fixBuffalo

Was unable to attend Saturday's auction that I first reported, City Auction, last month. A few people I talked to earlier this week told me that a couple hundred people showed. No mention in the local media about this.

Spoke with a representative from the auction company this afternoon and was told that every property was sold. This includes of course 16 Harwood Place - went to Buffalo resident for $3800 and the Woodlawn Row Houses were sold, too. An out of state development company purchased them for $8500.

All sales must be approved by the City according to the auction terms.

Here's the latest...

Submitted to Agency Members, for approval, is a request to contract with Fillmore Leroy Area Residents, Inc. (FLARE, Inc.) in the amount of $335,600 for the acquisition and rehabilitation of 24 Victoria Street and 2 Girard Place. FLARE has already rehabilitated four homes on Victoria Street and is looking to construct two new homes. Two Girard Place is located on the corner of Humboldt Parkway and can be seen from the Kensington Expressway when approaching downtown Buffalo. This home may be converted into a single family home if a previously interested buyer is still willing to purchase this property when rehabilitation is completed. Mayor Brown praised this project noting that the Girard location is an eyesore in its present state. Ms. Yvonne McCray from FLARE gave a brief overview of the project. She added that through the CHDO funding, FLARE has been able to assist smaller groups and she thanked the Board for their support.

2 Girard Street

04/01/07Transfer property to FLARE

06/07/0706/29/07Contract and Deed Prepared and ready

06/07/0708/15/07Funding Contract not completed as of08/28/07

Check back soon for additional updates...

If you've been reading fixBuffalo for any length of time no doubt you've seen various sets of interior views of the stunningly beautiful and collapsing Transfiguration Church. Interior video here, and archive over here that includes the cover story from a recent issue of Artvoice last month - Fall From Grace.

Today begins another bizarre chapter in the pending collapse of this church. A west side activist passed along the following fund-raiser that she received in the mail today.
The return address is the corporate address for local Buffalo based attorney William Trezevant, the presumptive owner of Transfiguration Church. And yes, there's still an outstanding Housing Court warrant for his mother's arrest from 2002. Don't know if the following mailing is intended as a legal defense fund or not. Assume so. Bill - I mean Paul Francis and Associates - is expected back in Buffalo's Housing Court next week - index# 409/2007.
Strange that the mailing doesn't mention - some faded b&w pics, sure - Transfiguration by name. The fundraiser included packets of flower seeds you could purchase.

I'm assuming Bill has a list of block clubs and is sending this to various groups. In about 15 seconds after publishing this post google will pick up - Sycamore Street Sounds of Joy - for the first time ever.

Bizarre Bill, simply bizzare. See you next Wednesday in Court...again.

Another Saturday tour of the Artspace Backyard Neighborhood. This morning a group of new UB students had the unexpected opportunity to catch a glimpse of a fifth floor loft courtesy of Kelly and her family who moved in recently.
Here's Chris Hawley describing the unique urban character and importance of Coe Place. Chris wrote the City's planning document - Midtown Poised for Renaissance, two years ago. And he's still looking for interns over at Senator's Schumer's office. Interested? Contact Chris.After the tour Chris and I poked around the backside of Artspace. Really amazing space emerging.
Tours every Saturday, meet-up at the Sonic Café, across from Artspace @ 11am.

Received the following in the morning mail. Rather odd that it appeared the same day a New York Times piece covers the story and the National Trust for Historic Preservation is weighing in, too.

Two articles crossing my desk this morning...
His article is in today's New York Times - Vacant Houses, Scourge of a Beaten-Down Buffalo.

Stranger still is that it sits less than half a block away from the newly renovated Arts Academy, crown jewel in the recent joint school reconstruction project. Sort of fits in with other houses in the neighborhood, owned by Rev. Stenhouse - secretary/treasurer of Buffalo's Control Board - see Controlled Plan?

Same problem exists in other neighborhoods, too. School House Project, from March 2005 is my first attempt to get my arms around this issue.
Meanwhile here's a map showing proximity of 1466 Michigan to the new Arts Academy.

Quick scan of the real estate transaction section of yesterday's Buffalo News - amazing weekly read if you're considering Buffalo for the first time - right here revealed that the St. Matthew's Church at 1066 East Ferry Street has a new owner.

fixBuffalo readers will remember the un-folding drama involving a Good Friday urbex moment that morphed rather quickly into some negative press for the recent former owners of St. Matthew's. Background - here.

Haven't heard yet about future plans. Updating soon.

update 2pm...this may have more to do with another building that was part of this campus. Still verifying. Here's the piece from yesterday's Buffalo News which I also received from an East side housing activist earlier this morning, too.

26 Wyoming, St. Matthews Roman Catholic Church of Buffalo NY to Vesta Community Housing Development Board Inc., $60,000.

fixBuffalo readers have been following the emerging Shrinking Cities critique and very intelligent right-sizing and green strategies of another devasted rustbelt city - Youngstown, OH. Eariler today a frequent fixBuffalo visitor passed along the following article - Small is Beautiful , Again - from a recent issue of Shelterforce Online.

No community developer likes to be told that the housing she just built was "not doing anybody a favor." But that's what Jay Williams, the young, incredibly popular mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, said to Governing magazine last fall about much of the low-income tax-credit housing built in his city over the past decade.

Williams is not anti-affordable housing. But Youngstown has lost more than half its population since 1970, dropping to 82,000 from 170,000. Some neighborhoods have only a couple of occupied buildings left per block. Others are semi-rural, never having gotten expected development before the collapse of the area's steel industry depressed the local economy. In the mid-20th century...read the rest...

Sound familiar? I know, everything but the leadership. So it goes...

Shelterforce Online is published by the National Housing Institute.

Shelterforce is the nation's oldest continually-published housing and community development magazine. For three decades, Shelterforce has been a primary forum for organizers, activists and advocates in the affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization movements.

Smart City is a weekly, hour-long public radio talk show that takes an in-depth look at urban life, the people, places, Create Documentideas and trends shaping cities. Host Carol Coletta talks with national and international public policy experts, elected officials, economists, business leaders, artists, developers, planners and others for a penetrating discussion of urban issues.

This weekend...

• Rarely do we get a good news story about teenagers. But this week is different. Teens in Memphis, many living in public housing, spent the summer mapping their neighborhood and its assets. And even they were surprised by what they learned. We'll talk to Dr. Charlie Santo from the University of Memphis who designed and directed the project. Dr. Santo is Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning in the School of Urban Affairs & Public Policy.

• Also with us is Wayne Senville who spent his summer traveling Route 50 from Maryland to California, talking to citizens and planning commissioners in towns along the way. Wayne is editor of the Planning Commissioners Journal and plannersweb.com.

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Artspace • BAVPA • Tour d'Neglect - 2007 • Woodlawn Row Houses • faq • my flickr
the creativity exchange • CEOs for Cities

For Sunday's Tour d'Neglect...if it's raining hard, tour is off. If there's only a slight drizzle, we'll still head out. Very sorry to say that there is no rain date for this tour though I may schedule something for October. Will post about it here...

Very cool tour late yesterday afternoon of the Artspace Backyard Neighborhood in Midtown, Buffalo. Brand new UB students got a first hand look at this emerging arts and education destination and had an opportunity to chat with Roy & Jen over on Coe Place.
Chris Hawley from Senator Chuck Schumer's office joined us, too.
Chris just informed me that he has a number of internship openings available here in Buffalo working for Senator Schumer. Interested? Contact Chris.

The introduction [full text .pdf] to Reyner Banham's Concrete Atlantis (1989) is a must read if you are interested in understanding this space along the banks of the river flowing through our City. Here, Banham quotes Eric Mendelsohn writing to his wife back in Berlin after visiting Buffalo in 1924.

Mountainous silos, incredibly space conscious, but creating space. A random confusion amidst the chaos of loading and unloading of corn ships, of railways and bridges, grain monsters with live gestures, hordes of silo cells in concrete, stone and glazed brick. Then suddenly a silo with administrative buildings, closed horizontal fronts against the stupendous verticals of fifty to a hundred cylinders and all this in the sharp evening light. I took photographs like mad. Everything else so far seemed to have been shaped interim to my silo dreams. Everything else was merely a beginning.