Issue 18: Back to the Future
Posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010
by block club
Back to the Future
By Ben Siegel Photos by Steve Soroka
See this story in the magazine here.
You can’t throw a stone in the City of Buffalo without hitting a landmark. Not that you’d want to be throwing anything at one of our city’s storied homes or commercial buildings, which span nearly two centuries of architectural, cultural, economic and political references. But you’d be hard pressed to find a building that someone didn’t care very deeply about, on a personal level.
Before this last decade––which has seen an onslaught of progressive rehabilitation and restoration projects, with more zeal than ever before––you might not have had the opportunity to know about these properties, much less be able to step inside them. But with this new century’s eye toward urban redevelopment, groups like Preservation Buffalo Niagara, People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) and Buffalo Re-Use, to name just a few, are building the city’s future on the foundation of its history.
That proud, avid Buffalo residents are stepping up to the plate to re-claim their city’s heritage is extraordinary, says Preservation Buffalo Niagara president Catherine Schweitzer.
“Some people would say that almost the entire City of Buffalo would qualify as an historic district. There is this movement in Buffalo that [believes] we can’t wait for City Hall, that it’s got to be citizen-grassroots-based,” says Schweitzer.
The City of Buffalo Preservation Board estimates that roughly 3,500 properties, many of which fall within the discriminating boundaries of the city’s nine historic districts, are designated as local historical landmarks. These districts comprise much of downtown and the West Side, though many pockets of popular neighborhoods, such as the Elmwood Village, Ashland and Norwood Avenues, Bidwell and Chapin Parkways, and much of the East Side, are not included. Approximately 2,300 properties are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with some properties appearing on both local and national lists.
These districts come with not only a heavy dose of civic and cultural pride, but eligibility for funding, stricter zoning regulations, and tax credits for homeowners to aid in the restoration or rehabilitation of their property, such as the residential tax credit law signed by Gov. David A. Paterson in July 2009. The law, sponsored by Assembly Member Sam Hoyt, covers 20 percent of qualified rehabilitation costs up to $50,000.
While Schweitzer says that not enough homeowners are taking advantage of grants, financing is just one obstacle.
“Historic preservation is a very high hurdle for people to get past. They don’t see it as a green movement. They don’t see it as a neighborhood movement. They don’t see it as a keeping-a-sense-of-place movement. They see it as a set of rules and regulations that ordinary people cannot achieve. And that’s the dilemma,” says Schweitzer.
“Our mission is about building a movement. It’s about encouraging people to do the right thing with the environment here. Whatever that means,” she says. “It’s changing the perception of preservation as something that’s positive.”
One plus one
An afternoon drive or stroll down one of the city’s more charming streets in Allentown portrays a row of charmed Victorian homes, artfully decorated in pastry-like daintiness with pretty pastels and scalloped rooflines.
Property after property line narrow sidewalks with manicured lawns and gardens inbetween.
As if there weren’t already a multitude of details and pleasantries to notice, there is a plaque adorning a sycamore, claiming it as the oldest tree in Buffalo. It is abundantly apparent that these homes, which look pleasingly antiquated, are from an era past.
The confluence of these observations, from the stories of these houses to the care and attention paid to them by their owners, is what gives Allentown resident Christina Akers great pride in her neighborhood. It is also what has propelled Akers, a political consultant, to take an active role in her neighborhood’s preservation.
“I think preservation is most successful when it’s grassroots and it comes from the ground up,” says Akers. “When it comes from the residents. I think preservation is less successful when it comes from the top down, when people misunderstand what the standards are.”
Akers served as executive director of the Allentown Association in 2005, during which time she became acquainted with the city’s standards for the historic district. Though many and specific, Akers says the rules are there for a reason.
“You can’t just tear down a Victorian porch and put up a car pad,” she says. “[These standards] allow you, as a historic property owner, the assurance of knowing that not only can you not do that, but your neighbors can’t either. It maintains the integrity of the historic fabric of your neighborhood.”
It is a series of small and specific code stipulations that add up to a greater whole.
“I can’t imagine our community without these historic resources being protected,” says Akers. “Houses aren’t these isolated places. They have neighbors, they have streets, they have trees, they have sidewalks, they have benches, they have playgrounds. That’s what makes Allentown ‘Allentown.’ You can’t divorce the house from the street in the neighborhood. And why would you? You have one plus one plus one, and then you have a neighborhood.”
Not your grandmother’s history
Henry McCartney, who moved here recently from Rochester to become the executive director of Preservation Buffalo Niagara, has worked his entire career in the historic preservation industry. As executive director of the Landmark Society of Western New York, a Rochester-based historical society that promotes preservation in that city, McCartney developed an understanding of ther word “preservationist.”
It is not the comm- unity-by-committee mentality some fear, one that enforces impossible standards.
“I think sometimes preservationists can be too harsh,” says McCartney, who cites two of Rochester’s “house museums”–– properties maintained to very exact and exhaustive historical detail, inside and out––as extreme cases of preservation.
There you do everything to the purist architectural standards. You’re not going to change anything, including the kitchens.” He says this standard of historic preservation is good for exhibit, but not for living. “There have got to be very few people who want to live with an 1890s kitchen.”
To the reassurance of many, antiquity is no longer the preservationist trend; innovative restoration is.
“Some preservationists would want a museum-quality restoration,” says Akers. “Some preservationists, and I would dare say many of us, would say that these should be places where we use and live and enjoy. These are living spaces. They’re not perfect; they’re not exactly as they were built. But they’re still in a historic preservation district.”
Akers says that Allen Street Hardware, Mark Goldman’s popular bar and restaurant on Allen Street in an old hardware store, is a prime example of the kind of creative re-use old buildings are capable of achieving.
“They’re not pristine museum-quality, but they have a life and they’re being re-used, but in a way that respects the historic context of the environment,” says Akers.
Still, as the movement has evolved since the signing of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, so has the understanding of what it means to preserve.
Schweitzer sees it as a matter of our city’s past informing its own future.
“People want to leave their mark on the world. Leave their sense of place. Taking a house that is shabby and under-loved or under-cared-for, and making a concerted effort over five years, 10 years, 20 years, to bring it back to its proud state, is a way of leaving your mark on the world. Or, in a way, giving back to the City of Buffalo,” says Schweitzer.
But as time progresses, so does what we consider to be historic. The National Register of Historic Places deems eligibility of properties for historic distinction at 50 years old. That means that this year, buildings built in 1960––more than a century younger than some of the historic homes in the West Village of Buffalo––become eligible. Homes in the Village of Kenmore––the city’s first suburb, established in 1899––and the hamlet of Snyder in Amherst, established in 1837, are areas outside of the city that don’t get noticed as often for their historic significance. This gap in understanding what constitutes history throws people for a loop.
“Preservationists seem to stop at classical Georgian Tudor, Queen Anne Victorian––identifiable styles––but to suddenly take in Philip Johnson’s Glass House is innovative,” says Schweitzer. “In two years, the [Gordon Bunshaft-designed 1962 addition to the] Albright-Knox Art Gallery will be 50 years old, and it will be eligible for the National Historic Registry. I think it is one of the most elegant, beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen. And yet in its stripped-down, spare black shape, it is equally elegant to the white marble temple forum [of the original 1905 Greek Revival gallery building]. What great companions they are: Black, white. As spare and clean as you can possibly be, to the most embellished, adorned; and yet two different centuries.”
It will be the conversation between old and new architectural idioms in residential and commercial spaces, she says, that will help define the future structural style of Buffalo. And yet, at some point, 2010 will be thought of as historical.
“Nothing stops in time. We’re not Pompeii where we’ve been frozen in lava,” says Schweitzer, “though it feels that way from time to time. But when we add to the built environment, what are the proportions or scale or design elements that make a new building beloved and wonderful and fitting in this city? If we don’t pay attention to establishing those expectations as a city, we won’t retain our sense of place.”\
The future is now
It would be near-sighted to assume that the preservationist movement is concerned with just structures. The process starts with one house, though as Akers pointed out, the work of one homeowner begets the work of another homeowner, and so on, until suddenly an entire street and neighborhood have received attention. That might take a few years or it might take a decade, depending on the condition of properties and the availability of residents.
But the hard work goes even beyond that community. The effects of historic preservation on the city at large are layered and interconnected. As properties are re-invested into, property assessments go up (which often means higher property taxes, but also higher resale values on those homes). Though this teeter-tottering effect can have its setbacks, on the whole it raises the real estate and cultural value of a city. It shows newcomers, and naysayers, that its residents care about their community, and will fight for its betterment and survival.
This philosophy will be on the minds of those attending 2011’s National Preservation Conference here, a first for Buffalo and according to Schweitzer, the “most important visitation a community with significant architecture could achieve.”
The five-day conference, which visits the northeast every five years, will highlight local preservation trends, the region’s rich architectural history, and a host of other topics. It is estimated that upwards of 2,000 people will come to town for the event, bringing an expected boost to local retailers, restaurants, hotels and attractions.
“Because this conference is so well known around the country, it has a significant reputation of quality and high expectations. Securing the bid was a catalyst to adjust the chatter about Buffalo, both outside and inside [the area],” says Schweitzer.
McCartney agrees that there’s buzz these days about Buffalo’s resources. The Buffalo Niagara Convention and Visitors Bureau has played a significant role in the attention Buffalo is getting out of town, as well as in bringing tourists here to see for themselves. McCartney calls the bureau’s focus on the city’s architecture the “calling card” of their campaigns, and says it’s paying off.
“I think there are only a handful of cities that could capitalize on their heritage in architecture,” says McCartney, citing Savannah, Ga. and Charleston, S.C. as towns that have succeeded.
Holding hands with history and forging ahead is a balancing act, often involving political and financial hurdles. But what seems to be at the center of every preservationist’s concern is the desire to hold onto the past so that it may still exist in the future. It’s the designation of a structure––a home, an office building, a church, a park system––as something important that endears a people to that city, whether they live there or are visiting.
“I think preservation means different things to different people,” says Akers. “We’re really lucky in Buffalo, I would say, to have such a diverse preservation community. What it means to me as an urban planner, it means that our community says that this place is important. That this place is so special and so beautiful it’s worthy of extra protection.”
