If there is one clear lesson to be learned about government-sponsored “redevelopment” projects in post-war Buffalo, it is that redevelopment often never comes. The best use we can think up for all this cleared land is parking lots. We have 20-, 30-, even 40-year parking lots still awaiting the second coming of the office building or store demolished to make way for it. Face it, we may be waiting for Godot.

But what if we designed it so that, if nothing happened for a year, 10 years, a virtual eternity, we could have something to have and to hold in the meantime? What if we designed with a fail safe mechanism?

That is the idea behind the proposal for a Millennial Park. It is exactly what you would have if the plan to attract development while resurrecting the historic waterfront streets and the Erie Canal terminus outlined on other pages were an utter failure. That is, not a single person would buy or lease a lot to operate a permanent business or construct a house.

View from Main Street toward water along Hanover Street. Temporary pavillions mark a 'festival' street.
Computer rendering by Premier Presentations.

What we would have would be the best urban festival site this side of Munich’s Theresienweise, where the Oktoberfest is held every year. Oktoberfest’s beer and tents are only a small part of the fair: there are roller coasters, ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds, exhibit buildings, you name it. When the fair is not being held, the site is a green park bisected by carless, buildingless streets: the midway and side alleys. On the Buffalo waterfront, these streets would be the historic cobblestone streets that go back to the city’s foundation, while the park spaces would be the blocks formerly occupied by buildings (and with rows of cellars still buried beneath them).

An Erie Canal Celebration

This plan, though, needn’t stand in the way of anyone’s plans for this site, even the ESD. It just puts it off for a few years while the site is intensively used for programmed civic celebrations central to the history of our community, and to which the nation could be invited: a celebration of the 175th anniversary of the Erie Canal in the year 2000, and - what the hey - Millennial Decade celebrations, ethnic music festivals, and various and sundry massive civic homecomings.

[It should be pointed out that if Preservation Plan A is followed, the cost of digging the $7,000,000, 700’ inlet for the naval ships is deferred, as is the $4,000,000 cost of digging the inlet near Main Street for the commercial ships and the occasional yacht owned by Thurston Howell. Plan B, illustrated on this page, would save about $4,000,000.]

This celebration would be bigger than anything the canal has seen in some time. That would be for the amazing reason its history was subsumed by the New York State Barge Canal. The state did not want anyone to think the narrow, poky canal of 1825 was at all related to the mighty new canal of 1918, with fast steam-powered tows of massive barges and towering single-lift locks. So the 100th, 125th, and 150th anniversaries went by without much fanfare.

View up reconstructed Prime Street. Two large temporary pavillions on left recall warehouses once lining Buffalo River. Pavillions could be dismantled and moved to new site if need be, for example, the old Chippewa market.
Computer rendering by Premier Presentations.

This has all changed within the past 10 years. Mario Cuomo wanted to take the canal operations out of the general state budget. That was done by giving it to the New York State Thruway Authority. To its credit, it recognized that the canal’s history is the only way to save it as an operating affair. So the canal got its name back, a logo showing a canal boat pulled by a mule, and a string of communities reawakening to the ka ching of tourist money. True, some have done this in a rather tacky, theme park kind of way (geez, isn’t that what ESD wants to do in Buffalo?), but that does not negate the sea change of attitude toward the canal.

That attitude is ripe to be exploited for 175th anniversary celebrations. What better place to be the world headquarters, party central, as it were, of the festivities than Buffalo?

The Thruway Authority, though, to its discredit, is apparently unaware of the potential of the anniversary. It is a good thing some other groups are not (see 55¸ªÄ