Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. – Daniel Burnham, 1910 What artist, so noble … as he who with far-reaching conception of beauty and designing power, sketches the outlines, writes the colours, and directs the shadows of a picture so great that Nature shall be employed upon it for generations… – Fredrick Law Olmsted, 1852 It is on paper still, but, from having been one of Buffalo’s vague and almost hopelessly…
Author: RaChaCha
Walking up to St. Benedict’s Church in Eggertsville, I could sense something special about it, but wasn’t sure just what. It was something unusual, something unique, but what was it, exactly? It wasn’t the architecture – in fact the last Mass Mob, at St. Bernard’s in Kaisertown, was held in a church designed by the same architect built about the same time using similar stone. But not wanting to be late for Mass, I’d have to figure it out later. Yet even after Mass, as I lingered to take photos of the exterior, the church grounds, the school next door,…
Earlier this year, two comments from “nuvaux” led down a rabbit hole of historic research that yielded new insights into how the Scajaquada corridor evolved, particularly on the western end. This evolution and history, I believe, are essential to thinking about and planning the future of the corridor. Following these threads took many interesting and unexpected turns, and there always seemed to be something new around the next bend. If you would like to follow along, I’ve put each thread in a section below, and tied them together at the end for what they say about our modern task of…
The ancient saying, “red sky at night, photographer’s delight,” definitely holds true in Buffalo. As Tim Tielman has pointed out, Our Fair City is one of the few in the east where residents can watch the sun set over the water, and sunset photos here are almost a genre. So with the atmospherics looking especially promising Saturday, it seemed like a good opportunity to try out the new Buffalo Rising camera on a sunset and also do some low-light photography, at which the camera seems amazingly capable – even in the hands of an amateur. And sure enough, awaiting me…
Last year as part of Olmsted-ucation Week, celebrating 150 years of Olmsted in Buffalo, the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy hosted a visit by the director of Boston’s famed Arnold Arboretum. Dr. Ned Friedman and others were in town to launch the South Park Arboretum Restoration Project, an important effort being co-chaired by Attorney David Colligan and Conservancy Trustee Richard Griffin. The announcement was accompanied by an arboretum presentation and panel discussion. In addition to Dr. Friedman, the panel included Lucy Lawliss, Chairwoman, National Association for Olmsted Parks; Doug Blonsky, Former CEO & President, Central Park Conservancy; and Landscape Architect Kyle…
Churchill is widely credited with saying something like, “Americans will always do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted every other possibility.” He could have been talking about Buffalo and the 198. Fortunately, it appears we’re about to do the right thing – actual planning – but only after a decade and a half of exhausting every other possibility. For those tuning in late, the DOT spent nearly fifteen years – and six or seven figures – on an on-again-off-again effort to redress the ever-problematic 198. That effort was fatally flawed from the beginning by not addressing the…
Note: this piece relates to an exhibit that opened Friday, October 4 (on view through November 16) at El Museo. Details here and below. Leadership vacuums are bad, because they make it hard to get things done in the here and now. And often, they invite the ineffective or opportunistic to try to seize the reins, which can make it hard to get things done in the future. But sometimes a leadership vacuum, out of necessity if nothing else, will spur leadership from unexpected sources to step up and prove worthy to the challenge. Something like that is happening with the…
I knew I should’ve had my bookie take odds on this. Sure enough, just days after the new process to rethink the 198 was announced, calls were made to create a design competition for the highway. After recent design competitions for the Skyway and DL&W Greenway, it seemed almost inevitable that Buffalo would become enamored of design competitions and want to use them everywhere. When your shiny new tool is a hammer, you start to see every problem as a nail. In a sense this is understandable, as the Skyway competition did elicit some ideas that the community should probably…
By the time you read this, the Diocese of Buffalo will have shut down its credit cards, perhaps a sign it will follow the Diocese of Rochester down the road to bankruptcy. This is just one of the extraordinary repercussions of a shocking series of developments over the last year involving the Diocese’ handling of clergy sex abuse cases. With a drastic, even existential impact on local Catholics and Catholicism in the last year, the crisis in the diocese has come to dominate thoughts, conversations, and prayers, and can’t be overlooked even in writing a piece about a this Sunday’s…
For western New York’s visual arts community, the launch of a new arts review couldn’t happen soon enough. Why? Recently, after a slow, decades-long decline in arts coverage by traditional media and even the alternative press, the end came swiftly with blows delivered in rapid succession. Artvoice’s arts voices were stilled. The Public ceased regular publication. And at the Buffalo News Colin Dabkowski, who had soldiered on in the face of management indifference to the visual arts, was pulled off the arts beat. These developments left yawning void in arts coverage. As for filling that void, the who and the…