Waterfront

Urban design and tourism advocates are calling on Governor Andrew Cuomo to commit to removing Niagara Falls State Park’s three surface parking lots, which they argue blight the park and detract from its natural awe.  Cuomo has refused similar demands in

Niagara Falls State Park is the oldest in the nation, founded in 1885. It hosts just over nine million visitors annually and is among the most iconic natural monuments in North America. The state park itself is 221 acres and was

BY FRANK PARLATO The New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) agreed last week to spend an unspecified sum of taxpayer money on a full and formal Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to examine alternatives to maintaining the Buffalo Skyway. The

BY JIM OSTROWSKI The power elites who have run Buffalo into the ground for decades have largely squandered the greatest inland waterfront in the United States, ours.  Only in recent years has progress been made.  It is said that China builds the

BY TONY FARINA The local construction company suing the state over its termination as the Canalside contractor in July of 2013 has won a major victory in the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court. In a unanimous ruling handed down

BY JAMES HUFNAGEL It couldn’t have been made any clearer had it been posted on billboards, shouted from rooftops or written in skywriting. If there was ever the shadow of a doubt in your mind that the south Robert Moses

Congressman Brian Higgins is urging the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority to spend over $40 million to redevelop the DL&W Terminal into a light rail station. The controversial publisher Matthew Ricchiazzi, a Cornell trained urban planner, is calling Higgins’ plan “another ignorant

The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority is considering two alternatives in its planning of an extension of the light rail system to the the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino and the future site of an anticipated Buffalo  Bills Stadium. The first —

County legislator Lynne Dixon (I-Hamburg) is rallying the community against the State Department of Environmental Conservation’s plan to only partially clean up the former Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna. The Cuomo administration plan calls for excavating contaminants, but the relocating

We don’t pay enough attention to the impact that sounds can have as a place making urban design tactic. Sound can have — like the smell of Cheerios baking or the subtle scent of seaweed in a lakefront breeze —

The Blackrock and Riverside sections of Buffalo could be nationally renowned neighborhoods with an extraordinary quality of life. But rather than securing a gorgeous waterfront as public space, we have allowed a massive interstate to sever the city from it’s waterfront,

One of the most profound urban design mistakes in Buffalo’s history has been our treatment of Scajaquada Creek. In Black Rock, the creek winds though industrial brownfeilds and functions as a sewage ditch — with all of the runoff pollutants from

It’s time to buildout Canalside into a real neighborhood — dominated by affordable mixed use primarily residential development with ample storefronts and pedestrian oriented streetscapes. How can we do it? By creating an affordable housing tax credit — not dissimilar

Former State Senator Al Coppola is working with a team of preservationists, activists, and community leaders to redevelop the long defunct lighthouse that sits at the southern entrance of Buffalo’s outer harbor. The lighthouse was once used to assist industrial

Our region’s most renowned art museum boasts an enormous collection so large that only up to 3% of it can be displayed at any given time. The institution is considering an expansion, and finds itself landlocked at its Delaware Park

The Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation (ECHDC) has been criticized for advancing a development plan for Buffalo’s outer harbor that includes small cul-de-sacs of exclusive luxury housing that privatizes much of the publicly owned parcel. The announcement comes after weeks of