Pine Harbor
Apartments, 10 7th Street,
Buffalo, New York, August 2020. This was only a small
portion of architect Paul
Rudolph's grandiose "Brutalist
vision for the Buffalo waterfront",
which also included theShoreline Apartmentson the
other side of 7th Street and a
series of never-built, roughly triangular
high-rise towers that were supposed
to abut the inland side of the then-newly builtErie Basin Marina,
where the Waterfront Village condos are found
today.
At the time, the
plan was considered
high-concept enough to be featured in a 1970-71 MoMA
exhibit entitledWork
in Progress, but despite these
auspicious beginnings, the
ensuing years weren't kind to Rudolph's creation:
his designs in general were
quickly developing a reputation as being prone to
water leaks, which in the
case of the Pine Harbor Apartments, the perennially
cash-strapped New York
State Urban Development Corporation was ill-equipped
to fix.
Moreover, as the
neighborhood began to fall
victim to crime and social ills, affordable housing
developments like these
were easy scapegoats in the blame game. In 2019 and
2020, despite loud
objections from the newly minted crop of Brutalism
fans among Buffalo's
preservationist community, the Shoreline Apartments
across the street fell to
the wrecking ball, soon to be replaced with
suburban-style townhouses, leaving
Pine Harbor standing alone as a testament to the
all-too-brief Brutalist era in
Lower West Side history.
Even so, from
looking closely at what
remains, you can get a sense of the original site
plan: one- and two-story
buildings that look nothing if not chiseled out of
concrete boulders, sporting vertically
ribbed "corduroy" façades and projecting balconies,
arranged in
chains interwoven together with seemingly
serendipitous patches of green space
in between, the Pine Harbor Apartments "combine[d]
Rudolph's spatial
radicalism with experiments in human-scaled, low-rise,
high-density housing
development", to borrow the words of local architect
and Brutalism
aficionado Barbara Campagna.
.....
