Last fall, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser wrote a piece in City Journal asking, "Can Buffalo Come Back?" The subtitle offers an ominous answer: "Probably not—and government should stop bribing people to stay there."
In the article, Glaeser describes a metropolis that didn't just decline -- it practically collapsed. Any quick history of the city waxes nostalgic about the city's golden days. Back in the early 1900s, Buffalo had the highest number of millionaires per capita among any city in the country. As the city's riches grew, industrialists and bankers hired world-renowned architects to build their homes and businesses -- Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eliel and Eero Saarinen all left their mark on the city landscape. After the decline of manufacturing in the region, once the factories were relocated to other parts of the country and abroad, Buffalo fell into steep decline. Factories shut down, law firms relocated to other parts of the country, houses were boarded up, and the population entered a long decline. The graph below shows that, from a high of around 580,000 people in the 1930s, Buffalo's population plumetted to around 250,000 by 2006.
Despite this gloomy history, during my first visit to the area, I wonder if there's been a self-selection process here; maybe the more resilient and optimistic residents tend to stay. Certainly the Buffalo residents I meet here are far from a grim crowd.
I am in Buffalo for the wedding of an old friend -- a Brazilian architect who has settled in the area and is marrying a local gent. Over brunch, a front-page story in the Buffalo News catches my eye. The Archdiocese of Atlanta is bidding to purchase one of Buffalo's oldest Catholic churches, St. Gerard (at Bailey and East Delavan avenues), and planning to dismantle it stone by stone and relocate it to Norcross, Georgia, where it would then be reassembled. The move follows a demographic shift: while Buffalo Catholics move southward, depleting local congregations, southern cities like Atlanta can't build churches fast enough.
But this model of "preservation by relocation" raises intriguing issues about the role of space in preservation: if the integrity of a building is maintained but it is moved geographically, is the intent of preservation maintained?
I am reminded of a philosophy course in college, when the professor (Robert Nozick, a brilliant teacher) prodded us freshmen with a question of indeterminate identity. (Crudely put): if you have a boat and the planks that make up the boat are all gradually replaced, is the boat the same boat that you started out with, or is it another boat altogether? Or, in the case of the church, all "planks" (more accurately, over 2,000 tons of stone, wooden pews and stained glass windows) will remain the same, but the geographic and social space that it occupies will be transformed -- so will it be the same church once reassembled in Norcross?
Photo by TManBuffalo
Aside from philosophical questions about the integrity of the preservation project, there's also the pressing issue of what will happen to the empty site. The city has promised to make the site into green space, and insists this is the only viable option, since no local buyers have appeared. I'm sure most people here would prefer to see the building intact and used rather than abandoned and empty, but I wonder if there aren’t any ways to revive this building in creative ways -- maybe converting it into a community center or library, perhaps an immigrant center.
At the wedding reception (held at the Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts inn designed by Frank Lloyd Wright -- more architectural evidence from Buffalo's boomtown heyday), I catch up with one of the bride's brothers, J., who has settled in the area. J. works for an NGO that assists freshly arrived immigrants and regufees to settle in the Buffalo area -- people from as far as Sudan, Burma, and Iraq. Buffalo may lose some of its vitality, and entire buildings, as in the case of St Gerard Church, but perhaps the newcomers will inject a dynamism into the city, and help to transform the city's social landscape.
In the article, Glaeser describes a metropolis that didn't just decline -- it practically collapsed. Any quick history of the city waxes nostalgic about the city's golden days. Back in the early 1900s, Buffalo had the highest number of millionaires per capita among any city in the country. As the city's riches grew, industrialists and bankers hired world-renowned architects to build their homes and businesses -- Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eliel and Eero Saarinen all left their mark on the city landscape. After the decline of manufacturing in the region, once the factories were relocated to other parts of the country and abroad, Buffalo fell into steep decline. Factories shut down, law firms relocated to other parts of the country, houses were boarded up, and the population entered a long decline. The graph below shows that, from a high of around 580,000 people in the 1930s, Buffalo's population plumetted to around 250,000 by 2006.
Despite this gloomy history, during my first visit to the area, I wonder if there's been a self-selection process here; maybe the more resilient and optimistic residents tend to stay. Certainly the Buffalo residents I meet here are far from a grim crowd.
I am in Buffalo for the wedding of an old friend -- a Brazilian architect who has settled in the area and is marrying a local gent. Over brunch, a front-page story in the Buffalo News catches my eye. The Archdiocese of Atlanta is bidding to purchase one of Buffalo's oldest Catholic churches, St. Gerard (at Bailey and East Delavan avenues), and planning to dismantle it stone by stone and relocate it to Norcross, Georgia, where it would then be reassembled. The move follows a demographic shift: while Buffalo Catholics move southward, depleting local congregations, southern cities like Atlanta can't build churches fast enough.
But this model of "preservation by relocation" raises intriguing issues about the role of space in preservation: if the integrity of a building is maintained but it is moved geographically, is the intent of preservation maintained?
I am reminded of a philosophy course in college, when the professor (Robert Nozick, a brilliant teacher) prodded us freshmen with a question of indeterminate identity. (Crudely put): if you have a boat and the planks that make up the boat are all gradually replaced, is the boat the same boat that you started out with, or is it another boat altogether? Or, in the case of the church, all "planks" (more accurately, over 2,000 tons of stone, wooden pews and stained glass windows) will remain the same, but the geographic and social space that it occupies will be transformed -- so will it be the same church once reassembled in Norcross?
Photo by TManBuffalo
Aside from philosophical questions about the integrity of the preservation project, there's also the pressing issue of what will happen to the empty site. The city has promised to make the site into green space, and insists this is the only viable option, since no local buyers have appeared. I'm sure most people here would prefer to see the building intact and used rather than abandoned and empty, but I wonder if there aren’t any ways to revive this building in creative ways -- maybe converting it into a community center or library, perhaps an immigrant center.
At the wedding reception (held at the Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts inn designed by Frank Lloyd Wright -- more architectural evidence from Buffalo's boomtown heyday), I catch up with one of the bride's brothers, J., who has settled in the area. J. works for an NGO that assists freshly arrived immigrants and regufees to settle in the Buffalo area -- people from as far as Sudan, Burma, and Iraq. Buffalo may lose some of its vitality, and entire buildings, as in the case of St Gerard Church, but perhaps the newcomers will inject a dynamism into the city, and help to transform the city's social landscape.
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