Feb. 1, 1980 Gusto Cover Story: Preservation

 

Call it an uncanny coincidence, but right after that awful fire at Mulligan's Brick Bar, this commentary from 45 years ago cropped up in my time machine.

Feb. 1, 1980

Preservation

You want to have a peek at Buffalo’s future?

It’s been hiding in plain sight.

         For years, the abandoned Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad terminal at the foot of Main Street stood as the very model of ruin and dilapidation. Every window was smashed. Every fixture was stolen. The vandalism was so complete that there was nothing left to haul away. The building ultimately started taking its own revenge on trespassers, dropping chunks of ceiling on unwary interlopers. One was killed that way.

         Nevertheless, there were few cheers last October when the Common Council was obliged to sign the place over to the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority for $190,000. The NFTA offered the city no choice. If it wasn’t yielded voluntarily, the authority would condemn it and take it anyway. The NFTA currently is paying $525,000 to convert the 64-year-old structure into a vacant lot, keeping only the train sheds behind it as a repair shop for the new Main Street rapid transit line.

         It was once one of three major rail terminals downtown. New York Central’s was replaced by a new one on the East Side. Lehigh Valley’s gave way to the Gen. Donovan State Office Building. The DL&W remained – a monument to the grandeur that was railroading. For the Old First Ward, it was heritage, a symbol of decline and a hope of better days to come.

         In recent years, that hope was taken up by developers. One of them envisioned it as an end-of-the-subway-line shopping mall and entertainment complex, a Buffalo version of Boston’s famed Faneuil Hall rehabilitation. (As one Bostonian notes: “Historic properties in Boston don’t wear out, they get better every year.”) It would take millions of dollars, of course, but if it worked, the project ultimately would include town houses, a marina and a sports stadium. The NFTA, however, already had other plans.

         What determines whether an old building stands or falls? In the case of the DL&W depot, it’s what one observer calls “a demolition mentality” residing in a public agency that is empowered to act without having to answer to its constituents. In the case of the Metcalfe House (see box on Page 10), it’s a matter of being in the wrong place when a major commercial rehabilitation project moves in next door. In the case of the Old Post Office or Shea’s Buffalo, it meant a stubborn and protracted campaign by private citizens, city and county officials, the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier, architects, architectural historians and UB’s School of Architecture and Environmental Design.

         “It takes a hell of a lot of luck and persistence and the help of many dedicated people in the community,” says Austin Fox, a leader in the city’s preservation fights. “A groundswell of public opinion helps as much as anything. It also takes a thick skin. I thought the deputy commissioner of development would punch me one time, he was so mad at the Delaware Mansions issue.”

         The stately DL&W terminal is hardly the most significant old building here that’s fallen to the bulldozer and the wrecking ball. It’s only the most recent. The list of lost Buffalonia runs from the marvelous to the mundane:

         – The former Larkin Administration Building at Swan and Seneca streets, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It appears in virtually every major book on modern architecture. After the Larkin Co. went bankrupt in the Depression, it stood vacant for more than a decade before it was demolished (with much difficulty) in 1950 to make way for a parking lot.

         – The former neo-classical Federal Reserve Bank branch at Main and Swan streets, leveled in the 1950s. Only its marble columns survive. They’re on UB’s Amherst Campus, overlooking Lake LaSalle.

         – The former Root Mansion at Delaware Avenue and North Street. Designed in 1896 by the leading architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White, it was a smaller version of the Eastman House in Rochester and was one of four McKim, Mead and White houses at Delaware and North. It came down in the 1940s for a Howard Johnson’s restaurant.

         – The homes of Millard Fillmore (now the site of the Hotel Statler), Mark Twain (Delaware just north of Virginia Street), Wells Fargo’s William D. Fargo (a five-story mansion with grounds that stretched from Fargo Avenue to West Street and from Pennsylvania to Vermont streets) and Buffalo founder Joseph Ellicott (a Greek revival house at Main and High streets, later moved to the site of the United Church Home on Amherst Street and torn down in 1950).

         Over the years, however, Buffalonians have learned to rise in defense of some of the more important parts of the city’s heritage. Austin Fox says modern historic preservation got its start here in 1959. What brought it to a head was a plan to demolish the lighthouse in the harbor – the one built in 1833 and which appears on the city’s official seal – to make way for ships that were expected to come here from the St. Lawrence Seaway. A public fund drive saved and restored the lighthouse. Shippers, meantime, used the Seaway to bypass Buffalo completely.

         Next to be saved was the Wilcox Mansion, where Teddy Roosevelt was sworn in to succeed President McKinley. Again it took a community effort, led by Owen Augspurger and abetted by Rep. Thaddeus Dulski and the Junior League.

         Then came the oldest house in Buffalo – the Coit House, a Federal style structure built in 1818 at Church and Pearl streets and moved to Elmwood Avenue and Virginia Street in the 1870s. A rundown boarding house, it was slated to come down in the late 1960s, but the Landmark Society stepped in, saved it and sold it with a stipulation that it be restored.

         The bitterest preservation struggle was the early 1970s controversy over the Delaware Mansions – three massive homes near West Ferry Street which IBM wanted to level for a new glass cube office building. While IBM bullied and blustered, the citizenry grew increasingly upset and outraged. After a season of bumper stickers and protest letters, IBM took offices in the Marine Midland Center downtown. The owner of the mansions, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, went ahead and knocked one of them down anyway. “IBM tried to do the same thing in Rochester,” Fox remarks, “and Rochester told them: ‘Build downtown.’”

         Architectural preservation is shaping up as one of the major social phenomena of the 1980s. The impetus began in the Tax Reform Act of 1976, which transforms old buildings into new tax shelters by allowing accelerated depreciation for commercial renovation. Inflation and scarcity of raw materials are becoming factors as well. It’s gotten to the point where it can be cheaper to overhaul an existing building than to put up a new one.

         Furthermore, America seems to be undergoing a change of heart about the past. “The country’s architectural history and culture are now seen as economic, esthetic and environmental necessities,” leading architecture writer Ada Louise Huxtable has remarked. “The city is discovering its identity in its historic architecture.”

         In that case, a lot of Buffalo’s future is going to be found in its past. Heaven knows the city has seen far more glorious days than these. “This,” says local social historian Mark Goldman, “is the quintessential 19th century American city.”

         “Besides Chicago,” says UB architectural historian Jack Quinan, “this is the only city in the United States which has major buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, H. H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan. These are blue chip people. We’re talking about America’s cultural heritage, not just artifacts. Each of them makes a specific statement about the past here. You can use the buildings to draw people to Buffalo forever. Look how people come to the Parthenon.”

         “We have to let Buffalo know that it is a living collection of great architecture,” says Austin Fox. “Someone asked Edward Durrell Stone when he was designing the Buffalo Evening News building why he’d bother with such a small building in Buffalo. He told them it was because so many great architects were represented in Buffalo and he wanted to be among them.”

         This year we’re due to be reminded several times over how special Buffalo is. The national Olmsted Parks convention will meet here this spring. The 19th century park pioneer laid out the city’s entire park and parkway system, along with the parkland beside Niagara Falls. The New York State Preservation League also will convene here in the spring. In the fall, architects will hold their state convention here. Also coming is the Buffalo Guidebook, which will detail the city’s architectural fine points, old and new, neighborhood by neighborhood.

         As the book will demonstrate, the souvenirs of the gone, golden decades are all around us. Some of them are proud and familiar – the intricate coziness of Allentown, the majestic mansions along Delaware Avenue, the bold art deco patternwork of City Hall and the clean modernism of Kleinhans Music Hall.

         Others stand neglected and unsung – the handsome woodwork by German immigrant carpenters in the Fruit Belt, the antique brick business facades along Broadway and Genesee Street, the gabled and turreted Victorian neighborhoods on the East Side and the West Side, the hulking, otherworldly grain elevators along the Buffalo River.

         “There’s outstanding residential architecture here,” says Kate Carroll, who’s helping compile the Buffalo Guidebook. “Europeans remark on the quality of the glass and the quality of the woodwork, not to mention the good planning that went into the city in the 19th century.”

         “If this was Toronto,” says D’Arcy Leslie, who with Richard Martin is making an inventory of every structure in the city, “all the West Side would be revitalized by now. But here people move a lot slower.”

         The federal government stands ready to encourage them. Susan O’Connor, director of the city’s neighborhood redevelopment office, says federal subsidies are available to offset high interest rates on loans. Application can be made through community action organizations. Most active is Allentown, which is in the midst of a special five- to seven-year program of improvement. Facades will be refreshed on a block of lower Elmwood Avenue. Days Park will be spruced up too.

         “The biggest problem,” says Richard Martin, “is money. There are not enough preservation developers. People don’t see it as a good thing to invest in yet. You also need a community awareness, so people recognize what they have before they change it or tear it down. It’s terrible when you start seeing what could’ve been done. What’s sad is places like Carolina Street, where everything was neglected because of that plan where they were going to connect the expressways.”

         Leslie and Martin, architecture grads working out of City Hall on state and local funding, have put together 10,000 pages of pictures and descriptions over the past two years. They’re only one-sixth completed, but when they finish this – the largest such survey in the state – the city will have an invaluable catalog of its building stock.

         It will take good planning not to make a mess of preservation. This survey is one planning tool. Other mechanisms have already been installed. One is the Buffalo Landmark and Preservation Board, authorized in the 1950s but set up only after the recent fight to save the Old Post Office. The landmark panel merely reviews construction and demolition and makes recommendations to the Common Council, which has the final say. The establishment of historic districts – Allentown is the largest in the U.S. – insures that every development is reviewed.

         But Buffalo lagged behind other cities in exploiting its 19th century charms. San Francisco has turned old factories into tourist attractions. Washington, D.C., requires an esthetic review before anything is built or razed. New York City has fought a trail-blazing lawsuit to save Grand Central Station. Cultivation of old neighborhoods in Charleston, S.C., and Providence, R.I., has transformed those cities. Closer to home, preservation programs in Corning and East Aurora are emblems of civic pride. Even so, nobody will go so far as to say that everything can be saved.

         “Let’s face it,” says Dennis Insalaco, partner with Charles Collesano in Buffalo’s pioneer commercial rehabilitation firm, “old buildings are full of blight and decay. We’re talking about redoing every ceiling, wall and floor. We’re talking about what time period it was built. Since 1925 is easy. You can usually use a lot of what’s there. The heating, the plumbing. Between 1900 and 1925, it’s mixed. Before 1900, you usually have to replace all the major systems.

         “Free enterprise is going to dictate the feasibility of a project,” Insalaco says. “Preservation could impose restraints that might deny the developer the means to do the task. It’s a different reality when you’re out there with a hammer in your hand.”

         Collesano and Insalaco showed the city how it’s done. They took on a project nobody else would touch – a pair of century-old brick nuns’ residences at Franklin and North streets – and converted them into professional offices. There they inaugurated their style. Exteriors were restored and amenities – fireplaces, stained glass, fancy woodwork – were retained. The rest was reworked to modern specifications.

         It was so successful that they’ve gone on to create radio studios in a carriage house for WKBW and in a former rooming house for WBLK-FM. These days they’re rehabbing abandoned School 16 on Delaware Avenue. In their Elm Street headquarters, they’re also forming Buffalo Restoration Center, which will bring together craftsmen to make appropriate cabinets, glass and hardware for old buildings.

         “We felt Franklin was the neglected street,” Insalaco says. “Victorian buildings are ideal for office conversions. They have generous parlors and entrances. The problem is limited square footage – most of them are 8,500 to 10,000 square feet. And most of them are in residential neighborhoods, which means tight parking restrictions. Parking is a serious problem. If you don’t have it, you don’t have a tenant.”

         “The buildings that are easiest are the ones that are non-specific,” says Dr. Bonnie Foit Albert, an assistant professor of architecture at UB who maintains a private practice in rehabilitation. “A lot of recycling will probably be aimed toward industrial and loft-type buildings, like the Merit Building downtown. They have fewer load-bearing walls, the ceilings are higher and the plans are more flexible. Apartment buildings don’t recycle as well.”

         “The problem is reuse,” says Francis Kowski, chairman of the Fine Arts Department at Buffalo State College. “That’s where it takes a community interest in preservation. If the city wants to save good old buildings, they’ll find a use for them. There’ll be a demand for them – like antique autos. We’re seeing it on Delaware Avenue and it tells you a few things about the culture. The new wealth of the 19th century was personal, while the new wealth of the 20th century is corporate. The family mansion really wasn’t that important to our culture. It was more like a necessity to build something to let everybody know you’d arrived.”

         Ideas for reuse are sometimes slow in coming. Buffalo’s Theater District sits mostly boarded up, waiting for the right development. St. Louis mothballed the Wainwright Building for 30 years before it could be rehabilitated. The question of reuse hovers over Buffalo most prominent international-class structures – Sullivan’s Guaranty (Prudential) Building, Richardson’s Buffalo State Hospital administration building and Wright’s Martin House on Jewett Parkway.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTOS: The DL&W Terminal in its heyday and a view of the main lobby, which bears a certain resemblance of other grand rail station lobbies.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: At long last, the NFTA is going to reopen what's left of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad terminal – basically the train shed – as an indoor light rail station, thanks to big infusions of state and federal funding.

Among its amenities, which eventually are supposed to include shops and a concert hall, it will have access onto the Riverwalk and Canalside, plus an elevated walkway (they're calling it a "skybridge") to the KeyBank Center. Plans call for it to open in stages throughout 2025 and 2026.