BUFFALO: DOWNTOWN

Like so many American cities, “urban renewal” programs and freeway construction hollowed out Buffalo’s downtown in the middle of the 20th century. While many of the city’s art deco masterpieces were spared the wrecking ball, the rest of downtown’s dense and racially-diverse (and ultimately red-lined) urban fabric was not. Whereas much of the existing 19th c. building stock of downtown was indeed overcrowded and sometimes unsanitary, it was nothing proper maintenance and improved public policy wouldn’t have been able to overcome. Simply look at NYC, where former tenement buildings have been upgraded to apartments while maintaining their connection to life on the street. Or San Francisco, where the Victorian “painted lady” houses throughout the city—once seen as hopelessly outdated and blighted—have been restored to become international landmarks. Instead, like most American cities, planners in Buffalo razed anything and everything that, according to the mind of a 1960s architect, was deemed outdated. Those displaced were shunted to the adjacent neighborhoods to the newly constructed residential projects, tall and poorly built with no connection to life on the street.

The dense, mixed commercial, office, and residential downtown was razed to make way for a series of single-use office towers standing in a sea of surface parking. That was the future, according to the (white, male) planners of the day. Using the wrecking ball, downtown was converted from the city’s cultural and commercial center into a defective, single-use business district—gradually losing its tenants to the suburbs even in spite of this “urban renewal.” While downtown has improved in leaps and bounds since the 1970s, returning to its mixed-use roots, much work remains to be done.