Cities and their people are constantly learning how to constitute and maintain their places.
Buffalo, Queen City of the Lakes, was one of the shining cities of the early and mid-Industrial Revolution. The Erie Canal took advantage of location and positioned us as a major transshipment center. Industry, factories and grain elevators claimed the waterfront.
In the name of progress we filled in the great wetland on Lake Erie to build a port. We were a booming metropolis, contributing steel and bread to the war efforts, bringing great wealth and steady jobs. Yet industry left and jobs disappeared; Buffalo fell into a deep depression that lasted decades.
Progress and “creative capitalism” abandoned people and community, and left contamination and destruction. We lost not only hope during those difficult years, but also fabric. We demolished Wright’s Larkin building. We almost lost the old Post Office, now Erie Community College, and could have lost the Richardson Psychiatric Center, now repurposed although still in need of our support.
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We saved a fragment of the Lake Erie coast wetland by creating Tifft Nature Preserve and began restoring Olmsted parks. Critically, the city lost so much fabric, particularly on the East Side, because of the great suburban migration that also appropriated acres of farmland and woods outside the city.
We learned. Diverse and energized civic movements formed in Buffalo and elsewhere to counter the sensibility that it is right to demolish and destroy the fabric of place. Save the historic buildings! Save the parks! Save the river!
These years saw early manifestations of the Olmsted Parks Conservancy, Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper, Preservation Buffalo Niagara, Campaign for Greater Buffalo, and Times Beach Nature Preserve.
As if speaking for these movements, the poet Adrienne Rich writes: My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed / I have to cast my lot with those/who age after age, perversely, / with no extraordinary power/reconstitute the world.
It seemed as if Buffalo had come to understand the economic and narrative power of being a city that conserves its architecture and historic fabric, a city that cleans up its contaminated rivers and rebuilds its ecology. Apparently not. If we had, we wouldn’t have issued a permit to demolish the Great Northern grain elevator based on a biased report by its owner, ADM, which wants to build a parking lot even though the damage from a storm is cosmetic.
We wouldn’t have permitted Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp. to bulldoze a regenerating habitat of 70-year-old trees on our Lake Erie coast to build an amphitheater, instead of building the ecological resilience of the coastline in a time of severe storms, climate change and a crisis of species extinction. Sadly, these actions do not reflect lessons learned and will hurt us as a city.
Lynda Schneekloth is a member of the Grandmothers Council of Niagara.
