5/27/2007

How Others See Us...

Remember Woe is Moi? from January 2006? Love knowing how others see us here in Buffalo.
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This morning woke up to this article - Buffalo Bets on its Waterfront - from Sean who observes Buffalo from his perch 100 miles away in Toronto. Frequent fixBuffalo readers also know him as the founding member of DK Photo Group.

Some of the lines in Buffalo Bets on its Waterfront just sort of jump out grab hold.
As Toronto continues to creep steadily forward on its waterfront redevelopment plan – the master scheme for the foot of the Don River and Portlands, released just a month ago, is still several years away from starting – Buffalo has already begun building what it hopes will be the anchor of a reinvigorated waterfront.

Robert Shibley is the director of the University of Buffalo's Urban Design Project. The city's wounds may have been cauterized, he says, but it's not done bleeding. "We're still losing population. We have a huge infrastructure of vacant land and weak neighbourhoods. And the demographics aren't great."

Shibley was courted from Oregon in 1982, when Buffalo was bottoming out. "The pitch to me was to come here because it has every problem in the world you'd ever want to study. It's small enough to get your arms around and you're only an hour and a half from Toronto," he laughs.

"Every day you'd pick up the paper and there'd be another insurance fire on the east side. We were losing housing stock, and population, very, very quickly. It was grim. It was very grim. But at the same time, it was challenging."

Here's the link to Canalside and some recent links - Role Reversal and (B)ass Pro


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

One typically doesn't expect such lazy reporting from a prestigious newspaper like The Star. The Preservation Coalition "stalled" waterfront development? The alternative opinion is absent, and readers from Toronto now have to do their own research to find that this successful lawsuit and the public process it created is what gave Larry Quinn & Co. a rewatered Commercial Slip, reconstructed streets, a Whipple Truss Bridge, and the potential for a restored heritage district.

The reporter takes everything Quinn, Brown and Rosenow says at face value. No additional research at all on a very complex issue. Two thumbs down for bad reporting...