Buffalo's Opportunity

Another piece of the picture is America’s rediscovery of its waterfronts over the past 25 years. As a people, and as a culture, we had turned our backs on the water. We saw the waterfront as merely functional, economic, not significant in cultural or ecological terms. Now we are trying to reconnect our communities to the water. It really is a national movement.

We can trace much of this to the Clean Water Act. Before that it was hard to think of our waterways as amenities. But the return to the waterfront has been part of even larger movements. Books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities, led a wholesale change in attitudes and perceptions and values about both natural and urban environments. Our return to the waterfront in the eighties and nineties and beyond is an extension of that.

It’s much like the reinventing of our Main Streets. Re-focusing our attention on the traditional centers of our cities and towns was a reaction to the ugly and vacuous character of post-war suburban commercial landscapes.

We should remember, of course, that not all of those efforts were successful. The malling over of our Main Streets was mainly a failure. We did it in Chicago, on State Street. We took the cars off and narrowed the streets and made it buses only. It didn’t work very well. Now we’ve widened the street again, opened it up to traffic, restored the period lighting, and things are lively again.

In this regard, Buffalo is really in a great position. You’ve made some important investments in your waterfront, but there is still a lot of acreage, still a lot of opportunities for you to take advantage. And the great thing is that you have the ability to learn from both the failures and the successes of waterfront developments, festival market places, Main Street redevelopments, and on and on.

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