Priorities - Putting It All Together
The radial plan, a mixed-use core district, residential communities and a series of gateways define Downtown.
Each of the five investment areas is thematically and geographically distinct but each also allows for a fully mixed-use program throughout Downtown. In addition, a great Downtown must be more than a collection of districts. It must provide an interconnected environment, overlapping activities, and continuous experience.
To achieve this goal, Downtown needs to emphasize, and where possible restore, the interconnections provided by Joseph Ellicott’s historic radial and grid street plan; it needs to announce this special Downtown environment with gateways; and it needs to foster the development of fine-grained mixed uses that define the pattern of the urban fabric. All of this must be done in concert with the historic stock of existing buildings, the designated historic districts, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s intentions to use his parkways and Ellicott’s radials to bring people around the City to Downtown and to the waterfronts.
For those who seek the grand vision for the City of Buffalo and the Downtown, this is a major part of it: Ellicott’s radial street plan, Olmsted’s park and parkway system, and the waterfronts will be united in a cohesive system of pedestrian-friendly “great streets,” avenues, and parkways.
The Radial and Grid Plan
The street system of any city is what allows or impedes its life, pedestrian movement, and exchange. Downtown Buffalo’s street pattern, now nearly 200 years old, once made it possible for a vibrant urban life to flourish. Interruptions of that pattern, and the introduction of many one-way streets, coincided with the waning of that life.
Current work in implementing the Downtown Buffalo Strategic Plan has emphasized the restoration of two-way traffic to many streets, including Chippewa, Franklin, Ellicott, Huron, and Washington. Current planning work has also focused on options to improve Main Street and reopen it to automobile traffic in addition to transit and pedestrians. Recent proposals have also identified the potential benefits of reestablishing major radial connections such as Genesee Street through Downtown and on toward the waterfront.
All of these initiatives have the potential to connect the different focus areas of Downtown and to help it become more than the sum of its parts. The radial and grid street plan connects Downtown with its surrounding neighborhoods, the waterfront, the rest of the city, and all of upstate New York. The historic Native American “first people’s“ trail, now known as Main Street, deserves special emphasis, as do Genesee Street, Broadway Street, Delaware Avenue, Court Street, Church Street, Erie Street and Niagara Street. These radials help integrate the historic Black Rock, Riverside, and Main Street grids that make up modern Buffalo.
Gateways that celebrate the connections between Downtown and the city can help define and announce the Downtown core. A well designed gateway can improve the image of Downtown both through physical improvements and by creating a sense that positive things are happening.
A long neglected area of Downtown is the Church Street link connecting the Adams Mark Hotel and the waterfront beyond it to Downtown. Currently the street has six lanes of forbiddingly fast-moving traffic and an unattractive streetscape. The objective is to make Church Street a truly great street, taking full advantage of the spectacular architecture including historic structures such as the old U.S. Post Office, The Ellicott Square Building, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Guaranty Building and the modern M & T Bank Building and Plaza. There is also the potential to reinvigorate the commercial and entertainment assets of the south end of Main Place Mall. The result will make Church Street a beautiful east-west boulevard. Work on Erie Street as part of Ellicott’s historic radial plan would contribute to Church and enhance the relationship of Downtown to Lake Erie by opening up a strong vista to the water from Main at Church.
The health of Downtown is partially dependent on the inter-modal transportation options created for the citizens of the region. A solid program of quality options that are well integrated will reduce the pressure on parking and increase the desirability of Downtown as a business location. Downtown must support and be supported by walking, biking and bus riding, as well as intercity and intra-city rail in a fully integrated system of transit. The same development of inter-modal transit options will also help reduce the social, economic, and environmental costs of suburban sprawl.
A Mixed-Use Core Area
What the radial, grid, and gateways connect, however, must be a dense and finely woven fabric of mixed uses. There must be big uses: Shea’s Buffalo Performing Arts Center, HSBC Arena, a new Inner Harbor, Courthouses, and a Community College. But there must also be small uses: first floor shops, street vendors, restaurants, second floor offices, loft apartments, coffee shops, drugstores, dry cleaners, taverns, and more. Some of this fabric has been repaired in recent years, in the Theatre District and along Chippewa Street, for example. Now it is possible to imagine over the ensuing years that the entire core, from Elmwood to Michigan, and extending north and south from Genesee Street, might be knit together in a continuous fabric, and that ultimately Downtown might be stitched together with the Near East Side, Fruit Belt, Medical Campus, Allentown, Lower West Side, and the waterfront to make a single greater Downtown. The Queen City Hub envisions a city that grows its core area in phases, taking advantage of current strengths, creating critical mass, and then expanding again.
Part of understanding the mixed use core requires the city to revise its Downtown zoning ordinance, retaining the mandate for transparency (no blank walls) and adding the requirement for 1st floor retail in the traditional retail core areas of the city, especially on Main Street from Church to Huron where the pedestrian density on the sidewalks make first floor space suitable for retail and service uses. On a typical summer day, pedestrian volumes in this area range from 7,000 to 40,000 trips per day.
Downtown Residential/Mixed-Use Communities
From the 1994 Downtown Summit forward, members of the Downtown constituency have been clear about the importance of making Downtown Buffalo a place where people live. They saw Downtown living as a valuable housing choice for citizens of the area. More importantly, they understood the development of a full-time Downtown population as a means to accomplish many of their other goals for Downtown. Full-time residents could give Downtown life twentyfour hours a day and seven days a week. It could help all Downtown users feel safer at all times of the day and night. Conversion to housing could soak up underutilized space in old office buildings. A new Downtown resident population could also help lay the groundwork for the resurgence of retail.
Over the years, attention has focused consistently on the Theatre District and vicinity as the most attractive and logical place to develop new housing Downtown. The 1993 Urban Design Project/Buffalo Place Inc. study A New Downtown Neighborhood in Buffalo envisioned new housing spreading from the Theatre District, north along Main Street, and east along Genesee Street. The American Institute of Architectssponsored Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team visit to Buffalo in March 2001 identified many of these same areas as likely targets for new housing, in addition to a few others. Now, as the idea of housing Downtown continues to gain credibility as well as support, the extent of the geographic focus for development has expanded and new areas have emerged. Focus areas for development of residential communities are essential for directing incentive resources in ways that reinforce the key investment areas even as they build out historic districts and give emphasis to the radial streets linking to the surrounding ring of neighborhoods.
The top priority areas for new neighborhoods Downtown outlined below are selected according to their critical relationship to strategic investment areas, the existing base of residential units Downtown, and current developer interests.
The 600-800 Blocks of Main Street
In the heart of the Theatre District, the 600 block of Main Street, Theatre Place became the pioneer for new housing in the 1980s. Around the same time, a six-unit apartment house on Franklin Street was renovated. Development of City Centre (also related to the Genesee Street radial) came next, with 32 high-rise, high-end condominiums. More recently, 10 new units were created in the floors above the new Irish Classical Theater. To the north, the 700 block of Main Street has long seemed a likely place for new housing. It is a short walk to the Theatre District and light rail station. And it is close to the south end of Allentown.
The first publicly supported residential development was the renovation of the glazed terra cotta Ansonia building for ground floor office and retail and 58 upperfloor residential units. A smaller privately funded project saw the 19-unit Spaulding Building renovated for new occupancy. Plans for 160 loft apartment units in Century Center I, the former Trico plant, are on hold while the developer reevaluates the market. Meanwhile, Clover Development is constructing 67 new units in the red terracotta Sidway Building at Main and Goodell Streets. The project is a prime example of how housing conversions can reduce the glut of underutilized older office space in Downtown and provide a new benefit at the same time. Future projects like Sidway will benefit from aggressive programs of tenant relocation in their conversion and a clear process of incentive awards.
Across the street on the west side of Main Street are the vacant site of the old Teck Theater, the long-vacant Vernor and Schmidt’s buildings, together long considered to be one of the most logical sites for new housing on this end of Downtown. The linkage north to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus continues in the 800 block where new units are planned for the existing structures on the west side of Main. In the shadow of these other projects, and with the support of an Urban Renewal designation amendment that enables site acquisition, these properties can be redeveloped.
Further south and west, the Ellicott Development Corporation is now developing a plan to renovate the former Greystone Hotel, a long-troubled property, to create 30 units of market rate housing between Delaware and Elmwood adjacent to Johnson Park. These complement other developments on Pearl, Franklin and Delaware north of Chippewa in what is the historical site of residential concentration in Downtown.
Genesee Street Radial
Nearby on Ellicott Street, just north of Genesee Street, Burke Development Corporation is redeveloping a complex of old commercial and warehouse structures known collectively as the Ellicott Lofts project.
Just across Genesee Street to the south of the Ellicott Lofts is the historic Genesee Village stretching from Ellicott to Elm, one of the largest intact ensembles of late 19th century commercial buildings remaining in Buffalo. This is another logical site for housing redevelopment “above the store“ or in a “live-work“ or other mixed-use complex that builds on the Genesee Street radial.
The 500 Block of Main Street and the Electric District
Just south of the Theatre District, starting in the 500 block of Main Street, is another potential cluster of new housing. Ellicott Development’s Belesario project in the former L. L. Berger buildings is under construction. The adjacent Gamler’s building has been incorporated in the project and new residential work is proposed on the northwest corner of Mohawk and Main. This represents the complete renovation of the west side of the block from Huron to Mohawk on Main. On nearby Washington Street, a developer is exploring the feasibility of an adaptive use of the former Holling Press building, perhaps the first of many efforts to create housing in the industrial and commercial stock of buildings in the Electric District. This residential concentration will help animate the financial and government centers to the west, immediate north, and south with the twenty-four hour, seven-day week life of a residential population.
The Cobblestone District and Perry Street
Developer Bernard Obletz is now renting 72 units of loft-style housing in the Elk Terminal on Scott Street near Michigan on the northern edge of the Cobblestone District. Other developers have expressed significant interest in the possibility of mixed-use development in the historic Cobblestone District to the west. This district is least well understood as a core neighborhood, but infill between the Elk Terminal and Cobblestone could become a significant urban village. Possibilities also exist for the village to grow east of the Elk Terminal site as well. All of this builds on the emerging strengths of investments in the Erie Canal Harbor and Waterfront District.
Other Sites: The Niagara Street Triangle, Lafayette Square, and Delaware Avenue
The Regional Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT) identified two other possible neighborhood clusters, including one centered on the triangle bounded by Niagara, Huron, and South Elmwood which is now appropriately slated for the development of a new office structure for the IRS and other tenants. The other R/UDAT site was on the east end of Lafayette Square. Future renovation of the Lafayette Hotel and development of the parking lot on the northeast corner of the square could bring the new Downtown neighborhood right into the center of the city.
Another mixed-use neighborhood cluster (Delaware Avenue) builds on the strengths of Allentown to the North, Elmwood and the Lower West side to the West, the Theatre District to the East, and the Government and Financial District to the South. An action plan developed by the “Avenue Association“ calls for specific work in all of the activity areas and most of the principle areas of The Queen City Hub work plan. For example, strategies for the full geography of the plan (three blocks wide by six blocks long) call for protecting historic resources, ensuring appropriate parking design, advancing the work of the Downtown Neighborhood Development Corporation, increasing the health of existing businesses, improving lighting as well as public safety and policing, and enhancing the pedestrian experience.
The idea of developing more Downtown housing has been advancing now for at least a quarter of a century. Some of the initial steps have been small halting ones. But as one project after another falls into place it becomes possible to see how these small clusters of residences will generate further new activity, draw neighborhood retail support services, and generate new confidence from other developers. Given this slow and steady progress, and the fact that developers have yet to produce enough housing to meet even the most conservative estimates of potential market demand, a new Downtown neighborhood in Buffalo will happen. In the near term, over 700 units are planned with rental rates from a low of $400/month to as high as $2,500/ month. These prices accommodate very affordable roommate flats as well as lofts and luxury housing. They also complement a mix of very affordable housing already available Downtown.
Also consistent with Downtown Buffalo 2002! and the R/UDAT recommendations, a Downtown Neighborhood Development (DND) Corporation is now being charged to implement a housing delivery system that will coordinate the efforts of Buffalo and Erie County governments, lenders, real estate developers and professional service firms, New York State and Federal government participants, the business community and Downtown residents. The new DND has the mission to create residential neighborhoods with an urban lifestyle. Its structure will be as a not-forprofit corporation coordinating the capacity of all its cooperating organizations. It will be the one-stop source for assistance in housing development Downtown.
Delaware Avenue Action Plan
The following projects, not listed in order of priority, are concentrated within this focus area to ensure that they have a strong and immediate impact. Once projects are well established, they can be expanded to the wider project area.
This focus area was chosen because of its intact urban fabric, existing visual appeal, and diverse mix and range of businesses, residences, and other uses that could produce the largest gains in the shortest time.
Area-Wide Strategies and Projects
- Protect Historic Resources
- Demolition moratorium
- Local history district
- Ensure Appropriate Parking Design
- Surface parking lot/ramp moratorium
- Design guidelines related to parking
- Ensure appropriate development
- No casino in downtown
- Design guidelines
- Sounding board for design
- Zoning limits for bars/restaurants
- Work with Downtown Housing Association
- Inventory and advocate
- Increase Health of Existing Businesses
- Joint promotional activities
- Improve Lighting
- Parking lot lighting program
- Public Safety and Policing
- Special police patrols
- Noise ordinance
- Enhance the Pedestrian Experience
- Public Signage Improvements
Focus Area Strategies and Projects
- Enhance the Pedestrian Experience
- Public art
- Pedestrian amenities
- Increase Green Spaces and Plants
- Hanging flower baskets
- Green oasis system
- Street tree improvements
- Market the Community to Retailers
- Retail marketing packet
- Improve Lighting
- Storefront illumination program
- Pedestrian level luminaries
- Improve Transportation Network
- Through block connector
- 30-minute parking meters
- Work to Foster Specific Businesses
- Business development program
