Buffalo: America's Best Designed City
Tim Tielman: It's almost, you know...you have to look for new world metaphors. It's Amazonian!
We're at the foot of this gigantic series of lakes and it's fresh water.
Chris Hawley: It's the reason we became a bustling and important city in the early
part of the American story and perhaps one of the reasons we'll become an important
city again in the 21st century.
Tim Tielman: Well one of the great things that Lake Erie gives us is this oceanic view,
over two hundred miles of water to the west. It's just spectacular to sit out there and
watch the sunset over the water and that's something no one else in the eastern U.S.
has because all our other cities: Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia; they don't
have sunsets over the water, we do.
Jill Jedlicka: The city Buffalo is surrounded by water. We have Lake Erie to our west, Niagara
Falls to the north and Buffalo River meandering to the south.
Robert Shibley: The settlement patterns in our community came up from the water.
Chris Hawley: Buffalo is one of the few cities that have a truly baroque street system.
Robert Shibley: In 1804 Joseph Ellicott came to town.
Chris Hawley: Joseph Ellicott was the brother of Andrew Ellicott who was on Pierre L'Enfant's
team to design Washington DC.
Tim Tielman: And lots of elements of the plan of Washington DC are visible in Buffalo. A
grid overlaid by a radial system of streets.
Chris Hawley: The radial and grid street system gave us an incredibly elegant framework for
developing our city.
Robert Shibley: One of the really terrific things about radials is the way they shape
the view. So when you're coming down Court Street from Lafayette Square you have what
Ada Louise Huxtable called the greatest urban vista in America.
Tim Tielman: Frederick Law Olmsted is perhaps the greatest landscape architect that America
has produced, designer of Central Park.
Robert Shibley: The father of landscape architecture, came to Buffalo with an invitation to put
a park in the city, decided instead that the real thing to do is put the city in a park
system.
Stephanie Barber: It was the first, best-designed park system in America.
Chris Hawley: That park and parkway system was built on the armature of the Ellicott
radial street system.
Robert Shibley: There is no main gate. You come in from any direction. You can move through
the parkways to other parks and have very different experiences in each one.
Stephanie Barber: Frederick Law Olmsted called Buffalo "the best planned city in America,
if not the world."
Robert Shibley: The thing that makes that marginally credible is that he said it before
he offered his park system, so it was the best planned city in America before the park
and parkway system and he added value to that best plan.
Howard Zemsky: The Parks, of course, are beautiful in and of themselves, but sometimes we forget
how significant the parkways are and how they frame the city and how they reflect Olmsted's
vision of a democratic city, an egalitarian approach where anyone and everyone in Buffalo
felt like they were royalty by virtue of being on these parkways.
Tim Tielman: To those of us who live along some of these streets or who traverse them
regularly, we get the idea today of what Ellicott and Olmsted wanted you to feel: You're an
individual, but when you cross these great civic works you're part of a much larger
thing, you're part of a larger society, you're part of something that can only happen
with the collective will, effort, aspirations of your fellow citizens. And to ride a bike,
to walk your dog along Chapin Parkway is just tremendously uplifting. And in Buffalo we
get that by walking the dog.
Robert Shibley: The radials, and the water, and the park system -- the best planned city
in America -- set the table for the best architecture in America.
Tim Tielman: Buffalo of course has buildings by what are today seen as the three greatest
American architects: Frank Lloyd Wright, H.H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan.
Tim Tielman: The grid overlaid with the radial streets provides you with these fantastic
building sights that really attract great architects to do their best work.
Chris Hawley: And that is all integrated within incredible, walkable, compact neighborhoods.
Tim Tielman: So when you go down the streets of Buffalo, you are going to see -- yeah,
holy cow, there's a house by Frank Lloyd Wright, my gosh! -- but you're going to
see lining the streets really wonderful and sometimes touching examples of craftsmanship.
Chris Hawley: Buffalo, like so many cities, made some tremendous mistakes starting around
1950.
Tim Tielman: If we didn't actually have a highway built by Robert Moses through a
city, we were inspired by a highway built by Robert Mosses through a city.
Chris Hawley: We brought the Scajaquada Expressway directly through an Olmsted park, Delaware
Park. We rammed the Kensington expressway down one of Olmsted's parkways displacing
entirely, Humboldt Parkway.
Tim Tielman: It's fascinating. There were photographs of these giant elm trees being
sawed down and the caption on the pictures wasn't: "Tragedy on Humboldt Parkway!"
It was "Hallelujah, progress coming!"
Stephanie Barber: They said, "Hey! This is progress!" How is it progress? How do
you just cut right through a neighborhood? And one side gets destroyed because of it
and other side barely holds on! It will make you cry. You'll say, "Well, what in the
world happened?" Every public record shows us that there were public votes, there were
public hearings, where people said, "Don't do this, this is going to really destroy neighborhoods!"
And they did it anyway.
Robert Shibley: Is there the mistake of all mistakes, the mother of all mistakes? We built
the expressway system that surrounds our city on the water.
Jill Jedlicka: The 190 and the Skyway just cut Buffalo off from its waterfront.
Chris Hawley: So those were huge mistakes. We're still suffering from those mistakes.
We may have yet an opportunity to undo them. That's our task for the next fifty years.
Stephanie Barber: Little by little I've seen someone get the courage to say, "Let's
fix it."
Chris Hawley: The Larkin district is one of the true rustbelt success stories. In the
past ten years a group of imaginative investors have managed to take a district which was
basically abandoned ten years ago and made it one of the most exciting and lively places
in the city today.
Howard Zemsky: This area was established actually in 1827 as Buffalo's first manufacturing
district known as the Hydraulics and it's just a great historic district that was in
tremendous dis-repair; so if you wandered around here ten years ago you would have seen
primarily bordered up and abandoned buildings. We now have as many employees in the district
as Larkin had in it's hey day, so we've come full circle that way, which is great.
Leslie Zemsky: We thought we'd start out with just having some music after work and
people really came out. So then the idea came about really from our son of, "Why don't
we invite food trucks down?" The crowds have been around two thousand people.
Howard Zemsky: This is a component of the renaissance of Buffalo and I think people
have really enjoyed being part of that.
Chris Hawley: In Buffalo we have an opportunity to rebuild the neighborhoods that we still
have. They are a proven alternative to sprawl. We're turning the page with a new zoning
code to begin the process of rebuilding our walkable urban neighborhoods. There is tremendous
incremental progress and hopefully that will create a better argument to make some of the
big moves like highway removal, like restoring our streetcar system or fully restoring our
Olmsted parks and parkways.
Stephanie Barber: 80% of what he brought to us is still here. What if we went back to
that, and said, "We're going to restore this place."
Marcus Wise: It's a very powerful movement that's happening right now. I am excited
to be a part of it because you can see the changes happening everyday: new projects on
the waterfront, old buildings being saved.
Jill Jedlicka: We are now starting to see a reawakening and a reconnection to our waterways
that made this region great.
Dana Marciniak: There is nothing better than Canalside. I love to bring my kids there to
run around, to eat, to play in the sand area.
Chris Hawley: I think the crowning achievement so far in the past ten years of downtown's
revitalization has to be the Lafayette Hotel. It's an amazing space; it was a wreck...
Rocco Termini: And we restored it to its original grandeur. 100% of the apartments were rented
the day we opened. It's funny because I see some of the bankers that thought I was
crazy seven or eight years ago and today they're calling me for my business.
Justin Booth: The mayor's made a commitment to add ten miles of bicycle lanes per year.
We were the first city in the state to pass a complete streets policy. And our flat topography,
our well-connected streets, is really going to go a long way in making this one of the
best bicycling cities in the country.
Chris Hawley: Elmwood Village was a wreck in the 1970s and only thirty years later it
was rated as one of the top ten best neighborhoods in the country by the American Planning Association.
We've got walkable streets, bikeable streets, compact neighborhoods, short blocks; I mean,
these are all the ingredients for making a successful place happen in the 21st century.
For us, it's merely a matter of restoring them.
Marcus Wise: I think we're beyond this idea of people wanting to leave and find something
better in a different city. I think people are putting in stakes and putting in roots
here in Buffalo.
Bernice Radle: Buffalo is a city that appeals to a person who wants to make change.
Marcus Wise: You can be an active participant in what's happening.
Bernice Radle: You can take your ideas and implement them.
Leslie Zemsky: It's always been a really friendly city. People who are new to Buffalo
find that they can get very involved very quickly and it's a welcoming place to new
ideas.
Chris Hawley: I think we're going to become one of the great cities in the nation again
and what we offer people I think is the opportunity to take part in that revitalization story.
Robert Shibley: The city of Buffalo is in transition. To say it's coming back, is
to suggest it's going back to what it was. It's becoming something new. So come see
it emerging.
Stephanie Barber: Help feed our enthusiasm and give us courage.