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Re: Buffalo and the Love Canal

I wish they would just move these landmarks to Toronto. :)
 
Re: Buffalo and the Love Canal

Excellent tour, sean!

Midwestern downtown architecture is in a league of its own, but then you round a corner and it's detached clapboard houses and low-slung commercial strips. I don't think any of the Midwestern cities, with the obvious exception of Chicago had the critical mass of density to have been able to support themselves through the post-war years, white flight or not.

It's not like Cleveland or Detroit or Bufffalo, despite being a magnitude larger than Toronto in the early 1900s had anything resembling Queen Street, or College, Dundas, Bloor, Yonge, Roncessvalles, even. You know, a two, or three-storey dense commercial strip with tall townhouse streets flanking them. What amazed me when I traveled to places like Cleveland was that they were erecting parkways and strip malls in 1918, while on our side of the border we were still frantically building cheek by jowl factory and rowhouse neighbourhoods like Dickensian England in areas like Wallace and Symington, Old Weston Road and Brockton.

It's almost as if these midwestern cities, grand as they were, were the urban forerunners of Phoenix or Houston 75 years before the sunbelt even made a name for itself.
 
Re: Buffalo and the Love Canal

"What amazed me when I traveled to places like Cleveland was that they were erecting parkways and strip malls in 1918, while on our side of the border we were still frantically building cheek by jowl factory and rowhouse neighbourhoods like Dickensian England in areas like Wallace and Symington, Old Weston Road and Brockton."

Though arguably, Toronto's true equivalents to those parkway/strip mall developments weren't those working-class zones you mention, but more middle-classy stuff like Leaside, the Kingsway, etc. Maybe slightly later and less infrastructurally avant-garde, but...
 
Re: Buffalo and the Love Canal

^
Midwestern cities grew as industrial frontiers that expanded outward from the point of production like a river.

Toronto's surroundings of villages, towns and trade routes grew at the same time.
 
Re: Buffalo and the Love Canal

Good Buffalo/Niagara Falls tour!!! Good shots of Central Terminal as well of downtown Buffalo's neat architecture-I will second mention the Buffalo Savings Bank as of the best bank architecture anywhere!!!! Great stuff from WNY!!!! LI MIKE
 
Re: Buffalo and the Love Canal

I was recently at Love Canal, and I actually saw a chemical barrel poking out of a shrub outside the fenced-in area.
 
Re: Buffalo and the Love Canal

I don't doubt your story, but the Love Canal chemical dump was located completely within the now fenced-off area. I wouldn't be surprised if unscruplous citizens use the surrounding area as their own personal dump site. What are you gonna do, pollute the land, right?

The handful of occupied homes to the east and the new retirement community just across the street from the fence on the west (and located WITHIN the former containment zone) are very creepy.
 
Maybe when Las Vegas, Phenoex, and the rest of the booming south west US starts running out of water they will start to move back to Western New York and the rest of the rusty Great Lake Cities (?)

Hopefully some of these structures will still be standing!
 
I'm friends with some people on the BCT preservation committee. They really do some amazing work. (and they've let me climb all the way to the roof)
 
Buffalo Central Terminal info...

Torplanner: I have been in contact with the Buffalo Central Terminal preservation group through my NRHS contacts and www.Railroad.net/ - look under New York State Railfan and on the first page you will find Buffalo Central Terminal: The Big Discussion as one good example there and under the New York Central Railroad(Fallen Flags section) for more info.
I will second that they have done quite a bit to save that maligned structure...see: www.buffalocentralterminal.org/ and it truly is a classic that could have easily have been lost forever...
LI MIKE
 
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Can't wait until Buffalo Central is back to how it was in its glory days!

Why is there a Canadian flag outside City Hall? :confused:
 

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