By Matt Ricchiazzi:
The war over the Peace Bridge is as contentious as ever. It’s a profound struggle: neighbors trying mightily to save their communities from big-government bureaucrats and corrupt politicians lusting for truck tolls – in an effort to profit at the expense of the public’s health, including a childhood asthma epidemic and shockingly high rates of cancer west of Main Street.
But it’s also about so much more than that. It’s a long political struggle over the kind of city that we want to build: a city for people with great waterfront access, livable neighborhoods, and compelling public spaces; or a city for all of the “bad stuff” that offend the sensibilities of narrow minded suburbanites. It pains me that, after decades of urban decline, this anti-urbanist sentiment continues to prevail among the governing class.
I hope so much that we overcome our collective inferiority complex – and finally reject the slander that suggests that our decline is inevitable. This city is like a canvas, boldly unfinished.
Imagine if our politicians were willing to take a radically aspirational approach to the Westside. Rather than expanding the Peace Bridge’s American plaza, we should eliminate it entirely and fully embrace shared border management. Imagine filling in the Black Rock Channel, no longer used for industrial transport, and replacing it with a vast waterfront park descending Prospect Hill. Imagine downgrading the I-190 into a waterfront parkway, and fully connecting it to the urban fabric:
Of course, trucks should be banned from the Peace Bridge and they should be routed over a new crossing in a more industrial area. The Peace Bridge should be oriented around cultural and recreational tourism – the type of bridge that is conducive to undergrads and bicyclists’ stumbling home from Canadian beaches. Notice how subtly and unobtrusively the Key Bridge enters Georgetown:
I’m told that when the Erie Basin Marina was being built, the City still maintained a massive public works department in house, at a time when the City approved the Public Works budget separate from the general operating budget with nearly no oversight. The story goes, that Col. Ward, the Public Works Commissioner at the time, designed and built the marina without telling anyone.
For months, City Hall staffers looked out their windows and assumed that the Department was doing work on the water intake. When the Council finally got around to asking Ward what they were doing on the waterfront, he responded, “I thought we needed a marina”.
I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, as I wasn’t alive at the time — but that’s the urban lore.
Imagine how much better a public space that it could have been if we engaged a broadly participatory planning process that sought to understand how people wanted to enjoy the waterfront:
And when it comes to rebranding our image in the national consciousness, no waterfront revival will be is as impactful as in Niagara Falls. Broad expanses of defunct industrial acreage, and a Robert Moses Parkway crying for removal present an opportunity that will rival the 1871 preplanning of Paris in the annals of urban history:
Our waterfront is calling us – beckoning us – demanding something of us that would take more than a lifetime to give.
Matthew Ricchiazzi holds an MBA in Finance and Private Equity, and a BS in Urban Planning, both from Cornell University. He founded Change Buffalo PAC to promote issues of new urbanism in Western New York. He can be reached at ChangeBuffalo.org.