Archive for the 'buffalo' Category

Here is an inter­est­ing item in the Buf­falo News… it seems former mayor James D. “Jimmy” Grif­fin is start­ing a “grass-roots” cam­paign to recall his suc­ces­sor, Mayor Masiello. Just as Buf­falo is start­ing to do the right things it needs to do to get out of finan­cial chaos, past specters respon­si­ble for the mess the city finds itself in are in are resur­fac­ing to reassert their influence.

There is no money in the city cof­fers, and NY State is occu­pied with rebuild­ing NY City… yet Grif­fin finds it nec­es­sary to stir up pop­ulist anger at the mayor’s insis­tence that a city of 290,000 cannot afford 2-man police cars.

Now, I’m sup­port­ive of unions, and labor in gen­eral. But, they’ve got the city hijacked — it’s just not the city of half-​million that it was in 1905. My sub­ur­ban child­hood town, Amherst, prob­a­bly has more class-A office space that 10 Buffalos… the reign­ing cul­ture there is one of the automobile.

If You Build it, They Will Come
The State built the new campus of the Uni­ver­sity at Buf­falo — on unde­vel­oped land in Amherst in the 60s — in such a way as to con­fuse pedes­tri­ans. The park­ing lots and mega-steel-and-glass-box build­ings are on a scale unfath­omable to the pedes­trian. It could take you thirty min­utes to walk from the dor­mi­to­ries to class, and the only thing that sep­a­rates you are vast park­ing lots and curv­ing 8-lane roads. This sort of destruc­tive and unprece­dented plan­ning will make an ago­ra­phobe out of anyone that isn’t high on something… There is no urban fabric — you can’t com­fort­ably walk down a block and buy a coke at the news stand on the way to sta­tis­tics. The street isn’t lined with a buffer of parked cars or trees to insu­late the pedes­trian from the street. No. This would be the tra­di­tional way of plan­ning. Are the streets planned at all?

The fact is, the only way the Uni­ver­sity at Buf­falo makes any coher­ent sense is from 75 mph out your car window on Interstate-990, (inci­den­tally a use­less, sprawl-​inducing high­way built to link yet-to-be-built shoddy cul-de-sacs north of the city, to the new campus). And from a reac­tionary admin­is­tra­tive point of view, this kind of build­ing assures total con­trol over the “streets”, a worry of these types in the tur­bu­lent 1960s.

A Cul­ture of Dash­boards
Where was I? Oh yes. The auto­mo­bile. The Cul­ture in Buf­falo. It must be changed. Or at least mod­i­fied, and we’ve got to for once put an end to people like Jimmy Grif­fin. Irish politi­cians, gen­er­ally speak­ing, have a par­tic­u­lar knack for killing cities for their own per­sonal gain. In my mind, James D. Grif­fin was the most cor­rupt city mayor of the past 25 years, eclipsed recently only by Buddy Cianci in Prov­i­dence. His neigh­bor­hood cronies ran the city into the ground, going so far as to poison the man-​made lake in Delaware Park, by dump­ing chem­i­cals such that it wouldn’t freeze for ice-​skaters. No, Grif­fin is only inter­ested in taking care of his clan in South Buf­falo, and the whole damn rest of you can go fuck yourselves.

Speak­ing of his Irish clan, always mind­ful to under­line their white, and there­fore priv­i­leged status, the Irish politi­cians iden­tify status sym­bols that might hide the oth­er­wise sad state of the city. The car, and sub­ur­ban devel­op­ment in gen­eral, are pre­cisely their chosen sym­bols. They can’t nec­es­sar­ily move into a 4 bed-​room McMan­sion in Amherst, how­ever they can afford a five-​year old Chevy or Ford — and avoid taking the subway or, god-​forbid, the bus system (which are pri­mar­ily employed by the African-​American pop­u­la­tion). They envy the new sub­ur­ban, car-​oriented devel­op­ment of strip malls and park­ing lots, and politi­cian like Grif­fin decided that this was pre­cisely the kind of con­struc­tion needed in the city. What resulted, was a mess. Drive down main street from the 198 to down­town to see what i mean. You can lit­er­ally drive through there with­out seeing people on the street for blocks — and this is a 4-lane road

Cities should be orga­nized to facil­i­tate sub­ur­ban­ite com­muters. Right? Well, this kind of thing isn’t going to be sus­tain­able in Miami, Las Vegas, Philadel­phia or Detroit — much less Buf­falo. In fact, the finan­cial real­i­ties that are start­ing to sur­face in less-​off places like Buf­falo should be a kind of warn­ing. We won’t always have cheap oil, and it should be evi­dent that cities actu­ally offer a healthy way of life. Walk to work. Ride a subway car with people from dif­fer­ent clans than you. Pre­serve our his­tor­i­cal build­ings, because they were built better than any build­ing in the past 50 years.

The Restora­tion
Walk to work? These sort of ideas belong to elites, and that explains why the Irish politi­cians (and others like James Pitts, the African-​American Common Coun­cil Pres­i­dent), resist efforts in this direc­tion. They’re too caught up in what they per­ceive to be status sym­bols, i.e., cars, krispy kremes, that they don’t real­ize that the health of the city and region depends on the health of its neigh­bor­hoods. And, yes Mr. Pitts, we will have to invest in the minor­ity neigh­bor­hoods. But until we put some money in the cof­fers, and work on erod­ing the per­cep­tion that cities are for non-​car dri­ving public-​housing types. It’s a mania that cannot sus­tain itself.