In his new book, CITY ON THE EDGE, Mark Goldman writes in detail about the impact of urban renewal on downtown Buffalo from the 1950s to the present. What follows is an excerpt from that material.
Demolitions Mar Drastic Urban Renewal Efforts in the mid 1950s: Downtown Buffalo, meanwhile, continued to struggle. Throughout the 1950s politicians and planners in the city, as in the rest of the nation, became increasingly desperate, seeking salvation in ever larger, ever more expensive, and ever more disastrous policies of urban renewal. For those who cared and thought they knew, the renewal of the city, its downtown and its neighborhoods, could be found only in big projects and large-scale developments. Only these types of ventures, they argued, had the potential to renew large areas and to make the kind of impact, both real and symbolic, that they felt was necessary to improve the struggling city Lewis Mumford, the great guru of urbanism, seemed to have agreed. Writing in the New Yorker in 1955 (how, it is interesting to ponder, did his readers in New York City respond to the advice he proffered?) Mumford insisted that the only way for the city to compete with the “lure of the suburb” is by “rebuilding the interior of the city with gardens and parks and open vistas so that it too will be desirable and habitable.” “Rebuilding” required demolition, and throughout the 1950s, whole blocks in downtown were cleared. The goal of such demolition was often nothing more than increasing parking capacity.
In 1951, Common Council president Peter J. Crotty, who earlier in the year had proposed the widening of Delaware Avenue from Niagara Square north to the city line, suggested the demolition of two square blocks of lower Main Street for the creation of a thousand-car parking ramp. Not only would this help the businessmen there, Crotty said, the surface lot would be “an enhancement.” He argued that “the area needs beautification” and should “be rid of the semi-slums there.”
Most downtown business interests,Aeibankers, real estate developers, the Chamber of Commerce, and the press,Aeiagreed that municipally owned and operated parking ramps were critical to the future of downtown. In October 1951, the Common Council approved the creation of a municipal parking agency and authorized a $3 million bond issue for the construction of three of five proposed parking ramps. Mayor Joseph Mruk was thrilled, believing that these ramps were somehow a cure-all that would, he said, lead to “the preservation and expansion of existing trade; the stabilization of existing business trends and the prevention of decentralization of business and shopping.”
The conversion of building sites to parking lots occurred at the hands of private owners, too, who, like those who came before and after them, realized a higher rate of return on their properties. The most infamous case occurred in 1950, when despite editorials in newspapers throughout the country and a few faint-hearted efforts locally to save it, Frank Lloyd Wright’s world-renowned Larkin Administration Building was torn down so the owners could build a parking lot. The building had been deteriorating for years, abandoned by its owners and neglected by the authorities. An article in the Buffalo Evening News, which featured a photograph of the crumbling building with all of its windows broken and shattered, bore the headline: “City’s ‘White Elephant’ Falling to Ruin,AePNo use for Larkin Building in sight.” The article told the full story:
The five story brick structure, once the most modern office building in the country, gradually is approaching a state in which it will be entirely useless. Every double-paned window is shattered. The tall iron gate which graced the entrance has toppled from rusted hinges. The iron fence topping a low brick wall around the structure went into a war-time scrap collection. The Larkin Building, a headache to the city since it was acquired in tax foreclosure proceedings in 1945, cost $4,000,000 to build and was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a nationally famous architect. Offers to purchase it for around $25,000, far less than its assessed valuation of $239,000, including land, have been turned down. A national advertising campaign that cost $6,000 brought inquiries but no offers. The state rejected a suggestion that the building be converted for emergency housing and the county took no action on a proposal to make it headquarters of the Welfare Department. Two years later, in 1949, The Larkin Building was sold to the Western Trading Company of Buffalo for $5000. They would, the company promised, demolish it, erecting in its place a storage facility for trucks.
It was not, it seems, that the owners did not know its value or its worth; it was just that they did not care enough to do anything about it. For years, fabulous buildings, so many of which had lost their value in a city hit by economic depression and then stunned by suburbanization, buildings whose absence we mourn today, had been coming down, usually for parking lots. This devastating process, which deprived future generations of the great treasures of the past, accelerated in the 1950s.
The price was high; the losses irreparable. Acquisition of the ramp sites and demolition of the buildings proceeded quickly. Reporting in the spring of 1954, the Evening News said: “A sizeable chunk of Buffalo’s history will be powdered into dust when wreckers’ hammers begin thudding against the buildings at Main and Seneca streets, clearing the way for municipal erection of off-street parking facilities.” With some sense of regret and loss, the paper described the building at 215 Main Street, which was being demolished: “The granite structure with its second floor fa/ssade of Greek columns and heavily cross-barred windows, was built in 1894, obviously as an ornate financial center.”
Also demolished for a parking ramp that was built at Washington and Eagle was the breathtakingly beautiful Hotel Buffalo, which through the 1920s was the city’s proudest and most elegant hotel. Down, too, came the Germania Insurance Building on the corner of Main and Lafayette Square. A six-story cast iron building built in 1875, it would have, had it been allowed to stand, rivaled any building in New York’s SoHo, the country’s great district of cast-iron architecture. Bought by the Tishman family of New York realtors in 1956, who planned to build on the site a contemporary, Miesian box of a building, The Germania did not come down without a fight. “The wreckers,” the Buffalo Evening News reported in August 1957, “who still will have to tear it apart with acetylene torches, will learn that in the 1870s good buildings were not put up to be torn down.”
Allan Tishman could not wait. “We’re excited about it,” he said. “We’re anxious to get the first brick off the old building to remove any doubts there may be about a new building going up.” Tishman had big plans for the site: it was to showcase a twenty-story glass, curtain-walled building, which was designed by the internationally known New York modernist, Emery Roth. It was to be the first skyscraper built in Buffalo in twenty-five years.
The Germania Building was not, at least according to the Buffalo Evening News, going to be missed: “[T]here are few left to shed any tears as it comes tumbling down.” The same also seemed to be true when, in early 1959, M&T Bank bought back from the Federal Reserve a building that the bank had built in the 1880s (image from WNY Heritage Press). The bank needed, it said, “more customer parking.” It was a heartbreakingly beautiful building, built in an imposing Greek Revival style and surrounded on three sides by monumental marble columns. Insley Smith, in charge of the Buffalo branch of the Federal Reserve, was pleased. “We’re glad,” he said, “that the M&T bought it because it is in a position to utilize the property to the best advantage of that area of Buffalo.”
In September of the same year, the Kellogg Building, a stately four-story Federal style brick building at the corner of Niagara Square and Delaware Avenue, which dated to the early 1830s, was also torn down for parking. The owner, Darwin Martin, Jr. said that a new parking lot was needed. Martin, whose father had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build his home, known today as the Martin House, “regretted,” he said, “that no economically feasible plan had been found to preserve it.”
Some, like Irving Saperston of Saperston Real Estate, would go further still. Saperston, like the other big downtown real estate companies, rarely saw a renewal project he did not like, particularly when new construction was involved. In a speech delivered to the Chamber of Commerce in 1958, Saperston advanced yet another plan that had the backing and support of many of the downtown real estate interests. The goal, as always, was more parking and easier traffic flow. The target, as it had been almost fifty years before, was Lafayette Square, which along with the elaborate Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument Saperston planned to demolish. In its place, Saperston would build an underground parking garage with space for more than a thousand cars. Gone, too, if Saperston had had his way, would have been downtown’s last farmer’s market, the Chippewa Market, which would have been replaced by a four-square-block surface parking lot. According to the Saperston plan, traffic flow would be enhanced by the conversion of most downtown streets to one-way traffic. But Saperston’s plan was not all slash and burn. For downtown to thrive, he said, children must be brought downtown. “Bring them back,” he proposed, “with clowns, prizes, suckers and free movies.”