Roundtable I: Don’t (just) look back
Click here to read Roundtable II
By Maria Scrivani
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It’s something to celebrate, certainly, but the dilemma is how to move forward when all eyes are looking backward. Can we preserve and indeed capitalize on our glorious past while addressing present needs? Nostalgia can be a cozy trap. Sometimes it’s easier to sing another round of “Auld Lang Syne” than it is to step ahead into the new year.
“My biggest fear is that all we can build is more of what we have,” says Williamsville resident Kevin Connors, whose architecture firm is located in the Tri-Main Building, a model of urban/industrial re-use. While he appreciates the ideals of what is called the New Urbanism, with its emphasis on making cities livable and creating great neighborhoods, he questions the notion that models from the past must be our present and future templates.
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Connors grew up in the Parkside neighborhood, where he remembers playing in the Darwin Martin House, at that time occupied by a friend’s family. “Even as a ten-year-old kid I knew that place was special,” he says. To this day the Frank Lloyd Wright design appears modern, a testament to its organic flow, the prevalence of natural light and warm wood.
In Connors’ practice, he looks to similar design principles, with contemporary tweaks. He is interested in the healing possibilities of good design. “Architecture has more of a role than just enclosing space around people. It can, and ought to be, therapeutic.” The Hospice Mitchell Campus in Cheektowaga is his project, a building and environs that seem to soothe. Here Connors used a modern, easily maintained material, cement siding that mimics wood.
As a clinical assistant professor in the architecture department of the State University of New York at Buffalo, he has taught a course on natural building in the city. His students created a demo strawbale wall. He believes in reuse and recycling of old buildings, and when one is doomed to the wrecking ball, at least scavenge some of that good old lumber that you can’t get anymore. A practical idealist, he says we should teach people basic home repair skills and let them take over some of the dilapidated houses that blight otherwise solid neighborhoods. “Razing is expensive. On every block I could show you some unique buildings.”
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Frizlen is a Buffalo resident now, with an architecture office in the Brisbane Building, one of downtown’s gracious old commercial structures. He is aligned with the New Urbanists, though he prefers the term “old urbanism,” as it draws on traditional principles of neighborhood design. Population density is an important aspect in successful communities, and explains the endangerment of some of Buffalo’s oldest neighborhoods.
“We have to repopulate some of these neighborhoods,” Frizlen says. “I have an idea that we could use immigration to reinvigorate the West Side, develop it like the ethnic neighborhoods of Toronto.”
Frizlen’s current projects are highly visible in the vibrant Elmwood neighborhood. He has designed “mixed-use” buildings, including the new lofts and retail structure between Hodge and Utica Streets, set for an August opening, “very much the model of small neighborhood buildings that we have forgotten about.”
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“We try to be as sensitive as possible to community sentiment,” says Frizlen, who seems distressed by the controversy, especially questions about the quick turnaround time from first public announcement of the hotel design last February and the slated summer opening. “Ideally, I would have liked to have seen this as a slower process,” he admits. “But the fact is the developer has certain financial and time constraints. … And we did have a well-attended and, I thought, well-presented, community forum last winter. Overall, it was a six-week process. No doubt about it; that was quick.” Like lightning, in a city with a sad history of good ideas left to languish and die. As a resident of the Elmwood neighborhood, Frizlen thinks the hotel is a positive development, though he might have preferred another site. But no other property in that corridor was available, and Richardson Towers land is sacrosanct. His best idea was to create a mixed-use building, with hotel rooms plus retail space on the ground level, a “7/24” construct, meaning enhanced safety and security for the neighborhood since the building will be occupied and in use seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.
“All of my urban building designs have to answer the one overriding question: How does the building respond to the public realm, and does the building itself contribute to and enhance the existing character of the street? Both projects on Elmwood Avenue … are multi-story but within the scale of surrounding buildings, have the parking out of sight, are constructed up to the sidewalk with first-floor transparent storefronts, and respond in scale and material to the character of the street. All these features make an important contribution to the walkability, safety, and economic viability of the street.”
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“Another one of my heroes is Tim Tielman,” says Frizlen, “who does not get enough credit for all his work saving the canal terminus and other historical structures in the city.”
John Laping, who retired in 2003 from Kideney Architects/Laping Jaeger Associates, P.C., and now serves as consultant to Kideney Architects, is a longtime Buffalo resident who calls its neighborhoods “the underlying architectural strength of this city.” He remembers explaining the character of good neighborhoods to his young son some three decades ago, during a walk around New York City’s Upper West Side.
“The good blocks generally had similar buildings and a heterogeneous use; the less interesting blocks were interrupted with very intrusive structures that neither aped the scale of the adjacent buildings nor their use. The good blocks did not have a Pano’s snubbing the adjacent Atwater House.”
Like many critics of the urban environment, he sees salvation in our decline. For a long time we hadn’t much development. The chair of the city Preservation Board since 1998, Laping says Buffalo is blessed with intact neighborhoods “that have been spared the curses of modernization contractors selling vinyl windows, cheap doors, and asphalt siding. These neighborhoods have the same look and the same feel that they had when they were constructed.”
Take a walk around to see some real magnificence in the public buildings that still stand. “These old neighborhoods were supported with convenient, affordable public transportation; they had good schools nearby and they had churches and synagogues that served both the spirit and community needs of those who lived there,” says Laping. “I have always been amazed by the quality that these early Buffalonians invested in their institutions. Schools and churches were grand architectural expressions of the high esteem these residents held for education and for their faith. Consider the monumentality of City Honors or Lafayette High Schools or the inherent neighborhood charm of School 64; marvel at the glory of a St. Stan’s or St. Ann’s, or consider the charm of a Church of the Good Shepherd. Consider, too, the commercial blocks that these neighborhoods supported; you could walk to the market, the druggist, the shoemaker, the ice cream shop, and, in some places, to the movies.”
Laping certainly recognizes the wide appeal of landmarks like the Sullivan, Wright, and Richardson buildings, but he thinks Buffalo neighborhoods are also part of an attractive tourist package. “I believe it is our neighborhoods that will captivate them and make that positive impression that we want the tourists to take home.”
Another established local architect respectfully nods to the past while keeping a firm face forward. Robert Traynham Coles, Architect, P.C. is the oldest African American-owned architectural firm in the Northeast, focusing on urban and public projects. A recent project, the new North Jefferson Branch Hub Library, is acclaimed for its functional design that also symbolizes the African American traditions of the community and the library’s collections.
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He plies his trade with an activist/social justice slant, doing business out of the historic Ellicott Square, arguably the most beautiful office space downtown.
Coles pays tribute to some lesser-known figures in local preservation efforts. The late Reverend Richard McClure Prosser ministered to Buffalo’s inner-city population as a Presbyterian clergyman, social worker, community organizer, activist, and architectural advocate. In 1986 he was posthumously awarded the American Institute of Architects’ Whitney M. Young Jr. Citation “in recognition of a significant contribution to social responsibility.” Among other urban design and redevelopment work, he was instrumental in establishing the Preservation League of New York State, which became a national model. He also helped create an organization that developed more than 100 new homes for modest-income people in deteriorating downtown neighborhoods.
Another personal hero to Coles was the late John E. Brent, who was the first African American architect in Buffalo. He designed the Michigan Avenue YMCA on Sycamore Street, which was demolished in 1972. Coles wrote a bio of Brent for the recently published Biography of African American Architects. “As a boy growing up in Buffalo, I knew John Brent, who was a family friend,” says Coles. “In some ways, he was a role model for me in the forties when there were probably fewer than 100 African American architects in the country.”
Coles also admires the late John D. Randall, who was an architect in the Facilities Planning Office at the University of Buffalo. Randall, who hailed from Illinois, had a great love for Louis Sullivan and is widely credited with saving the Guaranty Building.
David Chassin, who grew up in Buffalo and now works as an architect in St. Louis, is a frequent visitor to his hometown. In addition to the best-known architectural gems, he cites the Olmsted landscape plan (“I remember vividly the tall elms of my childhood creating wonderful canopies on all those parkways”), currently being restored all over the city, as a feature to promote. He also mentions the natural landscape: “Connections to the river and lake (where does one stop and the other begin?)—things that make a city like Buffalo different from Anyplace, USA. Like all places around the U.S., the water and the city were severed by highways or industry, and have been slowly reclaimed.
“The notion of the water that flows through/by Buffalo as part of the thundering stuff that is Niagara is a connection that I always feel when on the West Side, downtown, or more vividly on the Grand Island bridges. Are there other cities in America where you can work downtown and in twenty minutes (if the traffic is right) be at a cottage/beach house or just on the beach in another country sipping a tall one or gazing at the sunset?”
So nostalgia has its place—maybe it’s the starting point for a celebration that invites guests to come see what we have been, and what we are. What we will be remains to be seen, but if the past is prelude, our legacy can launch us.
Maria Scrivani is a freelance writer in Buffalo who co-authored, with the late Linda Levine,
the book Beautiful Buffalo: Preserving a City.
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