Downtown was the thriving hub of the city’s commercial activity prior the rise of extreme car culture and the mass exodus to the suburbs. This obsession with total automotive convenience and a fear of city’s the growing black and Latino underclass drove middle class residents and countless businesses to the once-rural fringe.

During the massive urban renewal fever of the postwar decades, a number of mega-projects were imposed upon downtown with false hopes of closing the wounds suffered as a result of the explosion of suburban sprawl. On a smaller scale, yet still in line with the renewal craze, many beautifully detailed old buildings were torn down and replaced with either surface parking lots or bleak, architecturally modern hellholes that did a better job resembling a UFO than a functional piece of urban fabric.

When a critical mass of downtown employees had moved to the suburbs, everything possible had to be done to accommodate their automobile usage downtown. Countless buildings were ripped down and replaced with surface parking lots. Once-vibrant streets came to look like glorified office parks.

After all this mess, people are pretty cynical about downtown. To address some of these concerns, we at the BEAST proudly present The Ten Crappiest Things About Downtown.

10. Surface Parking Lots

A quick glance at a satellite image of downtown shows that almost half of its surface area is blanketed in grey. Countless surface parking lots riddle the downtown landscape, causing many streets to resemble an old boxer’s smile—a sad grin with plenty of missing teeth. This gap-toothed arrangement turns streets into hostile pedestrian environments, with cars constantly crossing over the sidewalk. Parking lots turn away pedestrians because there is nothing more boring to walk by than, well…parking Lots.

West Chippewa Street, one of downtown’s few remaining intact streetscapes, draws large crowds (on drinking nights) because all the street activity provides for interesting sights and sounds. Few bare parking lots exist on the revitalized portion of the strip. Every few steps taken reveal another interesting building.

Downtown’s parking lot surplus becomes most apparent when walking down Franklin Street south from Allentown, well into the core of downtown. Upper Franklin, in Allentown, offers a glimpse at some of Buffalo’s finest vintage architecture dating from the 1860s-70s. This urban continuum comes to an abrupt halt upon crossing Edward Street as neatly preserved houses and small apartment buildings give way to a vast sea of parking lots stretching all the way to adjacent streets (restaurateur Mark Croce, ostensibly the savior of Franklin Street, owns most of these lots and makes a killing on them). Toward the end of the block are a few remaining buildings, housing the Tudor Lounge, Croce’s newly fixed-up Laughlin’s, and some beautiful, 19^th century walkup apartments. Once a lively, interesting streetscape, this entire block was lined with a solid wall of these buildings. Now this mostly-bleak stretch is one big parking lot hell. Oh, and I almost forgot Croce’s Buffalo Chophouse. But that is easy to miss thanks to it being obscured by, yes, a parking lot!

These lots offer a cheap and extremely profitable business venture, thanks to our regressive tax code which taxes land solely on its built improvements rather than its development potential. Lot owners get away with paying minuscule property taxes while collecting a steady stream of parking revenue each month. Often, owners of multiple parking lots sit on their land for speculation, waiting for a major developer to come in, buy their lot for a small fortune and plop down an office tower. If this doesn’t happen, the lot owner will still make a killing from parking fees. Either way, it’s a win-win situation for them. If Buffalo really cares about quashing the proliferation of surface parking downtown, they just might want to enable a land-value taxation system that would tax parking lots at the same rate as a next door office tower.

9. Convention Center

This architectural death star is a prime example of a silver-bullet megaproject imposed on a dying downtown that, of course, didn’t deliver on its original promises. The mere construction of this sprawling, concrete monolith threw a monkey wrench in the tight-knit grid of downtown streets by cutting off Mohawk and Genesee streets from Niagara Square. This effectively severed downtown into two isolated halves, with the help of the Main Place Mall (mentioned below). The truncation of those vital streets creates a massive, bleak superblock which disrespects proper urban form and the pedestrian, human scale of a functional urban district.

Let’s not kid ourselves; Buffalo’s convention center is fucking ugly as sin. It was plopped in the ‘60s during the heyday of the architectural style known as Brutalism (no, really—that vertical concrete slab we call the City Courthouse is another example). Edifices constructed using this tormenting blend of blank concrete walls and lego-block like structures did everything possible to turn once-thriving streets into bleak places that no pedestrian would dare wish to venture. The convention center lives up to the Brutalism tag very well. I must give credit to the honesty in that name. Most postwar Modernist architectural styles were intended to punish the denizens of the unfortunate recipient environments—and be cheap—rather than create a captivating place.

8. Main Place Mall

Speaking of massive blunders, let’s not forget another hulking eyesore built around the same time as the convention center mentioned above. This was yet another “urban renewal” megaproject disaster birthed in the name of progress. Like the convention center, it cuts off a vital cross street (Eagle Street), creating a long block less pleasing and efficient for pedestrian navigation. This happened also during the “mall craze” days that favored an indoor shopping environment as opposed to traditional street and storefront urbanism. Often resulting in the demolition of many vital old, human-scaled buildings, downtown malls became all the rage under the false premise that they could somehow compete with their suburban counterparts. No chance in hell.

Such pedestrian malls were all the hype at the time and, like in Buffalo, they failed almost everywhere they were built.

Main Street was once the commercial heart of downtown. Many impressive buildings still remain, but the life of this street has been sucked out by a prolonged bombardment of all the other problems that downtown has faced in the postwar decades. Removing vehicular traffic from Main Street and surrendering it to a light rail line was the final nail in the street’s coffin. Since by that time most of downtown had lost its pedestrian character, city planners should have known better than removing automobiles from a street which actually still had some hope.

Most of the time on this portion of Main Street, there is only a very light dusting of actual pedestrians. Look at the picture above of Main Street around the turn of the century, then look at it now.

With the exception of Allentown, the neighborhoods surrounding downtown range from desolate and dingy to downright abysmal.

Flanking downtown’s industrial district to the southeast is the Old First Ward, a dumpy old area adorned with weed-choked vacant lots, abandoned industrial sites and a crumbling housing stock. This neighborhood was always a working class Irish district and due to its industrial nature was never very attractive. It’s a complete shit hole now.

Directly East of downtown is the oldest part of the East Side, a neighborhood that deteriorated long ago and which is now partially filled in with high-rise housing projects and rows of newer government subsidized suburban-style houses.

These new clusters of infill housing can be thought of as horizontal projects, as they house the same impoverished residents that have been living in this area for quite a while. Sooner or later the property “owners” will default on their mortgages and these new houses will enter the same cycle of neglect, abandonment and decay as older ghetto houses. The people running the city’s planning office obviously know little about cities if they insist on placing low-density housing adjacent to downtown. Come to think of it, building high-rise projects adjacent to downtown was a big mistake as well.

To the northeast lies the fruit belt, a neighborhood with a name that evokes images of Buffalo’s worst ghettos, although the situation there has stabilized a bit in recent years. It’s a shame that a neighborhood situated right next to Buffalo’s booming medical campus still looks like such a dump. The original housing stock, consisting of small working class cottages, doesn’t lend itself to well to gentrification. Unlike its neighbor, Allentown, the Fruit Belt lacks a mix of high-density brick apartment buildings, storefronts, and delicately ornamented Victorian houses. The one thing this area has going for it are its heavily tree-lined streets. Ripping down the crumbling homes and building townhouse/brownstone style houses along with retail on Michigan Ave. would be the only real way of making this neighborhood come alive. Higher densities bring more people onto the streets (and more eyes watching it), therefore making it safer.

Finally, northwest of downtown is a lower west side neighborhood with some exceptional architecture yet overwhelmed by a slum-like atmosphere. The area has a few exceptional blocks, but many more run down ones. If the good blocks were somehow weaved together by redeveloping the shitty blocks, the neighborhood would really recover.

Right now the city needs to find a way to sell downtown living to retirees, childless couples and empty nesters. Bringing back middle-class families to the city core is a tough sell, but those without children are the hottest residential market for cities on the rebound. When people with disposable income move into an area, retail and services will follow suit. It’s a simple formula that local politicians don’t seem to understand. The key to bringing back downtown is building up a residential population, not plunking down costly silver-bullet megaprojects that render downtown even more devoid of life.

I will credit the city for restoring a number of downtown’s one-way streets to two-way traffic, but there is still a number of remaining one-ways.

Probably the worst is what I dub the “Elm-Oak speedway.” This twin artery consisting of two one-way streets (opposite direction of course) is fed by traffic coming off the 33 expressway, en route to the I-190, and vice-versa. Traffic engineers obviously planned this as a de-facto connector between the two highways. The traffic lights along these streets are geared for a constant flow of vehicular traffic. Pedestrians, beware.

I guess one could argue that there are few uses on these streets that attract pedestrians. Indeed an entire strip of tacky, one-story, suburb-style urban renewal office buildings was built between the dual arterials, rendering this section of downtown a no-go zone for those on foot. So why bother tinkering with this auto-friendly configuration? Well, there have been plans to convert some of the surviving buildings along this stretch into lofts and apartments. If these streets ever wish to become places worth taking a stroll and spending money, the one-way speedways must be nixed. Otherwise who the hell would want to live next to a noisy expressway? Remember what happened to Humboldt Parkway?

Chippewa’s clientele primarily includes tasteless suburban trash, frat-type meatheads, and 30-40ish professionals who still think they are young. On this three-block strip we get a monoculture of noisy bars that spin the same tired Top 40 booty-shaking tunes and pander to the shallow culture of suburban jocks and fake-boobed hussies.

By day, Chippewa is a quiet street with a primary use of small offices above the sleeping bars. By nightfall, on weekends, the street caters to some theater district patrons, soon to be replaced an hour or two later by the younger, sloppy drunk crowd.

So what is so horrible about all of this? Not a whole lot, except the lesson of trying to avoid single-use districts. At night Chippewa qualifies as a single-use district because just about every establishment on the street offers the same use and caters to the same crowd. Take a busy district at night like Greenwich Village in NYC for example. Its major streets are filled nearly every night, with as many people, if not more than Chippewa on a typical weekend evening. But each street in the Village has a mix of bars, restaurants, coffee shops, retail stores, small emporiums, and apartments. Not a single street is occupied primarily by bars.

If downtown Buffalo is to eventually build up a sizable population, streets like Chippewa will have to diversify and accommodate residential and retail uses. City planners and officials should be doing their best to lure popular retail outlets onto the street and the general area. This could turn the Chippewa area and theater district into a 24-hour destination, which would be much better than an urban theme park, only active on weekend nights.

We all know our waterfront sucks. Let’s forget for a second about the outer harbor (that vast expanse of scrub land under the skyway and along route 5) and concentrate on the section directly abutting downtown. Thanks to the ugly presence of the I-190, there are few downtown streets which connect to the scenic portion of the waterfront. There we have the Erie Basin Marina which offers some nice scenic views but is surrounded by parking lots and has poor pedestrian connectivity with downtown. The rest of the waterfront is marred by a strange mix of isolated luxury condos, subsidized housing towers and suburb-like office parks (Adelphia and Channel 7 News are two of the occupants). What in the hell were they thinking here? Just about every function of our waterfront caters to automobile-dominated uses that one could find anywhere in the twenty gazillion suburban moonscapes that scar this nation. The biggest problem here overall is the lack of connectivity.

On the subject of the outer harbor, most of these “plans” I have seen are pure rubbish. Most of them call for creating a mix of high rise-luxury condos and offices in some sort of ecotopian park-like setting. Let’s first not forget that the outer harbor’s soil is still contaminated by a number of heavy metals. Secondly, if downtown has enough problems retaining office tenants (around a 40% office vacancy rate) and attracting new residents, who the hell would think that businesses and home-seekers will suddenly flock downtown in huge numbers if a bunch of towers were erected overnight on the waterfront? Dream on.

Our local politicians have little ability to think beyond the typical silver-bullet megaprojects. They make for cute soundbites on the evening news; that’s about it. Fixing an ailing city requires a gradual, long-term sequence of small steps. It means luring in a delicate combination of small businesses, retail chains, offices, places to live. It means working on one neighborhood at a time or even one block at a time. The changes add up slowly.

Our politicians lack the will, the patience, and a genuine understanding of how cities function. Sometimes I don’t think they even care. Whatever makes flashy headlines, gets them reelected and pleases their moneyed friends is what flies. Our waterfront is a case in point. My recommendation: Rip down the 190 and restore a connective street pattern to the waterfront. Likeliness of this to happen? When Red Bull will actually give you wings.