The Controversy Surrounding Urban Renewal

PART ONE: THE IMPACT ON BUFFALO, NY OF THE KENSINGTON EXPRESSWAY

In "The Big Project Syndrome", we saw how the city of Niagara Falls, NY, is a case study of how having a major project in town, in this instance the Niagara Power Project which generates electricity, seems like a good thing in the immediate sense but can distort the landscape and thinking and leave the city worse off over the long term.

I have long wanted to write an article about Urban Renewal. This is generally defined as the rebuilding of cities in the 1960s and 1970s. Urban Renewal rebuilding took place in a number of countries, and is particularly associated with the northeastern U.S. There are a number of articles about it online.

Urban Renewal in the U.S. was a kind of Marshall Plan at home. It followed the building of the Interstate Highway System during the 1950s, and may be thought of as one of the Great Society programs. In New York State, the name that really stands out with regard to such projects is that of Robert Moses. He is probably the most important character in postwar New York State, being adept at handling the bureaucracy and getting things built.

Urban Renewal was highly controversial during it's time, and remains so today. Many of the changes were certainly positive, and it worked well in many places. But to accomplish these changes made it necessary to bulldoze historic neighborhoods and cut off the economic flow of other neighborhoods. In a few places, the results were even worse and it is the Niagara Falls that was featured as the case study in "The Big Project Syndrome" that is considered as the nadir of urban renewal, as described in the Wikipedia article on the subject. Many in Toronto consider it a great triumph to have successfully blocked construction of the proposed Spadina Expressway.

Today, I would like to focus on as a case study what is possibly the most contentious and controversial project of Urban Renewal anywhere. It is the construction of the Kensington Expressway, Route 33, across the East Side neighborhood of Buffalo, NY. As with "The Big Project Syndrome", I will do my best to write the article so that it is not necessary to be familiar with the area to understand it. The lessons of this apply anywhere in the world where there is contention over bulldozing the old to make way for the new.

Here is the map link that I usually use, with the satellite imagery and Google Street View: www.maps.google.com . For the vast majority of readers that are not familiar with Buffalo, most of the sites that I refer to here will come up in Google searches. There is a search utility that is helpful on the map and satellite imagery.

The city of Buffalo, NY lies in a natural place for a city to grow. It is situated at the eastern end of Lake Erie so that it is where ships stop that have used the lake as an east-west canal, being unable to sail any further east because of the falls in the Niagara River. Grain and iron ore, brought by ships from the Midwest along the Great Lakes, unloaded their cargo at Buffalo.

Buffalo was also at the western terminus of the Erie Canal, which connected the Hudson River in eastern New York State with Buffalo. The industrial community that grew up around this terminus was known as Black Rock. But this old canal, built in the early Nineteenth Century, could only handle small cargo boats which were typically pulled by mules on towpaths on opposite sides of the canal. Buffalo was also a natural stopover for migrants from the east, who were moving to settle the western U.S.. Some of these migrants, such as future U.S. president Grover Cleveland, decided to stay in Buffalo.

The Erie Canal had used the large Tonawanda Creek, between the far northern Buffalo suburbs of Tonawanda and North Tonawanda, as part of it's course. The canal diverged from the creek just east of where the creek empties into the Niagara River, at Tonawanda Island. The entire length of the canal from there to Black Rock, now a section of Buffalo, was filled in.

The broad stretch of Niagara Street in Tonawanda, adjacent to the Niagara River, was built over the Erie Canal that had been filled in. Because of high ground in Tonawanda along the river, a part of the river itself was used as the canal. One towpath was built along the shore, and the opposite one some distance out in the river. This was later filled in out to the towpath separating the canal from the river to form Niawanda Park. Finally, the long section of the canal from where the South Grand Island Bridge is now located to the terminus near Lake Erie in Buffalo was filled in and the Interstate 190 Highway that we have today was built over it.

Buffalo took on the role of turning the grain and iron ore from the Midwest into finished products. The eastern shore of Lake Erie had some of the largest grain mills in the world, which can be seen today in the massive grain elevators just south of downtown Buffalo, and the vast complexes of Bethlehem and Republic Steel to the south of that. If anyone living nearby does not have an appetite when arriving home from work, the scent of baked grain will give them one.

But all of that changed in the late 1950s when the Welland Canal was built across the Niagara Peninsula in neighboring Canada, as part of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Ships could now sail all the way to the sea, and no longer needed to unload their cargo in Buffalo. While the Seaway probably made the entire region better off, as a whole, in the long term, the Welland Canal effectively short-circuited the major economic reason for Buffalo's existence, at least for the economy of that time.

As the construction of the Welland Canal was short-circuiting Buffalo, Buffalo was similarly short-circuiting a major part of itself. The postwar suburbs were growing to the east of Buffalo, based on families owning cars, and it was decided that a faster route from the suburbs to downtown was needed.

Just as the Erie Canal, running north-south parallel to the Niagara River across north Buffalo, had been filled in and a section of the Interstate 190 (I-190) had been built over it, an elegant residential street in Buffalo was removed and the section of the Kensington Expressway (Route 33) from downtown Buffalo to the northeast was built in it's place.

It remains the most controversial example of Urban Renewal that I am aware of. Humboldt Parkway had been designed by the famed landscape artist Frederick Law Olmsted. Until it's removal in 1958, for this highway project, it was supposed to be one of the most attractive residential streets in Buffalo. The contested section of the Kensington Expressway is the curving portion that can be seen on the map, extending from downtown to where it meets the Scajaquada Expressway (Route 198) and the remains of Humboldt Parkway, and then proceeds eastward as the east-west section of the Kensington Expressway which is not as controversial.

Building a highway within a city is a perilous thing to do, even though traffic volume may make it necessary. It can disrupt the fabric of the community and short-circuit the established business patterns. The highway may act as a barrier, cutting a long-established neighborhood in two and greatly reducing interaction between the opposite sides. It seems less risky to build a beltway around a city than an expressway within it.

Then there is the possible environmental consequences both of the highway itself, and the cars that drive along it. The LaSalle Arterial Highway, in Niagara Falls, NY affected the water drainage patterns in such a way that it hindered runoff when the tremendous volume of snow from the Blizzard of 1977 melted, and this caused chemicals that had earlier been buried under a residential neighborhood in the adjacent Love Canal to emerge from the ground quickly, and it ended up as national headlines the following year.

Put simply the Kensington Expressway, Route 33, created an easy bypass of the East Side of Buffalo, which threatened to make it economically irrelevant. The East Side of Buffalo is the area to the east of the downtown stretch of Main Street, Route 5 on a map.

The result is that the economic activity of the East Side has shifted eastward, to postwar suburbs such as Cheektowaga, but the original East Side is still there. The most troubled neighborhoods in cities are those that have been short-circuited by highways in just such a way. It makes it so that anyone who does not live in these older sections of the city really does not have to go there. The East Side is still known for sites such as the Broadway Market, once visited by President John F. Kennedy, but that was there before the Kensington Expressway was built.

My conclusion is that an expressway through a city should ideally function as a high-speed street, without traffic lights, that showcases the surrounding city. The trick is in simple geometry, it must work in harmony with the surrounding street pattern instead of working against it.

The Scajaquada Expressway is not far from the Kensington Expressway in question, some distance to the west of it. In contrast to the Kensington, the Scajaquada seems to work in harmony with the surrounding city. It crosses the main north-south streets at right angles so that it brings traffic in as it showcases the area. The Scajaquada was built over part of Humboldt Parkway also, but it's geometry is not at all destructive like that of the Kensington.

(Note-If you have heard of the Scajaquada Expressway before, it may be from the section "The Very Special Escarpments Of Buffalo And Fort Erie" in the posting "All About The Appalachians", on the geology blog www.markmeekearth.blogspot.com . This expressway is actually built along a valley around the northern end of the West Side Escarpment, as described in that posting. Buffalo State College, along the Scajaquada, is actually built on the northern tip of that escarpment).

On the opposite side of Buffalo, the further east-west eastern section of the Kensington Expressway works in harmony with the street pattern in a way similar to that of the Scajaquada Expressway. Bailey Avenue, Route 62, is a main north-south business street further out on the East Side of Buffalo that intersects with this section of the Kensington, and is doing well. But the main streets parallel to Bailey Avenue that are closer to the curving inner section of the Kensington, Jefferson Avenue between Main Street and the Kensington and Fillmore Avenue on the opposite (east) side of the Kensington, are economically cut off by it.

The East Side of Buffalo, the section of the city to the east of the downtown section of Main Street (Route 5) is closest to the new eastern suburbs so that it is the section of Buffalo that is sacrificed most in the quest to build a faster route from those suburbs to downtown. The West Side of Buffalo, the area between the downtown stretch of Main Street west to the Niagara River has not been affected as much. It is only the Lower West Side, centered along Niagara Street, Route 266, (not the same Niagara Street as mentioned earlier in Tonawanda) that shares the debilitating economic and housing stock issues of the East Side.

But it can be easily seen on the map that the Lower West Side is also short-circuited, in a way similar to the East Side, by the so-called Niagara Section of the Interstate 190 Highway (I-190). This section of the highway is the one along the Niagara River and the lake shore on the American Side where the Niagara River meets Lake Erie. This area also has environmental issues from the exhaust of trucks waiting to cross the Peace Bridge to Canada.

The West Side of Buffalo has the thriving Elmwood Avenue (Route 384) district, popular with students at Buffalo State College. There is all manner of businesses and organizations occupying the mansions of Delaware Avenue, mostly built in the Nineteenth Century by those who made their fortunes in Buffalo.The reason that most of the West Side of Buffalo tends to do better than the East Side is simply that the West Side does not have anything to short-circuit it's economic activity like the Kensington Expressway that cuts diagonally across the East Side. Not only is the Kensington completely out of harmony with the surrounding street pattern, but it is mostly in a trench so that it hides the area rather than showcases it.

North Buffalo, north of the Scajaquada Expressway, is also doing fairly well because it doesn't have a Kensington Expressway to cut it in half and strangle it's economic activity. It's most prominent street is Hertel Avenue. It doesn't have an expressway bringing in traffic like the Scajaquada does to the West Side's Elmwood Avenue. But neither does it have an expressway carrying traffic past it and away from it like Jefferson and Fillmore Avenues, on the East Side.

No such expressway was built across North Buffalo because the suburbs to the north, Kenmore and Tonawanda, are older than the suburbs to the east, like Cheektowaga. The postwar expansion and building boom didn't make a new highway across North Buffalo because the suburbs to the north didn't grow as much and traffic routes from the northern suburbs into the city were already well-established. The North Buffalo section of the Interstate 190 (or I-190) Highway and the I-290 (Youngmann) Highway across Tonawanda are not at all out of harmony with the street pattern, and showcase the area rather than working in opposition to it.

It is not fair to blame the economic struggles of the East Side of Buffalo entirely on the building of the Kensington Expressway. (Note-The difference between an expressway and any other highway is that the expressway gets you somewhere that you could have gotten to on other streets, but it gets you there faster). The West Side of Buffalo gained Buffalo State College while the East Side lost the old War Memorial Stadium. "The Rockpile", as the stadium was affectionately known, was itself built in an earlier bout of Urban Renewal, the public works projects of the Great Depression. The stadium was finally replaced by a new stadium in Buffalo's southern suburbs.

A nearby success story is the Larkin Square project. The Larkin Company was a large mail-order soap company that did not make it through the Great Depression of the 1930s, but left Buffalo two massive buildings which have been put to very good use. The buildings today are full of many different businesses.

The Central Terminal, at the intersection of Paderewski and Curtiss Drives, adjacent to the rail tracks on the East Side of Buffalo, is one of the most magnificent structures in the area. It towers over the southern part of Buffalo's East Side. The terminal was opened in 1929, and was the place at which countless thousands of people embarked to or arrived from New York City, or other points east, by train.

But within a few decades, people would be travelling much more by car and by plane than by train. Today, the structure lies virtually abandoned and seems like an ill omen for the entire East Side. My hope is that what was done with the Larkin Buildings could also be done with the Central Terminal.

Another factor to consider in evaluating the success of Urban Renewal is that it's era coincided with the mass movement of manufacturing overseas. It is this that is responsible for a lot of urban decline, not Urban Renewal. The builders planned for projected population growth, which did not occur as planned because so many manufacturing jobs went away.

When redesigning a city, it it impossible to please everyone. No matter how it turns out, there will always be those saying "We shouldn't have built this" or "We should have built that".

What Urban Renewal really comes down to is cars. Do we want a city built for people, or do we decide to bulldoze that and replace it with a city built for cars? Having everyone driving comes with a price in older neighborhoods and urban landscapes that were not designed for such traffic volume. We want to preserve historic neighborhoods and the familiar patterns of the city, but we don't want to spend an hour a day in a traffic jam and then a half-hour looking for a place to park.

PART TWO: THE RESULTS OF BUILDING THE INTERSTATE 190 AND THE LEWISTON-QUEENSTON BRIDGE ON NIAGARA FALLS, NY

The city of Niagara Falls, NY is sometimes held as the classic example of the failure of Urban Renewal as described, for example, in the Wikipedia article on the subject. As we saw in Part One, on this blog, Urban Renewal was the movement mostly from the 1950s to the 1970s in rebuilding cities to accommodate increased automobile traffic.

(The NY in Niagara Falls, NY is the abbreviation for New York State, to differentiate it from the Canadian city across the river which is also called Niagara Falls).

Business in Niagara Falls, NY is fine during the summer tourist season, but then curtails sharply for most of the year. It commonly gets blamed on the extensive Urban Renewal project which rebuilt it's downtown. My feeling is that this deserves a closer look because, while controversial, Urban Renewal has worked just fine in other places.

It is claimed that Urban Renewal made the downtown of Niagara Falls, NY more difficult to navigate. But anyone who has done much travelling knows that a lot of towns and cities are not really easy to navigate and, in many cases, this adds to their charm. This is especially true if several nearby towns have gradually merged into a city, leaving the city with several different sets of street patterns.

It is also true that Niagara Falls, NY has lost a lot of factory jobs in recent decades. The city became an industrial center based on the inexpensive electrical power generated by the drop in the water level represented by the falls. But, once again, a lot of cities have similarly lost industrial jobs. Pittsburgh underwent both the loss of it's steel mills and extensive Urban Renewal, which is generally considered as a success.

The saga of the Love Canal, where a neighborhood was built over what had been a dump where industrial waste chemicals had been buried, certainly didn't help. But other cities have recovered from their tragedies, and the Love Canal was far away from downtown Niagara Falls, NY, at the opposite end of the city.

In the posting "The Big Project Syndrome", we saw Niagara Falls, NY as a case study in how the construction of the massive power project adversely affected both the thinking and the landscape of the city. In Part One of this posting, we saw how the construction of an expressway within the nearby city of Buffalo, NY turned out to have very adverse effects on the traditional flow of business within Buffalo.

It is my conclusion that what is really behind the economic decline of Niagara Falls, NY is neither downtown Urban Renewal nor loss of factory jobs. It is actually a situation very similar to that of Buffalo, as described in Part One, the construction of a highway within the city during the era of Urban Renewal. Building a highway within or across a city is a perilous thing to do as it can completely alter the flow of commercial activity.

Here is the map link that I usually use with the satellite imagery and Google Street View: www.maps.google.com .

The highway across Niagara Falls, NY that I am referring to is the Interstate Highway 190 or simply the I-190. This highway cuts across Niagara Falls, NY to link the North Grand Island Bridges with the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge between the U.S. and Canada, which is to the northwest of the North Grand Island Bridges. The I-190 goes right across the power project that we saw in "The Big Project Syndrome", and the raised berm on which much of the highway in the area is constructed is made from the soil and rock excavated during the construction of that power project and it's attached reservoir.

The I-190 both brings business to the Niagara Falls, NY area, but also cuts off the downtown and the older western half of the city. I find that the highway creates a sharp dividing line that drastically changed the commercial flow pattern. The area that it feeds is to the east of it, and the area that it cuts off is to the west of it.

The trouble is really the gap that exists between the highway and the city of Niagara Falls, NY, to the west of it. Just west of the highway, between it and downtown, is a massive landfill, industrial areas, railroad tracks and, plenty of electric power lines. With this highway as the main traffic conduit of the area this gap, which can be readily be seen in the satellite imagery, makes downtown Niagara Falls and other business districts to the west just too far out of the way to easily get to.

This highway was opened in the early 1960s, and the destructive effects would not become apparent for many years. This is because the factories of the area were still booming. These factories were mostly in the southwestern part of Niagara Falls, NY, along Buffalo Avenue which runs parallel to the Niagara River, and in another industrial district in the north end of Niagara Falls, NY. As long as these factories were there, it brought plenty of business activity to Niagara Falls, west of the I-190.

It was only when most of these factories closed or drastically reduced their staff that the city began a steep economic decline and it was mainly due to the divisive effect of this highway, which did not become apparent before, and not to the "failure" of Urban Renewal downtown.

Niagara Falls, NY is built in a kind of a square that is formed by the right angle in the Niagara River, with the wide upper river running east-west and the narrow lower river running north-south. The falls at Niagara are at the intersection of the upper and lower river. It is easy to see how the I-190 cuts off this portion of the city diagonally.

When the I-190 directly connected the North Grand Island Bridges to the newly-built Lewiston-Queenston Bridge to Canada, it changed the entire flow pattern of the area. The Village of Lewiston, to the north of the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge and the power project (with the large reservoir), certainly gained because the highway brought traffic right to it. A new business district would form to the east of the highway, in the eastern half of Niagara Falls NY known as LaSalle along Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62 to the east of the I-190) and in the adjacent Town of Niagara, along Military Road (Route 265), but the rest of Niagara Falls, NY, to the west of the highway, would be cut off.

The flow of business within the city of Niagara Falls, NY, west of the I-190, is now much more east-west than north-south. The main east-west business street in this area, Pine Avenue (Route 62 to the west of the I-190), has survived much better then the main north-south business street, which is Main Street (Route 104 near and parallel to the lower Niagara River). This is because the I-190 runs mostly north-south and this made Pine Avenue (Route 62 to the west of the I-190) more in harmony with it, being closer to perpendicular to the I-190, than Main Street which is closer to parallel with the direction of the I-190 and thus more out of harmony and more likely to be cut off by it.

Main Street also appears on the map or satellite imagery to run near and parallel to the Robert Moses Parkway, and thus to be cut off by it. But this is not a busy highway, and there has long been talk of removing it.

Hyde Park Boulevard (Route 61) runs diagonally across Niagara Falls NY, some distance west of the I-190 in a mostly north-south direction. This is directly out of harmony with the I-190, running nearly parallel to it, and is not much of a business district, being more residential and industrial in nature.

Highland Avenue is a former business district in the north end of Niagara Falls, NY, parallel to and between Main Street and Hyde park Boulevard. It is also cut off by the new route patterns.

Is it only a coincidence that, since the I-190 and the power project was built, Niagara Falls NY has lost one of it's two business dimensions by having it cut off and has also lost half of it's population? The new police station was put on the most afflicted section of Main Street, to at least put something there as well as to deter crime.

The I-190 was built on the opposite side of the factory district, clearly seen in the satellite imagery between the southern portion of Hyde Park Boulevard (Route 61) and 56th Street, from downtown. This makes downtown Niagara Falls, NY more difficult and out of the way to get to from the highway.

The I-190 did bring business in, but this prompted the business activity to migrate east from the highway, rather than west. Both of the main business conduits to the east of the I-190, Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62 east of the I-190) and Military Road (Route 265) are in harmony, near perpendicular, to the highway. The highway had the effect of diverting traffic that might have gone to the west of it toward the afflicted areas of Niagara Falls, NY, to the east instead. A critical mass of business started a spiral to the east of the highway, rather than to the west.

The booming business district that was created by the building of the I-190, to it's east, does not continue far to the east. On Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62), to the east of Military Road (Route 265), the business district fades into mostly motels. The former Summit Park Mall, at the eastern end of Niagara Falls, NY off Niagara Falls Boulevard, did not survive when it surely would have if it had been closer to the all-important I-190.

It is really amazing what a sharp division in business activity this highway has created. There used to be two department stores a very short distance from one another, within easy walking distance. One store was really no better than the other, both were the same type of store. The difference was that one was just east of the I-190, and the other was just to the west of it. The one just east of the I-190 (K-Mart) has been there for about half a century, and is still there today. The one a short distance away, to the west of the I-190, has been several comparable stores (including Twin Fair and Gold Circle), but none can survive there and the building has long been vacant.

On Niagara Falls Boulevard (Route 62) if you go under the I-190 from east to west, you will go from a bustling business district to suddenly seeing a long-abandoned gas station, with it's parking lot overgrown with weeds, and a large abandoned former office building. If You go under the I-190 from east to west on Packard Road or Porter Road (Route 182), you will go from a business district lined with busy stores to a former large shopping complex that is now virtually empty.

Even retail giant Wal-Mart has been affected by this stark division in business created by the I-190. When the company first opened a store in the area, it was just to the west of the I-190. But when the store was to be expanded to include a grocery store, instead of expanding the existing store the company decided to build an entirely new store, this time to the favored east of the I-190.

"West of the I-190" could be a byword that essentially means an economic dead zone and, unfortunately, downtown Niagara Falls, NY lies in this zone.

The northern section of Military Road (Route 265), east of the I-190 and north of Packard Road (Route 182) did not develop into a business district anything like that south of Packard Road because it is close to, and also directly parallel to, the I-190. This puts it out of harmony with the I-190. The change in direction of the I-190 to north-south changes this and puts the portion of Military Road (Route 265) to the south of Packard Road (Route 182) in harmony with it so that it thrives as a business district.

Of course, "The Property Order", which we saw in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog, is an important factor here also. The move to newer terrain to the east provided the chance to start the property order over to accommodate widespread automobile ownership.

The LaSalle Expressway that can be seen on the map and satellite imagery runs parallel to Niagara Falls Boulevard, east of the I-190. It does not significantly affect it because the expressway is sparsely-used and does not lead to any business district. There is a massive landfill that stands out in the satellite imagery. We can tell that it was there because the I-190 curves around it. This is the landfill that I referred to in "The Big Project Syndrome" that would have been ideal space for a modern industrial park.

Niagara Falls, Canada, across the lower Niagara River to the west of downtown Niagara Falls, NY, has gone through the same issues as Niagara Falls, NY, such as the building of a power plant and the decline of industrial jobs. The only real advantage that the Canadian side has it that the falls can be seen more directly from that side. Yet, the Canadian side of Niagara Falls does not seem to "die" in the winter as much as the U.S. side does.

The fundamental alignment of Niagara Falls, Canada is north-south, but it has several prominent east-west business streets. The fundamental alignment of Niagara Falls, NY, in contrast, is east-west. It has retained it's business district in that direction, Pine Avenue (Route 62 west of the I-190), but not the business district in the north-south direction, Main Street.

But look at the highway system of Niagara Falls, Canada on the map or satellite imagery. The Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) is congruent to the I-190 on the U.S. side. But the QEW and the 420 which is perpendicular to it are both in alignment with the grid of the street pattern. There is no cross-cutting or short-circuiting of the street pattern. The QEW is perpendicular to the east-west business streets, and so it operates in harmony with those streets.

Queen Street, in Niagara Falls, Canada, is Main Street's nearby Canadian sibling. Both are the same type of street, an old-style business district. Yet, being not cut off in the way that Main Street is, is doing well and not just in businesses for locals. But it is also true that the Canadian power plants have been there for longer, are further from the city, and not much of the landscape of Niagara Falls, Canada is taken up by power lines as Niagara Falls, NY is.

North Tonawanda, NY is a smaller city east of Niagara Falls, NY. It is a case in point of a similar city, but one which has been unencumbered either by highways or a power plant. North Tonawanda has also undergone transitions over time. The Erie Canal made it a collection point for the lumber that was shipped from it. It's nickname is still "The Lumber City". After the decline of the canal due to railroads and much bigger boats, it industrialized until most of that was eventually lost.

North Tonawanda has no highways near it. In comparison with neighboring Niagara Falls, it has no shopping district bringing in people from outside like that to the east of the I-190. But neither does it have a dying downtown, like that cut off by the I-190.

Pine Avenue (Route 62 west of the I-190) survives, being the business district within Niagara Falls, NY that is best aligned in harmony with the I-190. But most of it is not really a shopping district that brings in people from outside, rather it is mostly everyday businesses that serve locals.

Buffalo Avenue (Route 384), east if the I-190, survives as a business district. Even though it is perpendicular to the I-190, and has a ramp to it, it does not thrive as a shopping district like the area to the north. Rather, it also continues as a district of mostly "local" businesses catering mainly to those who live nearby. This section of Buffalo Avenue east of the I-190, which also includes the adjoining section of Cayuga Drive (Route 265) that it curves into, is in the older section of LaSalle (the eastern half of Niagara Falls, NY) and thus has the issue of "The Property Order" as we saw in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog. There is not the room for massive development and the street is not wide enough for the traffic volume that it would bring.

Conversely the little-used LaSalle Expressway, which runs parallel to Buffalo Avenue some distance to the north, actually helps to preserve this Buffalo Avenue business district. This is done not by bringing traffic to it but by somewhat isolating it. There are few underpasses to get past the LaSalle Expressway, and this encourages residents who live south of this highway to use these local businesses at times rather than getting to the busier business district to the north.

The challenge for downtown Niagara Falls, NY is to bring people in after the end of the summer tourist season, even though the changing patterns brought about by the I-190 make it out of the way and not easy to get to. The construction of the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, at around the same time as the power project and the I-190, made it so that the Rainbow Bridge, which leads right into Niagara Falls, NY, is no longer the busiest border crossing point in the area.

Previous efforts to revitalize the downtown in the off-season have been the Rainbow Mall  and the Festival of Lights. The more recently built casino, appears to be doing well for itself but has not brought prosperity to the surrounding area. There is nostalgia among older Niagarans for Falls Street before Urban Renewal and the building of the I-190, but the truth is that if this downtown street were still there it would probably fare no better than the downtown does today.