The derelict Hamilton Ward house, at 19 Coe Place, is the linchpin to the rejuvenation of Coe Place, according to urban planner Chris Hawley.

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

On a recent July evening, the strong wind carrying an unkept promise of rain, Chris Hawley stands in a city-owned vacant lot adjacent to 19 Coe Place, surveying a pile of debris—tree limbs, parts of a tree trunk more than three feet in diameter, rocks, twisted tin, construction trash. The debris is backed up against a metal fence that separates the backyards of Coe Place’s south-side houses from the parking lot of Belmont Shelter Corporation, the independent, nonprofit, affordable housing agency that took possession of 19 Coe Place in January.

Coe Place is a hidden treasure of a street, a single block traveling one way between Main and Ellicott, just south of the Sarabeth building, former home to the Buffalo Electric Vehicle Company, where construction has already begun on Artspace’s $16 million project. It will comprise 55 artist’s lofts and at least 13,000 square feet of commercial and retail space for arts organizations and arts-friendly businesses. The live/work apartments are due to be completed and ready for occupancy in May 2007.

Coe Place is lined with tall, close-set Queen Annes that come right up to the narrow street, creating an intimate and cohesive community. The lots are tiny by Buffalo standards—if you both step out onto the stoop at the same time, your neighbor is right there by your side. A few of the houses are in good repair; some are shabby; a few, like 19 Coe, are endangered.

Hawley, who currently works with the Campaign for Greater Buffalo History, Architecture and Culture, and fellow urban planner Stevan Stipanovich, currently working for the Black Rock/Riverside Good Neighbors Planning Alliance, previously served together as paid interns in the city’s planning department. Their task was to identify ways in which a cash-strapped city could leverage Artspace’s investment to encourage a rebirth of Buffalo’s Midtown—to plant a few seeds here and there and guide growth rather than try to undertake the sort of massive, top-down redevelopment project that the city can’t afford and which rarely succeeds in the long term.

Among many other recommendations, Hawley and Stipanovich singled out the preservation and revitalization of Coe Place as a key opportunity. Possessed of a rich history, the street is also a natural model for the sort of urban density that planners say builds community and supports local business. “It’s a charming street, perhaps one of the most charming on all of the East Side,” Hawley says. “There’s almost nothing else like it. That’s why it’s so great. And that’s why it’s got to be saved.”

Saved, it turns out, from Belmont Shelter, whose headquarters have occupied the block of Main Street between Dodge and Coe since 1989. Until two weeks ago, Belmont Shelter was pursuing a demolition permit from the city in order to take down the 106-year-old Queen Anne at 19 Coe, which Hawley and other activists have started calling the Hamilton Ward house, after the former New York State attorney general who lived in the house as a boy.

In private conversations, Belmont Shelter has told preservationists that they intended to use 19 Coe Place, as well as the two city-owned vacant lots that flank it, to expand their parking lot, which is quite spacious and never full, and for green space. The Hamilton Ward house—formerly owned by notorious slumlord and house-flipper Scott Wizig—had long been an eyesore and a danger to the neighborhood, according to a Belmont Shelter spokesman, and the company had been trying for years to secure the property before it finally was able to buy it at auction late last year. Rehabilitation, says Belmont Shelter’s Doug Carpenter, would cost $130,000—a figure those opposing demolition question but cannot refute because Belmont Shelter has been reluctant to allow anyone entry to the property to make an assessment.

But the Hamilton Ward house, Hawley says, is the linchpin to Coe Place’s revival. “When you’re looking in from Main Street, this is the first house you see,” he says. “Belmont Shelter sees this as a roadblock to expanding their parking lot. And we see an opportunity for revitalizing one of the great streets of Buffalo. If this house is taken down, basically half the block will appear to have been demolished. It is a placeholder on Coe Street that has to stay there.”

Now, for the time being, it looks as if it will. Two weeks ago, just before the Preservation Board was due to consider its application, Belmont Shelter pulled its request for a demolition permit. Carpenter, the Belmont spokesman, says the company has reconsidered its plans.

“We decided to take up the spirit of keeping the community vital. We’ve always been committed to that,” Carpenter says. “We stepped back and we looked at it and we said, ‘Let’s see what we can do with this.’ If there are resources available, we’re going to try to identify them. We’re going to look at what it will take to accomplish various levels of restoration.”

Demolition, he says, is no longer on the table. The Hamilton Ward house will be saved and rehabbed, then resold or turned into offices for Belmont Shelter. The adjacent lots, if the city agrees to sell them to Belmont Shelter, will be made into green space. There will be no expansion of the parking lot.

That’s good news for now.

The quixotic George A. Chadeayne

Hawley’s report, Midtown: Poised for Renaissance, includes a history of Coe Place and its developer, who Hawley describes as “quixotic.” (The report is available online at www.fixbuffalo.blogspot.com, as are the complementary illustrations created by Stipanovich.)

George A. Chadeayne was the owner of a not too terribly successful skating rink that used to stand on the south side of what is now Coe Place. Realizing, as he told reporter Sybil Reppert, who wrote a profile of Coe Place in the Buffalo Times in 1930 as part of a series of articles on Buffalo’s small streets, that people “needed houses worse than they needed places to skate,” in 1885 he decided to go into the homebuilding business.

In order to duck zoning laws and foil some lawsuits that sought to prevent his project, Chadeayne built a private street and provided each lot with a few feet of frontage on either Ellicott or Main Street, to which the houses were deeded—a task his civil engineer, William White, accomplished by means of artful gerrymandering. In addition, the property lines encompassed half the brick footpath in front of every house. Chadeayne built the first seven houses on the north side of the street. Then, when winter came, he transferred operations to the south side, where his men worked under the shelter of the skating rink’s high brick piers. When spring came, they tore down the rink and used the salvaged materials to build 11 more houses. One more house was added later on, for a total of 19, of which 14 houses remain today. Chadeayne named the development after his father-in-law, William S. Coe, a Buffalo transit entrepreneur.

Chadeayne told Reppert that he bought the property—a swath not more than 100 feet wide between Main and Ellicott—for $12,500. He sold the corner lot for $16,000. By contrast, Belmont Shelter bought the Hamilton Ward house at auction for a sum reportedly less than $4,000. James Rayburg, an architect at Cannon Design, recently bought three houses on Coe Place for about $10,000 apiece.

The city finally annexed Coe Street in 1928 at the request of residents, who had been plunged into darkness when the city stopped pumping the gas that fueled the street’s antiquated streetlamps. “After five weeks of darkness, the women decided that something had to be done,” Reppert wrote in the Buffalo Times. “The people signed petitions. And the city took over Coe place, gave it new plumbing, electric lights, and a concrete pavement.”

That concrete pavement replaced the original brickwork Chadeayne had laid and went largely unrepaired until a year ago. By then the sidewalks and street were in a state of disrepair that would shock those who don’t spend much time on the East Side, where dishevelment and neglect are not uncommon: the sidewalk cracked or missing entirely, worn down to gravel; the street pocked with holes; the curb disintegrating.

“It was pretty bad,” Stipanovich says of the street, producing a photograph taken before the repaving. In the photograph, he points out a spindly line of grass between the curb and the wreck of a sidewalk. “But there was a narrow green strip.”

Then he indicates the new curb gutters, which have no rise and resemble the sort of feature you’d see in a suburban development with no sidewalks. The grass is gone. The gutters are beginning to crumble, no doubt because the lack of a rise in the curb tempts people to drive over them onto the sidewalks. Halfway down the block, some residents have piled rocks and cinder blocks on the sidewalks in front of their houses to keep drivers on the street—ersatz traffic-calming devices.

“As you can see, the curb gutters don’t work too well here, because they’re already wearing out—after one year,” Stipanovich says.

“I hope they wear out some more,” says Hawley, who, with Stipanovich, suggests that the street be repaved in brick, narrowed to its original 15 feet and redefined by granite curbs.

That’s unlikely to happen so soon after the city has spent money on new paving, of course. But whether it is aesthetically pleasing or not, the city’s small investment in new paving and sidewalks argues for careful redevelopment of the block. In a letter to the Preservation Board opposing the demolition of the Hamilton Ward House, Preservation Coalition of Erie County board president Cynthia Van Ness wrote, “The City has just spent good infrastructure dollars to repave Coe Place, which greatly increases its curb appeal. Please let this worthy investment do its work to aid the rediscovery and rejuvenation of Coe Place. It is easy to predict that the existing houses—if not foolishly and prematurely sent to the landfill—will soon generate more tax revenues for the City than another street-deadening parking lot.”

In addition to repaving Coe, there is the $16 million investment in Artspace to consider—as well as an underused, $500-million transit system that has two stations within walking distance of Coe Place. To make the most of those investments, planners need to look for ways to pack people around them.

“This isn’t a place where we should be building parking lots,” Hawley says. “It’s a place where we should increase density and recreate community.”

Architect James Rayburg has started his renovation of 23 Coe Place, as well as two more houses further down the block.

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Revitalization already underway

“You’ll notice that they didn’t haul away any of this material, though there were trucks here to do it,” Hawley says, still standing among the detritus. “Most likely they wanted to wait until they’d demolished the house so they could haul everything away at once, more efficiently and less expensively.”

According to David Torke, an advocate for rehabilitation of near East Side neighborhoods who has taken a special interest in Coe Place, shortly before the June 29 Preservation Board meeting on its request for a demolition permit, Belmont Shelter hired landscapers to clear the vacant lots on either side of the Hamilton Ward house, presumably in preparation for demolition.

Rather than haul the debris away, the landscapers piled some in the lot to the north of the house and pushed the rest of the detritus into the backyard of one of the houses Rayburg is rehabbing.

Rayburg came round to Coe Place gradually. His real estate agent told him about four houses on Coe Street last year, and about the potential boost the Artspace investment might bring to the neighborhood. At first Rayburg thought the four houses, in need of serious rehabilitation, were too much to take on; but when another purchase he’d been working on fell through, and when he checked the properties online and saw the prices had dropped considerably, he couldn’t resist.

“All the original woodwork is in there, and the fireplace,” he says of 23 Coe Place. “It’s just a really nice house.” If that house had not been part of the package, Rayburg says he might not have been interested in the other two, which are not as well preserved inside. But it was available, and now he is rehabbing all three houses. He’ll paint them this summer, he says, and then get to work on the inside, with the goal of bringing them as close as possible to their original condition—a project that he expects will take two or three years.

“The houses on the south side of the street really have an interesting layout,” he says. “The stairway comes up to a landing and then the same stairs go down into the kitchen. I’m an architect, so when I see something that I think is interesting it really sticks in my head. The street had really been stuck in my head for several months.”

Rayburg has also made an offer to the city for the same vacant lots that Belmont Shelter wants to buy. He says he’d make them green space in the short term and maybe build infill houses later on, in order to recreate the continuity of Coe Place’s streetscape. Rayburg also approached Belmont Shelter about purchasing the Hamilton Ward house, with the intention of rehabbing it. He didn’t want to see his investment on the street compromised by a new parking lot or some other project that wouldn’t fit the character of the neighborhood. Belmont Shelter’s projects, though laudable for making low-cost housing available to those who need it most, tend toward the suburban, faux Victorian models that dismantle the sort of closely knit urban fabric that promotes density and community.

Rayburg was also frustrated by Belmont Shelter’s apparent willingness to let the house and property rot while waiting for the go-ahead on demolition.

“They haven’t repaired windows, they haven’t painted the house, they don’t maintain the yard,” he says. “That’s all stuff that they could have done without anyone living in it. That would have made the house not look blighted from Main Street or from their parking lot.”

Rayburg wasn’t the only party to make such an offer, and all describe Belmont Shelter as having been standoffish and obstructionist. “They said, ‘Our estimates say it’ll take $130,000 to repair it. Do you have $130,000?’” Rayburg recalls. “I said, ‘No, I dont have $130,000.’ So they asked how long it was going to take me to repair it, and I said, ‘Well, you’re not letting me in the house, so how am I supposed to know? I can tell you by the end of the summer that the house will be painted and that windows will be repaired, and it will look like someone lives in the house even if no one does.’”

Another interested party was allowed into the house and estimated the cost of rehab at no more than $60,000—less, he said, if he did some of the work himself. Belmont Shelter’s estimate very likely presumed union labor, which may help to explain the discrepancy.

Belmont Shelter’s spokesman, Doug Carpenter, says that his company was not interested in selling prior to its change of heart because its assessors felt demolition was the best course. The company is not interested in pursuing a buyer now because it wants to make sure the job is done right—which is why it asked Rayburg to describe his financial resources and his plans.

“If we were to consider working with any partners on the project we would want to make sure that they have the resourses to do it and do it well,” he says. “And we would remain involved in the project on any level.

Improvement without gentrification

Asked if the rent he’s receiving now from his three properties—one single and two doubles—can support the investment he’s making in the houses, Rayburg says, “Right now, yes.”

Many of the street’s residents receive some sort of public assistance, Rayburg explains. One of his renters lost her Section Eight assistance—a program which Belmont Shelter has been involved with since its inception in 1977—because the house had fallen into such disrepair that it no longer qualified under the program’s guidelines for housing quality. The improvements Rayburg is making to his houses might make it possible for all his current tenants to stay, because their properties will become eligible for rent assistance again.

In addition, Hawley says his group will try to landmark the entire street—it would be the second neighborhood in the East Side to be so designated. The other is the Hamlin Park neighborhood, to the north.

“A lot of people think of historic designation as somewhat punitive, but there’s a little-known city law that allows for tax abatements for homes and properties within historic districts,” Hawley says. “It’s especially beneficial to streets with very low property values because it puts a freeze on any increase in property values, no matter what improvements are made to the property and no matter how much the property value increases while that improvement is occurring. So for the first five years, Mr. Rayburg can make improvements on his properties and not get an increased assessment.”

Historic designation can also lure new investment because it imparts cachet—people are interested in living in areas that have stories, and they are willing to invest their time and money to become a chapter in those stories.

In combination with other incentives, such as the city-provided housing loans that help current homeowners to improve their properties affordably, new investors such as Rayburg might be able to revive Coe Place without inadvertently dismantling it.

“You come on the weekend and everyone is out barbecueing on the streetscape, everyone knows everyone on the street,” Rayburg says. “There already is a sense of community. I think people are hoping for a leg up from what’s going to happen here. But I think there is also some fear about new development moving in and people getting cleared out. I think there’s a great deal of fear. I have a tenant who’s lived here 30 years, and the day I came over with his lease agreement, he said, ‘How long can I stay?’ He was in tears. I said, ‘You’re signing a lease. You’re staying. No one is leaving.’”

“Coe Place has that connection and feeling that is one key goal of living in modern built space,” Roy Cunningham, who has lived on the street for more than two years, wrote in a letter to the Preservation Board opposing Belmont Shelter’s demolition plans. “At the same time, Coe Place has the sweet flavor of Buffalo’s history. What we have here is rare, precious—something that cannot be recreated. We need to do more than preserve a few tattered shreds. We all need this place, and other places like it, as living examples of what is possible.”

“There’a very strong possibility, and it’s certainly our goal, to have neighborhood improvement without gentrification,” Hawley says. “It’s a bit easier in Buffalo than it would be in New York. We’re a slow-growth city, and that has a lot of benefits. A street like Coe Place could be gradually revived and have its glory restored, without cataclysmic change to the community.

Mike Golden and Nick Sparks of Jeff Wagner & Sons (General Contracting & Painting) are working on James Rayburg's three houses on Coe Place.

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

A house still at risk

A few weeks ago, Belmont Shelter erected a new flagpole behind its building, by the entrance that opens onto its expansive parking lot. The company positioned a spotlight on one corner of its roof to illuminate the flag at night. As it happens, the light also washes over the west side of the Hamilton Ward house, making it visible to passersby on Main Street. The tableau it illuminates disturbs David Torke: boarded up and broken windows, peeling gray paint, a stone foundation with newly punched holes in it that render the basement open to trespassers and vandals—not to mention rain.

“If no effort is made to fully restore this house or at minimum properly secure it from the elements and vandalism, it will surely succumb to the all-too-common demolition by neglect,” Torke writes on his Web site, www.fixbuffalo.blogspot.com, where he has documented the effort to revitalize Coe Place.

“They’ve done some damage,” Chris Hawley says of Belmont Shelter. He claims that the foundation was intact a month ago; the damage has occurred under Belmont Shelter’s stewardship. The two holes, maybe four feet wide and three feet high, appeared overnight, just before a prediction of torrential rains. On the same side of the house, boards recently have been removed from one of the windows—quite deliberately; the nails that held the window were then hammered flat, and the board itself is nowhere in evidence among the detritus on the property or the neighboring lots—inviting entry through that window, which is broken. The holes in the foundation and a pair of broken basement windows also invite entry, as well as water damage and, worst of all, arson.

Hawley alerted Belmont Shelter of the damage and the risk it posed. “They said they would look into it. That was about a month ago,” he says. “This threatens the rehab potential of the Ward house and of the block overall.

“I’m not sure that this is the kind of image that a nonprofit organization concerned with reviving neighborhoods wants to have.”

Doug Carpenter, the spokesman for Belmont Shelter, says he has no knowledge of the condition of house, of any communication between Hawley or other activists and his company or what information might have been exchanged.

“I can assure you that we are going to make sure that the property is secure,” Carpenter says. “We will not let it languish. We will not let it wither. We will be protective of it.

What concerns current residents like Roy Cunningham, activists like Hawley and Torke and new investors like Rayburg is that the house, if it’s allowed to deteriorate further, might become a candidate for emergency demolition. A derelict house that becomes an imminent danger to the community—whose structure has been compromised by weather or a fire, or which attracts criminal activity—does not need to go before the Preservation Board to be taken down. The city grants a waiver and the bulldozers roll. The whole process can unfold in a day, and it’s not uncommon.

Whether or not the spotlight was intended to reveal the Hamilton Ward house’s condition—the light is clearly meant for the flag—its illumination may portend good things. Stipanovich and Hawley tick off some of the great reclamation efforts in recent Buffalo history: the Richardson towers, St. Stanislaus, Corpus Christi, the Central Terminal. The first step in each campaign was simply to shine lights on the structures. “I hope, whether they meant it or not, that they have started their own renovation project on that building,” Hawley says.

Belmont Shelter’s Doug Carpenter says that’s exactly what the company plans to do. Time will tell, and the neighborhood will be watching.