formally known as The Lofts at University Heights. But there was more to the celebration than the reuse of a decade-vacant elementary school for workforce housing. There was something else in the air in the school’s auditorium, and…
Note: your last opportunity to see this exhibit free of charge is this Friday! Details below. Recently a Twitter pal shared a photo of a painting her grade-school daughter made of a flower. It was nicely detailed, like something you might find among the work of a naturalist, and evinced a budding talent. So I asked whether she had taken her daughter to the current exhibit at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, which includes work from Burchfield’s school days, when he was beginning to evince a similar talent for depicting the world around him. I was surprised that she not…
Like a scene from a Pasternak novel, the domes loomed up over a pure-white, windswept, snow-blanketed landscape. St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church is just the building you might expect to find on the icy, windswept plains of a frozen eastern land. Ascending the steps only heightened the impression of being on the steppes, as I found myself surrounded by Cyrillic inscriptions, icons, flickering candles, and parishioners speaking a language closely related to Russian. I’d arrived at the end of the Ukrainian-language liturgy, one of the few such services still conducted weekly in western New York. I was immediately taken with…
The YMCA Turkey Trot is the “oldest continually run footrace in North America.” It is only a couple of decades younger than the park through which it has passed for over a century. But this year the park was more than a backdrop – it spoke up and asked for help. Dozens of advocates for the park were on site with a simple message: we need help to stop the DOT’s top-down plan for the 198 from being shoved down our throats. The protest was quite lively, as you can see from some of the photos here, and this video…