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Act Small, Think Big: The Micropark Revolution

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Matt Quinn talks to neighborhood kids who regularly swim at the foot of Ferry St.

On a clear hot summer day in Buffalo, you swim where you can. For many, that means the city’s pools and splash rings, most of which are open this year and crowded, thanks to the scorching weather that settled over the region in July and early August.

The more fortunate may head to a beach in Canada or south of the city, along Route 5, or even further, to the southern shore of Lake Ontario. We are, after all, situated at the confluence of two of the world’s great lakes. A pool seems a letdown, somehow, given the great expanse of water we dwell beside—sad to be confined haplessly to so narrow a pond in a concrete yard, when the lakes and river are so nearby.

On a particularly sweltering weekday in mid July, a half dozen or so West Side kids swim in the Black Rock canal, at the foot of West Ferry. They scramble along the water barefoot, jacknifing into the cool, green-black water from the jumble of broken concrete slabs that have fallen away from the breakwall. There are condoms floating in the canal, broken glass and used syringes among the rocks. There are beer cans, trash, feces and the remnants of small fires. The iron rails that run along one side of the breakwall, separating the boys from the roiling currents of the Niagara River, are loose in spots.

He and his friends come down every day in the summer, says Jovan, who lives on School Street and is headed to Canisius High School in the fall.

“From 10 o’clock in the morning all the way till six o’clock,” Jovan says. “Swim, jump off the bridge. It’s kind of dangerous, but it’s fun too.”

He indicates a cut on his foot from the day before, then points to a trash can that he and some other boys had hauled out of the spot where they like to dive. Jovan’s friend, Christopher, dives into the water from high atop a metal railing while Jovan picks his way along the water’s edge, pointing out the trash that others have left behind, or which has washed up from the canal.

“This place looks like a dump,” Jovan says. “There’s crack needles on the floor…there’s needles, there’s glass. Yesterday we brought a rake over here, rake all this stuff up.”

To be sure, Buffalo’s waterfront features some gems: The Erie Basin Marina and the adjacent naval park attract consistent crowds, as does Riverside Park; and Squaw Island remains a hidden, underused treasure, though new signage along Niagara Street may educate city residents of its existence and location. And there have been improvements to the city’s waterfront in recent years, and exciting new prospects on the horizon: South Buffalo’s Gallagher Beach, for example, owes its continuing refurbishment in large part to the efforts of Congressman Brian Higgins, who also was instrumental in reaching a relicensing settlement with the New York Power Authority that will mean $150 million to promote public and private redevelopment in Buffalo’s Inner and Outer Harbors and $450 million for the proposed Buffalo Niagara Greenway, which imagines a continuous ribbon of waterfront greenspace from Lackawanna to Lake Ontario. At the foot of Main Street, in the triangle of land once known as the Infected District, the historic reconstruction of the Erie Canal’s western terminus continues.

But for the most part, and for most of us, the face of Buffalo’s waterfront looks like the foot of West Ferry, where Jovan and his friends like to swim; or like the befuddling bike path between Tifft Farms and downtown Buffalo; or like the barren expanse of LaSalle Park.

Overgrown, unkempt, difficult to access, strewn with garbage. Invisible. Confusing. Divorced from the city and its people by highways, industrial infrastructure and chain-link fences.

There are sweeping plans afoot to transform the city’s waterfront, certainly; there always have been. Politicians and business leaders have been peddling top-down redevelopment of the waterfront for 30 years, since the death of heavy industry made anachronisms of its factories, railroads and highways—built there at the behest of past business leaders and past politicians.

This time, thanks in large part to to advocacy of Higgins, there is money to make something happen. But many Buffalonians are rightly wary of overarching schemes, because they have failed to materialize again and again. (Remember the Horizons Waterfront Commission?) The Buffalo Niagara Greenway Commission, whose draft plan is due next month, cannot even seem to get the participating municipalities to agree on what “waterfront” means; many towns along the route want to access the funds for inland projects that will in no way contribute to greenspace along the lakes and the Niagara River. In order to justify that, they are insisting that the project boundaries extend beyond the water to embrace entire townships.

The greenway concept is further complicated by tremendous environmental concerns, especially in Tonawanda and Niagara Falls, and balkanized by Buffalo’s separate plans for redevelopment. Those plans include the BassPro project, which, with every passing month, deserves to be called the “long-heralded” BassPro project, or even the “stalled” BassPro project. The fishing megastore, to be built inside a refurbished Memorial Auditorium with a $60 million public subsidy, seems to have hit still waters: BassPro keeps asking for more money and reassurances, and shows few signs of moving forward.

Add in the piecemeal ownership of waterfront property, particularly in the city of Buffalo, and most likely it will be years before these grand plans for the waterfront bear fruit. Meanwhile, the cash-strapped city and county do what they can to maintain the waterfront parks they control within the City of Buffalo, which clearly is not enough.

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Jay McCarthy shares his vision of the waterfront.

The micropark solution

Enter Jay McCarthy, a 31-year-old banker-turned-bartender from family with strong connections in the city’s political and business establishments. McCarthy has decided that there’s no point in waiting on government and big developers. He wants to motivate private citizens and community groups to work with public officials to make small, immediate improvements to the city’s waterfront.

What Frederick Law Olmsted envisioned when he conceived the city’s integrated parks, McCarthy says, were gateways which carried park-goers out of their everyday circumstances into enlightening environments. Buffalo’s remarkable waterfront, hidden behind and degraded by the city’s industrial legacy, provides exactly that experience—or it could, if only it were more accessible and more inviting.

“The only way to bring people to the waterfront is through the parks system,” McCarthy says. “As soon as you cross that industrial barrier, you should walk into a natural oasis.”

McCarthy believes that a practical first step in revitalizing the city’s waterfront is a series of microparks—small attractions along the 3.25-mile bike path between Tifft Farms and Riverside Park. Each micropark would offer a unique attraction; one might consist of a community garden surrounded by benches, another might cater to fishermen on Squaw Island, another might comprise a skate park or a picnic area. These microparks could be built and maintained by community groups working with local government, using both public and private money.

Small, attractive parks that cater to niche audiences will draw more people to the waterfront. As more people make their way to the water’s edge, they will feel a greater investment in the parks there—creating impetus for more microparks, which will draw more people, which will draw the attention of businesses who will want to capitalize on the presence of so many people with leisure time and dollars to spend.

There are models for the successful development of microparks in other cities. In Tacoma, Washington, for example, a series of microparks were installed to acommodate skateboarders and inline skaters—the first of these was built on the city’s waterfront for a mere $2,000. Bay City, Michigan has planned a series of eight to 10 microparks connecting locations of cultural and historical interest in that city. They’re doing it with two grants for $100,000 in private, not public, money. On a grander scale—and of special interest, considering its parallels to the Buffalo Niagara Greenway project—is the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway project, which is a 32-mile route circumscribing Manhattan, replete with microparks, bike paths and pedestrian walkways.

McCarthy’s position is that he needs to build public interest first and use that to coax money and support from politicians and private donors, particularly those companies—Rich Products, for example, or General Mills—who have a presence on the waterfront and who therefore exercise some control over public access to the water. Start with one success, one micropark, with an eye toward bulding an entire chain of them, connected by the existing bike path.

“We can build upon one success,” McCarthy says, “and then two, and then three and then four, and create communal areas from Tifft Farms to Riverside, where people will be able to come enjoy themselves on a warm summer day.”

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Sam Hoyt discusses the possibility of putting a dog park in LaSalle Park.

First step: a dog park

To launch the idea, McCarthy hopes to tap into the passion and energy of a particular, exisiting constituency in the community, one that is already active and organized: dog owners, who have long sought a dedicated, fenced-in park for walking their dogs off-leash. McCarthy hopes to redirect their campaign—which has, in any case, foundered in recent years—away from inland sites, in favor of an underused stretch of LaSalle Park.

Forty percent of all Buffalo homes include one or more dogs, according to Reed Stevens, president of the Niagara Frontier Veterinary Society, a coalition of 65 veterinary clinics and 175 veterinarians. There are 250 cities in the US that host dog parks, and 500 dog parks in the country overall. But the nearest one to Buffalo is across the Peace Bridge in St. Catharine’s.

Stevens is a veteran of previous movements to establish dog parks in Western New York. He advised a group in Amherst that tried and failed to establish a dog park and was intimately involved in trying to establish a dog park in Delaware Park a few years ago. That effort failed, too, in part because many dog owners already use Delaware Park as a de facto off-leash park; though the police occasionally hand out tickets, for the most part they look the other way. Those dog owners felt they already had a dog park that they liked, though it was technically illegal, and were afraid of losing what they had if a sanctioned, fenced-in dog park were to be constructed.

So support for a dedicated, fenced-in dog park was fractured even among the city’s dog owners, Stevens explained. Add to that split the concerns of the Olmsted Conservancy, who pointed out that fences had no place in Olmsted’s idea of what a park should be. Then-Mayor Anthony Masiello, who had originally supported the idea, eventually backed off and the movement died.

McCarthy thinks that a waterfront dog park would attract unified support among the city’s dog owners, because it would not threaten the staus quo in Delaware Park—it would simply provide another option. And it would draw people to the waterfront every day of the week, building the sort of critical mass he feels will lead to a greater sense of community ownership of the parks.

“If you get just a slim percentage of those people to take their dogs to the waterfront,” McCarthy argues, “they will see what they’ve been missing—the waterfront will become a regular part of their experience of Buffalo, which it is not for most people now.”

Additionally, LaSalle Park is accessible not only to Buffalonians but to the entire region: It’s at the foot of the Peace Bridge, next to an exit off the I-190.

Reed Stevens thinks that LaSalle Park is a promising site because so much of the park is underused, and it’s not part of the Olmsted system, so a fenced-in dog park should not be deemed an inappropriate use. Plus, dogs like to swim just as much as people do. “Water is a huge plus,” he says. “If you can get a place where dogs can swim—where they can get into the water and out of the water, that’s huge.”

Over an evening drink at the Hatch in the Erie Basin Marina, Reed reiterates the size of the constituency dog owners comprise: 40 percent of Buffalo households are dog owners; there are 122,720 households in the city, according to the 2000 census. The Marina is swamped with people and both the Hatch and Shanghai Red’s are doing a brisk business.

Meanwhile, a half-mile away at LaSalle Park, the concession stands are closed. The baseball diamonds get regular use, and on weekends people stroll along the walkway. Rarely, there is a concert in the bandstand.

“Look at the sign coming into this park: ‘No dogs allowed,’” Stevens says. “What percentage of the city has boats? And look at what we devote to boating. What percentage of households play soccer? What percentage plays baseball? Look at the space we devote to tennis.”

The benefits of a dog park extend to the rest of the community as well. “An exercised dog, a socialized dog, is a well behaved dog,” Steven says. “That’s a benefit to everybody.”

The cost of a dog park is minimal; it essentially amounts to the cost of fencing and signage. Maintenance is not an issue, either. Reed Stevens has visited dog parks in other cities and says that dog owners are conscientious stakeholders; they police their own, because they don’t want to lose what they’ve got.

To make it happen, however, people have to ask for it and the city, which maintains LaSalle Park, has to say yes. With help from the Wellness Institute of Greater Buffalo and Western New York, McCarthy is circulating an online petition to test support for a waterfront dog park.

“Let’s start with a dog park,” says McCarthy, who says he has no personal stake in the matter; he’s allergic to dogs. “Then we’ll build microparks for the fishermen, the skateboarders and everybody else. And soon we’ll have a vibrant waterfront, filled with people, all communing with this incredible body of water.”

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Sam Hoyt on a bike ride along the waterfront

A bike ride along the water

McCarthy already has the support of Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, to whom he pitched the micropark concept in June. Hoyt found $10,000 in seed money to get the project rolling.

Two weeks ago McCarthy took Hoyt, along with members of the media and a handful of other interested parties, on a bike ride from Tifft Farms to Riverside Park, in order to explain the concept. Greg Stevens, of Barnes Stevens Redevelopment, has been advising McCarthy; he took part in the Saturday morning ride, guiding the tour through the tricky industrial section that eventually spits out bikers behind the HSBC Arena. From there the path leads past the Inner Harbor project, to the naval park, to the Erie Basin Marina and on to LaSalle Park. Then the path shoots up onto Niagara Street for a while, before rejoining the waterfront at the foot of West Ferry.

“You can make this work if you’re creative and you know what you’re doing,” Greg Stevens says, pointing out that there is little signage and an obvious missing link in the bike path—a bridge at the foot of Michigan Avenue, which would neatly obviate the need for the circuitous, hard-to-follow route that exists now. “But if you come from St. Catherines and you want to go for a ride for a day, how would you begin to find this? It would take a GPS system.”

A number of activists are lobbying for the reconstruction of that Michigan Avenue bridge as part of the Buffalo section of the Buffalo Niagara Greenway. General Mills, whose facility sits at the end of Michigan Avenue, has opposed it, apparently worried that enhanced public access would interfere with its truck traffic.

The problem of the absent Michigan Avenue bridge, and specifically General Mills’ opposition to replacing it, illustrates the biggest obstacle to microparks, and waterfront development generally: There are so many property owners on the waterfront with different agendas, not all of which align with each other, and very few of which consider public access and waterfront greenspace to be a priority.

General Mills may have to relent eventually; the Greenway, though fraught with hurtles, has enough political momentum to achieve at least its minimum goal of an integrated waterfront pathway. A city ordinance has required developers in the Inner and Outer harbors to allow access and space for Greenway development, including waterfront paths. The NFTA is committed to developing waterfront greenspace on its property before it hands that property over to private developers. The key, according to Greg Stevens, is to start working with the NFTA now, to embed the microparks envision in the authority’s thinking as it considers how to do that.

“It is possible to work with the NFTA now, and again later with Uniland and the other developers who will build their projects on the waterfront,” Steven says. “Right now you’re missing continuity, you can’t get from one place to another. There are breakages in the system. But with fairly simple improvements you could increase the accessibility and useability of the infrastructure that’s there.

“Most of this is underappreciated and underutilized,” Steven adds. “There’s not a whole lot of stakeholding going on.”

Energized by the micropark proposal, Hoyt says that he is negotiating with the New York State Thruway Authority to open public access to a small stretch of waterfront underneath the Peace Bridge. For several years he has been negotiating with the Army Corps of Engineers, Buffalo District to open a visitors center and museum in its offices next to Squaw Island. The museum would illustrate the history of the Army Corps works in the region, and would allow visitors to watch the working canal lock connecting the Niagara River and the Black Rock Canal.

“We go on field trips to Lockport to visit the working lock, and we have one right here in the heart of Buffalo,” Hoyt says.

The Buffalo District office is the Army Corps headquarters for the lower Great Lakes; the headquarters for the upper Great Lakes, in Minnesota, has a visitors center and museum much like the one Hoyt imagines. The Buffalo District office, once receptive to the idea, is less so now, citing post-9/11 security concerns about inviting the public onto its property.

“People always say that Buffalo’s greatest assets are its people, and they’re right, but I think our second greatest asset is our waterfront,” Hoyt says, standing amid broken glass on Squaw Island. “There’s a lot of complaints about our inability to develop the waterfront in a user-friendly way, but the fact of the matter is that there are endless opportunities to do cool and visionary and interesting things along the lines of this micropark concept. And, as we see here on Squaw Island, (the best kept secret in Western New York) there is public access and there are existing opportunities for the public to enjoy the extraordinary waterfront that we have.”

Start small, start now

McCarthy stands on the breakwall at the foot of West Ferry, among the broken glass and used syringes, watching Jovan and his friends jumping over and over again into the Black Rock Canal.

The concessions stand beside the parking lot is closed; so are the public restrooms. There’s a pothole in a nearby section of the bike path that’s about 16 inches deep and two feet wide, filled with trash.

“I don’t understand why there has been a lack of interest in this area where we’re standing right now,” McCarthy says. “This was the original gate to Buffalo when it was a thriving metropolis. Now it’s become a graveyard of industrial waste and sewage and syringes.”

Talking a mile a minute, he runs off a string of what-ifs: What if there were a table installed so fishermen could gut their fish right there? What if a community group took ownership of the landscaping? What if, at the end of the long walk down the breakwall, there were some benches and a garden, maybe even a snack bar—in other words, a micropark—instead of a barren circle of rock? What if the water taxi that Rick Smith of Rigidized Metals hopes to put in the water started carrying pedestrians and bicyclists from Erie Basin Marina to that breakwall micropark, and to others up and down Buffalo’s waterfront?

“Places to commune, to get together with your family, your friends, to enjoy what we have right in our backyard,” he says.

“I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve traveled this waterway all my life,” he adds. “I grew up fishing all along the Niagara River and the lake. That’s why I’m doing this—because I want people to see it the way I do, to love it as much as I do.”

Later that afternoon, on Squaw Island, McCarthy strikes up a conversation with a couple whose relationship began with a stroll down the breakwall. As he talks with them, the revolving bridge over the canal swivels to let the Miss Buffalo pass through, carrying a couple dozen sightseers. The man, also named Jay, reflects on the changes on the waterfront since he was kid in the 1960s and 1970s, swimming and fishing and drinking beer on Squaw Island.

“Now that they’re doing something it’s an improvement over the last 30 years,” he says. “Gallagher Beach, Times Beach. LaSalle Park has been in transition since they decided to start building townhouses and condos down there. It shortened up the park but it made it more functional.”

He returns a wave to the people on the Miss Buffalo, who have cleared the bridge. “This was the joint when I was a kid,” he says and grins.” You came back here, you drank some beers and went swimming…You get beyond the stink, it’s a pretty good place to hang.”