  |
One scheme for the Buffalo-Fort Erie Peace bridge would invoke the city's history in a literal way with a straightforward industrial span, top. A competing, grander scheme, above, would place a single 450-foot stanchion exactly above the U.S.-Canada border. |
| Competing proposals for an international span test popular interest
in design. by Robert Neuwirth For the past year, Buffalo, New York, has been embroiled in an intense debate about whether fancy design can help revitalize a dying region. At stake was the future of the Peace Bridge -- a 71-year-old span that links the city to Fort Erie, Ontario, across both the Niagara River and the Black Rock Channel shipping lane. That the bridge needed help was beyond debate: traffic had increased by 50 percent since 1990 and was projected to surpass the span's capacity by 2002. As the second busiest crossing between the U.S. and Canada, the bridge was a key to continued robust trade between the two countries. More important for depressed, postindustrial Buffalo, though, it had the potential to bring thousands of tourists into the city -- both as a major conduit to another country, and, many argued, as a powerful attraction in itself. To the members of the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority, the binational group that built the border crossing in 1927 and still runs it, the solution was simple: build a three-lane updated companion to the original, doubling the capacity of the roadway. Authority member John A. Lopinski, a chartered accountant from Port Colborne, Ontario, says his group's polling showed the public mandate was clear: "Build it as quickly as you can and as cheaply as you can. Basically, what they drive over is not that important." But after the authority endorsed this straightforward plan in 1994, some on the New York side started to push for a different approach. "Buffalo calls itself the city of no illusions; it's beaten down," says Buffalo News publisher Stanford Lipsey, who believed that a dramatic new bridge would put Buffalo on the map as an important international gateway. "People come from one country to the next here. Why shouldn't there be a grand entrance?" Lipsey's newspaper, which dominates the local market, began agitating for a sexier bridge. In 1996 the paper and the authority cosponsored a "design embellishment" charrette, which yielded 400 submissions. But only a few of the proposals were adopted, leading to some minor changes in the design; the plan remained essentially the same. The companion span would cost an estimated $65 million, and the authority would spend another $17 million to refurbish the old bridge. Opposition did not die down. "The existing bridge is a dog," says Bruno Freschi, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the State University of New York in Buffalo. "What you've got here is a series of arches. That in itself could be quite interesting." But the arches are boring, he contends, and never conjure a sense of arrival or create a dramatic presence. He pronounces the bridge's major arch -- a Parker truss that vaults the Black Rock Channel -- "awkward, out of place, and indeed, a mistake when it was built." By rising to its highest point at the channel, the bridge suggests that that's the border between the U.S. and Canada, when in fact it's in the middle of the Niagara. "Symbolically," Freschi says, "it doesn't inform the eye." The authority's companion span, he adds, fails because it doesn't correct the obvious flaws in the existing bridge. Working with the well-known bridge engineer T.Y. Lin, Freschi produced a new design that he believed would restore some grandeur to the border crossing: a curving single-spar, six-lane bridge to replace the old span. At 450 feet, it would be the highest structure in the area, visible on the horizon from as far away as Toronto. And its single stanchion would mark the exact border between the two countries. Freschi's plan included a new plaza on the U.S. side of the bridge and called for the demolition of 22 houses on a dead-end block in order to link bridge traffic directly to Niagara Street, one of Buffalo's great radial thoroughfares. There would also be some serious construction on the Canadian side. Even so, he argued that his radical design could be realized for about the same price as the authority's (he estimated $75 million for construction, plus $9 million for demolishing the existing bridge). And his bridge could be open by 2002, he claimed, with twice as many lanes as the companion span. (The authority's twin bridge was slated to open that same year, but the existing span would immediately shut down for roadbed repair for another year or two.) But, according to Lopinski, Freschi's cost estimates were too low, and his time frame too optimistic. And, as he points out, polls show that the public doesn't seem to give a damn about design for its own sake. (The Buffalo News was so outraged when a recent canvass found support for the twin-span idea that it decided to fund its own door-to-door study, in which respondents were shown renderings of both bridges; that survey was inconclusive.) The people of Buffalo simply want traffic to move faster, for cheap. Ken Cowdery, head of Clarkson Center, a Buffalo social services agency, explains why: "This community has made some huge mistakes with public projects -- a thruway that tears through the waterfront, putting the university out of town rather than downtown, a subway that goes nowhere. The bridge is extremely important to the community. But more and more, people are seeing it not as a gateway but as a utilitarian item." This past June, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, famously an advocate of high-profile design statements, weighed in, endorsing the Freschi-Lin approach. But even he seemed to hedge a bit, suggesting in a letter to the Buffalo Niagara Partnership (the local chamber of commerce) that "re-use options for the old bridge present a wonderful chance to honor Buffalo's past." The issue came to a head in midsummer when the Peace Bridge Authority finally decided to exercise its power. On July 23, joined by a coalition that included the mayors of Buffalo and Fort Erie, the authority endorsed the twin-span proposal. Construction should start in the spring. Freschi argues that "the current bridge will one day no longer be feasible. It is very old steel technology which is being replaced around the world." That isn't, however, the judgment of the engineers who've analyzed the bridge. And some in the community feel that the no-nonsense industrial span is fitting for Buffalo -- a tribute to the area's blue-collar steel and shipping heritage. "When you get into aesthetics, you'll never get two people to agree," says Lopinski. "I find it hard to believe that a family from Columbus, Ohio, traveling to Toronto would come by Buffalo instead of the Ambassador Bridge [the crossing between Detroit and Windsor] because we have a new, signature bridge." Throughout the battle, Freschi was eloquent in his defense of his plan. "The way you uplift an area like this that's had a strong hit and lost half its population is to take the strong iconic public objects and celebrate them," he said a week before the authority's announcement. "The meaning of iconic is that it stays on in your memory. It's the ooh-aah effect." In the end, however, Lopinski's brutally practical argument proved the more persuasive. |
Keywords:
Buffalo, bridge, Bruno Freschi, Buffalo News
