fixBuffalo

Demolitions and Urban Prairie...

Update...10/2/06
I've had a surge of activity linking to this page via the wikipedia "urban prairie" entry. Usually 10-12 hits/day from there. Today 250+ Someone, please let me know where you're coming from, who's linking...thanks.

Update...8/2/06
Check out Buffalo's Little House on the (Urban) Prairie

Update... 7/1/06
Chances are you arrived here from a search on Wikipedia for "urban prairie" Please take a moment to check out some of my recent posts. Especially a series of two recent posts about Buffalo's accelerating rate of population loss as recentley presented by two Wharton School professors at the University of Pennsylvannia. I've also linked to their study. Here and recently 7/Day - One every Three Hours!

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Yeah, I've got demolitions on my mind as some of the recent posts documenting the spike in residential demolitions in this little 25 block area of Masten further explain. Every time a house comes down over here on this side of Main Street, the foundation is filled in and we wait for mother nature to visit with her very own 'weed and seed' program. Grass seed, no. It's just not in the budget.

click to enlarge and view various notes in the pics

Compare these two images of the built environment along Utica, here in Buffalo. The shot on the left shows the intersection of Utica and Elmwood Avenue. The image on the right shows what life looks like a mile away at the intersection of Utica and Jefferson. No, all the green spots have nothing to do with what the good people at the Olmsted Parks Conservancy are doing to our city. Here in the 'hood this is called the 'urban prairie.' A more abstract way of imagining the ever increasingly larger 'urban prairie' is to think of missing houses and all the recent demolitions here in Masten as, you guessed it, our shrinking tax base.

Both images are, probably two years old. The problem...I mean the 'urban prairie' has gotten larger. But you know this. It's reflected in your tax bills...

Frequent readers of my blog will recognize these Utica pics from a recent post, in May, where I was maxing out on google crack. The use of the term 'urban prairie' designating forgotten and now mostly empty and vacant urban property, I think is sort of new. I remember first bumping into this category of understanding urban phenomena over here, at Detroit Yes, an extraordinary site documenting what happens when a city, like Buffalo, loses half its population. Detroit Yes, is so worth checking out...

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Artspace Archive • Annals of Neglect • BAVPA • Where is Perrysburg? • Broken Promises...
Writing the City • Woodlawn Row Houses • Tour dé Neglect - 2006