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Artvoice Weekly Edition » Issue v12n11 (03/14/2013) » Section: Letters to Artvoice


You've Got No Schools

by Ray Peterson
While delighting in the reading of Professor Michael Niman’s “You’ve Got No Mail” (Artvoice 2/14/13) I thought: Wait a minute, soon it may be for Buffalo that we’ve got no schools, either, and what a loss for the city that created magnet schools, with open classrooms and UB’s “storefront colleges” like Tolstoy College F in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were experiments in education at a time when urban riots and civil disorders were rife and answers came through massive federal government spending for all sorts of attempts to make equality and justice something of a reality for all of us.

The Urge to Merge

by Elizabeth Giles
In response to Bruce Fisher’s “Thought Leaders in Retreat” (Artvoice 2/28/2013), yes, it is an eternal frustration for the far-thinking that our suburban townships cling so fiercely to their fiefdoms—as if they could ever hope to thrive in any meaningful way by pitting themselves against other Western New York municipalities, not the least of which is the City of Buffalo, the urban core that they should all relate to as their mutual center of culture and commerce. The suburbs ought have no ambition other than being the quiet, green bedroom communities they were originally conceived to be rather than the concrete and tarmac jungles dotted with shopping malls, strip plazas, and office parks that they’ve sadly become. Who ever would have thought we’d evolve into a hodgepodge of car-dependent mini-cities, each uglier and more purposeless than the next?

We Don't Live in a "Ghetto"

by Natasha Soto
You owe the residents of the West Side an apology. Last week the authority you chair was allowed to go ahead and demolish eight homes on Busti Avenue, and in fewer than 12 hours the homes were mere rubble. During the coverage of this momentous event you said that you and the authority are “going to send a message [that] you’re not entering a ghetto when you cross into the great city of Buffalo.”



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