Buffalo: Not Quite Ready for Its Close Up!

By Betty Jean Grant

Betty Jean Grant

I will admit that much has been done to revitalize Buffalo, especially the Eastside of the city, which saw thousands of houses being demolished or abandoned; hundreds being foreclosed and more than a few being sold to foreign investors, who were buying and then selling them through a process called “Flipping” that brought new homeownership, but most of the time, left the housing stock in their deplorable, pre-sale state.

One only has to take a slow stroll on long established Westside streets such as West Ferry, West Delavan, Elmwood, Delaware, Forest, Jewett Parkway and Bidwell Parkway, to see where the folks who controlled Buffalo’s wealth and politics lived, promoted and invested in, made their money.

Almost everyone in the city has seen or visited, as a school project, the Darwin Martin House on Jewett Park way. But how many of us know or even care, that at the time of the house being constructed, it was owned Larkin Soap Company, the largest and most profitable body washing and laundry detergent soap manufacturer in the United States! How many of our students or even our grown up folks know that Fargo Avenue, on Buffalo’s Westside, is named after a gentleman who is former Mayor of the city of Buffalo and a co-founder of the famous Wells Fargo Bank, and the owners of a money transportation security entity known especially during the last two centuries’ expansion of our western territories, and on cowboy movies of the 1950s, simply as Wells and Fargo?

I don’t believe I am the only person to realize that although the city has fought to emulate the the richness and successes Buffalo was associated with during the Era of the Pan American Exhibition, it will probably never be as prosperous as it was, when, in the 1900s, the eighth largest city in population and the first, per capital, in millionaires. This was also during that time when Buffalo, thanks to an inventor, Thomas Edison, a guy named Tesla and their utilization of electricity, deemed our fair city, the City of Lights.

Unfortunately, for the residents of Buffalo, the assassination of President William McKinley seemed to have put a dark spirit around all of the city’s enthusiasm that some say continues even today.

Buffalo has had some positive achievements over the past 100 years. The development of the Waterfront and Canalside quickly comes to mind. But just as fast, the ill thought out decision to add an intrusive and divisive Expressway in the heart of thriving neighborhoods brought such a negative spirit to Buffalo that the com munity, seventy years later, is still trying to fix.

One does not correct a bad decision by putting forth a worse decision in its place. The Expressway was a bad move in the 1960s. Digging, blasting and erecting a car bon monoxide emitting tunnel will only make the original decision to put in the Expressway even worse.

Norma Desmond, in the movie, Sunset Boulevard, was so in tune with her inner delusional self that she had her own mistakenly concept of reality. Those leaders who purport to speak for the people regarding putting in that toxic tunnel, on Humboldt Parkway, are operating in their somewhat warped sense of reality. They are not listening to the people. The majority of the folks surveyed or wrote letters to NYSDOT did not endorse the tunnel proposal.

I am sorry, Mr. DeMill – but neither Norma Desmond nor the leaders, who are deciding everything, are ready for that Close Up Shot.