Grumpy Old Preservationists

[captainsblog]

It's an odd sight when you see it:



And, a week ago, I did see it. I drove to the Boston Solidarity run via North Buffalo, and passed the site of this structure as I headed south on Colvin Boulevard. I knew the rather sad history of why the rest of this once sacred lot was now rubble, and also shared the sadness that my own denomination had been a part of it.

Here's what it looked like in the days before its mostly-death:



And here's some background to why the local preservationist community strongly opposed its teardown in spite of the damage from the elements and an arson fire that accumulated after the United Methodist conference gave up on it:

The building is best known as the former Temple Emanu-El, the seat of the most significant rabbi within Conservative Judaism in the United States, Isaac Klein, from 1953 to 1968. The former Baptist congregation overextended itself on the grand building, and sold it in 1934 to congregation Emanu-El, led by Rabbi Joseph Gitin (upon his death in 2010 at age 104, Rabbi Gitin was believed to have been oldest Reform rabbi in the world).

Eventually, my denomination got its hands on it, last used it as the home of a Korean Methodist congregation, but ultimately abandoned it to its present fate. The demo occurred after what was clearly and inexcusably a New Years Eve Day issuance of a permit for the teardown by the Mayor himself, and before anyone could protest effectively in a court of law or opinion, the building was gone.

Except for that tower. A funny thing happened on the way to the demolition:

While preparing to pull apart the fire-damaged church’s sanctuary and office-classroom wing, the company’s officers took a liking to the tower and the site.

“We ended up buying the property, and we left [the tower] up,” said Sam DeFranks, president of Apollo Dismantling Services of Niagara Falls. “Our goal is to redevelop the site and incorporate the tower.”

Architects are working on concepts for a housing project that could work around the soaring spire – which is more than twice as high as most of the surrounding homes. DeFranks said they hope to submit plans to the city within about 30 days, so he should know fairly soon if they will be repairing the last piece of the church campus or removing it.

“The owners wanted to tear it down,” DeFranks said, “but we knew that preservationists and people in the neighborhood had felt like the tower was a local landmark.”

So the site I saw was not an incomplete teardown, but a sincere effort by someone to put their money where their mouth was in repurposing the location.  Buffalo suffers from some pretty heavy collective guilt about tearing down a Frank Lloyd Wright office structure back in 1950, and it has come to manifest itself in preservationists coming out of the woodwork to oppose the removal or alteration of just about any structure, no matter what its condition or the cost of its renovation.

We've seen lemonade-out-of-lemon repurposings of buildings, or parts of them, into more modern structures around here. In the 80s, architects used the Genesee Building, built by E.B. Green, in the development around it of the downtown Hyatt Hotel. More recently, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Western New York incorporated the facade of the historic Buffalo Gas Works building (all but the facade having long fallen down) into their new headquarters. 

Some of these efforts work better than others: E.B. Green's old building fits beautifully into the rest of the Hyatt, but the Gas Works bit seems forced and out of place.  But hey! Let's give this demolisher-cum-developer some credit for trying, right?

Wrong.

Tom Yots, executive director of Preservation Niagara, said he had heard rumors that the developers would keep the tower but was not enthused.

“It’s a mockery,” Yots said. “There could have been a very appropriate use of that entire building.”

Which is easy to say when you're not the one paying to maintain it before the "appropriate use" or meeting all the regulatory requirements to update a structure to 2010ish standards during the "appropriate use."  Sorry, Tom (even if your name is almost a palindrome)- as wrong as the decay and ultimate demolition might have been, now's the time to end your hissy over it and give this developer the same respect before planning authorities that you unsuccessfully sought from them yourselves.

That neighborhood was one of the first I ever got to know around here. A law school friend lived on North Park Avenue and I spent plenty of study-group time in the shadows of the North Park and Colvin movie theatres, the Sunshine Market, and Mastman's kosher deli.  The North Park lives on, lovingly preserved, as the city's only still-active cinema venue from the golden age of film, while the Colvin couldn't be saved and now hosts a senior citizen housing tower.  Sunshine, named for its owner and not the Buffalo weather, long passed into history. And Mastman's? Its iconic neon sign is still on the corner of Hertel and Colvin, but since 2006 its inside has become a new concept which honors, but does not mummify, the decades that went before it.

Maybe that's the best way to honor our history. Don't destroy, but don't stand helplessly in time, either. Because there is a time to build up AND a time to break down. Even in Buffalo, which, more than you'd like, is simply for the Byrds.

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