Mark Goldman - Table of
Contents
EXCERPT - Chapter 7: "The
1999 New Convention Center Proposal"
City of
My
Heart: Buffalo, 1967-2020
By Mark Goldman
|
City of My Heart: Buffalo,
1967-2020
Forward: by
Karen Brady(Published in October 2021) AVAILABLE IN LOCAL BOOKSTORES. Introduction: A New York State of Mind Chapter 1: A Brand New World - Buffalo, 1967 Chapter 2: An Italian Hill Town in Buffalo? How the neighborhood of Black Rock changed my way of thinking about life in the city Chapter 3: Into the ‘Seventies - How people stared down decline and, with faith in themselves in the future of their community, rolled up their sleeves, went to work and got it done Chapter 4: Into the ‘Eighties - How a teacher and his students discovered their city… together Chapter 5: Judge John T. Curtin - Struggling with the challenges of a changing city, helped restore my faith in Buffalo Chapter 6: The Calumet Arts Café - The arts as a tonic for an ailing downtown Chapter 7: What Would Grandma Rosie Do? - How everyday wisdom brought sanity to downtown development plans Chapter 8: The Buffalo Story - History and heritage as the building blocks of community Chapter 9: Next year in Jerusalem - What? A New Yorker finds his Jewish identity in, where? Buffalo? Chapter 10: Discovering the Power of Faith, Family and Friendship - In South Buffalo, I learned, you are never alone. Chapter 11: In the End - The enchanted landscape of North Buffalo and Central Park Epilogue: A healing heart: Buffalo, 2020 |
|
"The 1999 New Convention Center
Proposal"
The proposal to
build a new convention center was first floated by Erie County
Executive Dennis Gorski in 1998. Gorski’s proposal,
resoundingly supported bythe usual suspects in the downtown
development community, called for the demolition of an eight and a half
acre site between Main and Ellicott streets and Mohawk and the central
library. The proposed convention center was a superblock on steroids,
one that would have closed off several of the area’s streets while
demolishing most of the buildings on Washington and Ellicott Streets.
With a project cost of upward of $200,000,000 in state and county
money, the proposal for this new convention center was a slow-moving
target, a pinata for those of us who cared about good urbanism. We
jumped at the opportunity to derail it and in the process continued our
efforts to educate the public about how best to renew our city. Tim Tielman took the first whack at it in the Spring of 1999 by dedicating a special edition of the Buffalo Preservation Report to the issue of the convention center. Tim’s highly effective combination of dramatic written narrative and graphic illustration produced a scathing critique of the proposal. Under a large Hopperesque color photograph of the endangered Ferguson Electric Company building on Ellicott Street, Tim wrote an apocalyptic headline: “Death Star: In the Wrong Place, Convention Center Could Be A Killer.” Calling it the “biggest planning mistake since the last convention center,” Tim asked: “Do we demolish a neighborhood so a convention center can be attached to a hotel on the chance that it will appeal to the occasional visiting lardass from Dubuque? Or do we save that neighborhood, provide housing, services, entertainment and jobs: in other words a reason to live in Buffalo?” Luckily, Tim was not the only outraged person. Led by a Buffalo business and social icon, John Nussbaumer, a handful of us formed a not-for-profit called Citizens for Common Sense to fight the convention center. Our argument against the proposed convention center dealt not only with its location but rather with its feasibility. Simply put, Buffalo, we insisted, did not need a convention center. Therefore, we said, not one dollar of the public’s money should be spent on it. Nussbaumer, a highly-regarded business-owner with an impeccable public persona, was convinced that he smelled a rat. “It seems to me,” he told the press in late 1999, “that we have a small group of people trying to jam a convention center down our throats.” The self-fulfilling prophecies of the feasibility studies were wrongfully based, we argued, rooted in data generated by downtown interests most likely to benefit from the project. The public subsidies were outrageous and besides, the project, by displacing over 500 people and $18 million in payroll and $60 million in sales made no sense. Nussbaumer asked incredulously: “You’re replacing people making good money with part-time workers who will make minimum wages? Who would do that?” With their data credibly challenged by two outside consultants that we had hired, the proponents of the new convention center were left with little more than the argument that, if it was good enough for other cities, it was good enough for Buffalo. Keith Belanger, a vice-president at M&T Bank and long-time president of Buffalo Place, the downtown district business association, argued: “We’re missing out. Our peer cities have made this kind of investment. It’s time for us.” Rich Geiger, the president of the Greater Buffalo Convention and Visitors Bureau, added his cheers: “We’ve got to start doing things to move this community forward.” Smeared with the “obstructionist” label, red meat to the development community, we argued that our ultimate goal was not only to prevent the construction of a new convention center, symbolic in our mind of an outdated and destructive way of thinking, but to advance a new, different, more sustainable form of downtown development. The eight and a half-acre “Mohawk Site,” was not a wasteland of blight and abandonment as convention center advocates argued, but rather a viable district. A neon sign that read “Electric District” that hung in the window of an old saloon at the corner of Mohawk and Ellicott, provided inspiration and from then on that is what we called the area that we were trying to protect. We thought that with densely-packed buildings, small streets, low rents, and a downtown location, the district was ripe for renewal. It held promise for the kind of renewal that Jane Jacobs had written about in the early 1960s and what my brother Tony saw in SoHo in the late ‘70s. A mixture of uses, repeated small blocks, old buildings and high density were just the ingredients which produce urban renewal that works. Convinced that our cause was about the future, about seeding real and sustainable urban renewal, we organized a campaign. We were not willing to sacrifice what we felt was the future of downtown on the altar of a new convention center. Our “Save the Electric District” campaign gathered momentum. Although we were opposed by The Buffalo News, we had support from Artvoice and other local groups. The capstone was a public meeting, which Nussbaumer organized at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in January 2000. Hundreds filled the auditorium, and as many more were turned away. At a barb-filled panel discussion with Nussbaumer and me lined up against Rich Geiger from the Convention Bureau and Mark Mendell, president of Cannon Design, the architectural firm behind many of the “big projects” in the area, we went at it. What I opposed, I said, was not development but rather “bad development,” the kind that turned its back on historical context, that ignored public opinion, and that required large amounts of public subsidy. I rejected the proponents of the convention center’s characterization of the Mohawk site as “blighted.” Suggesting that one person’s “blight” is another’s opportunity I pointed to my brother’s efforts in such previously “blighted” areas as SoHo and South Beach, not to mention my own going-on-ten-year efforts on Chippewa Street. The characteristics that evoked disparagement from the proponents of the convention center were, I said, actually the preconditions for successful renewal of the Electric District. Because they offered opportunities to risk-taking, creative people, worn-down buildings (albeit with good bones), high vacancy rates, and low real estate values made fertile ground for rebirth. Hearing my remarks that night, and the overwhelmingly positive response of the audience, was Republican County Executive-elect Joel Giambra who was in attendance. Shortly after he assumed office a few weeks later, Giambra announced that he was “kicking the convention center down the road.” There would be another time, he said, to consider it. I’d like to think our passionate debating that night had something to do with his decision. |
web site consulting by ingenious, inc.