14 May 2004
Peace Bridge Chronicles #84
Bruce JacksonThe fallacy crippling the Peace Bridge expansion project: "Old" does not equal "Historically Significant"
It is more and more apparent that the people controlling the Peace Bridge expansion project are passionately committed to erecting a companion span—a bridge that keeps the old bridge company rather than one that replaces it entirely.
Bruce Campbell, who is currently heading up the project, seems of late to have been working very hard to convince people that the old bridge cannot be taken down because it is eligible for being classified as an historical site by the New York State Historic Preservation Act of 1980 (online at http://nysparks.state.ny.us/field/fsb/1409regs.htm ) He keeps setting up meetings in which various experts come in and pontificate about the eligibility of the Peace Bridge for being classified as an historical site.
That is all nonsense, and all those meetings are fluff and puff, wasting everyone's time. In law, "eligible" means almost nothing at all. It current Peace Bridge expansion project practice, it is a term used to foreclose other kinds of thinking and options.
If you're not a lawyer, you should know that there is no legal mumbo-jumbo or hocus-pocus that keeps you out of this conversation. "Eligible" means no more than what it seems to mean in plain English: it might happen, but it hasn’t, as in "eligible bachelor," "eligible for the draft," "eligible to run for president of the United States." The longest-shot in the world can be "eligible" if it fits the rules and regulations; that doesn't mean that anyone sane will ever want to vote it in or make it happen or do it. In New York, sites that are eligible for being declared historically significant have certain protections, but only to keep them from being destroyed while their eligibility is being determined. If eligible were the same as declared an historical site, then there would be no need for two categories.
Paragraph (e) of section 426.1 of the act, "Authority and Purpose" reads, "The act requires State agencies to consult with the commissioner if it appears that any project which is being planned may or will cause any change, beneficial or adverse, in the quality of any historic, architectural, archeological or cultural property that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places or property listed on the State Register of Historic Places or that is determined by the commissioner to be eligible for listing on the State Register of Historic Places. It requires State agencies, to the fullest extent practicable, consistent with other provisions of the law, to avoid or mitigate adverse impacts to such properties, to fully explore all feasible and prudent alternatives and to give due consideration to feasible and prudent plans which would avoid or mitigate adverse impacts to such property."
That describes a rational process, one with balances. One balancing factor that has been absent every time I have heard anyone from the PBA expansion project discuss what is going on here is the restoration of Front Park, a major public work designed by America's most honored public-space designer, Frederick Law Olmsted. Surely such restoration would interest the SHPA officials in Albany at least as much as preservation of the Peace Bridge's Parker Truss, which exists only by bureaucratic fiat of the Coast Guard and is a functional anachronism and a design disaster. (Late in the design process in 1926 the Coast Guard insisted that the bridge have 100' of clearance all the way across the Black Rock canal in case a sailing ship with a mast that tall should want to pass through. But no boat or ship with a height approaching 100' has traversed that waterway in the lifetime of anyone presently connected with or likely to be affected by this project. Tall masts on modern sailing ships fold; the countryside doesn’t have to be designed to accommodate them.)
It is lousy engineering to foreclose useful and viable options because someone in government might make a stupid and dysfunctional decision later. Far better to opt for good design, and if a bureaucrat doesn’t like it, make the argument then. Don’t do the stupid and dysfunctional work for them. Engineers should solve problems; not think up problems that fools might propose and then fall on their swords because of those thoughts.
More and more it seems that Bruce Campbell has fallen into the fallacy that contaminated this project from the beginning, the one that got Judge Eugene Fahey's court order stopping the PBA’s twin span project four years ago. He is segmenting, looking at the bridge as if it is a standalone object.
The Peace Bridge is not a standalone object. It is part of a complex system that involves an international gateway and a park system of great historical significance.
What if Bruce Campbell came at it the other way? What if instead of saying "Some clerk or committee in Albany might give us trouble down the line" he said, "We have a transportation opportunity that will let us restore Front Park and Fort Porter and give the city of Buffalo and the town of Fort Erie excellent international gateways." Then it all falls a totally different way. Then there is no need to spend energy and pay for public relations fluff dedicated to the mere burnishing of mediocrity.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.