3 June 2004
Bruce Jackson
J. Alfred Prufrock takes control of the Peace Bridge expansion project
"Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?"
T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," 1917.
Do-ability
The Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority (PBA) dumped its plan to hire a high-powered lobbyist to help it lock in presently-available Federal transportation and national security money. Instead, the PBA will hire a consultant to tell it how much it will be able to afford on its bridge expansion and plaza renewal project. Instead of coming up with a design that makes sense and figuring out how to pay for it, they're going to cast about for hints of what money is available and will develop a design in terms of those hints.
Federal officials who have been following the project were astonished and appalled. "The money is there now," one said. "They should be asking, not stopping for a study."
According to the Buffalo News, Peace Bridge general manager (and former Fort Erie planning director) Ron Rienas said "We want an independent, unbiased assessment of the whole financing package for this project. People have to come to the realization that there is a "do-ability' factor for this project." Bridge chairman Paul Koessler said the consultant’s report would determine the final design. And New York Transportation Commissioner Joseph H. Boardman, who recent joined the Authority said, "I think it's critical. We've got to know what's affordable here."
"Do-ability" and "affordability" are PBA code for "Screw everything other than getting this done as quickly as possible" and "Let’s think small."
If Pat Moynihan were alive he’d be all over them for those words and everything they imply. "Do-ability?" he'd say. "Do-ABility?" his voice getting louder. "DO-ABILITY?" It would come out like he'd caught them in some silly, petty game when things that really mattered were at stake, which would have been the case. "DO-ABILITY?" Pat's lips would form a circle and curl to the front, as if he were in the process of saying "Doo-doo," which would also be the case. Only, Pat would have said something stronger and more specific.
Two ways of thinking about building a bridge
Assuming that putting more truck lanes in the heart of a populated area makes sense (it doesn't, but the PBA and the various governments involved treat it as a given and for now we're stuck with it), the question of bridge and plaza design can be approached two ways: bold and imaginative or Prufrockian.
The bold and imaginative mode is to decide what would best serve the three immediate stakeholders (the city of Buffalo, the town of Fort Erie, and the commercial and private users of the bridge here and elsewhere): efficiency, safety, aesthetics, environmental suitability, and so forth. Design that, and then go find the money to make it happen.
The Prufrockian mode is to first see what is available and what limitations seem to be on the horizon and then ask all questions in terms of them.
The Prufrockian mode is pusillanimous and grounded in a fallacy. Funds for projects like this are rarely sitting on as table marked "Funds for Projects Like This." The Ambassador Bridge people in Detroit recently got the U.S. federal government to pony up millions ostensibly for highway development but really to tweak and tune the approaches to their bridge. Special allocations are always possible in Congress. Even though New York has two Democrats in the Republican-controlled Senate and the Bush administration has written the state off in the November election, this is an international crossing that involves so much money even Republicans in the heartland have an interest in seeing something happen here.
That, I assume, is why Joseph H. Boardman now attends PBA meetings himself, rather than sending a proxy, as has traditionally been the practice. His presence means that Governor Pataki is finally taking an active interest in the slow-moving project, but it is yet to be seen if he is there to get a bridge built that will serve this region well or if he is there just to get more truck lanes up and running as soon as possible to satisfy shippers and their customers far from Buffalo.
In the runup to its recent public vote on bridge design option, PBA officials kept saying they had no preconceptions about bridge design. That is more and more difficult to believe. This new gambit of forgoing the option of locking down available federal money while a feasibility study is done and then doing design in terms of that study seems primarily in the service of ensuring that the old bridge is not replaced and the American plaza is not significantly reconfigured.
At the end of the line they’ll be able to say, "We didn’t choose dull design and an unimaginative gateway. It’s just that the dollars weren’t there for anything else."
The historical site fallacy
The other part of the Prufrockian operation has been executed by Bruce Campbell, who replaced Vincent "Jake" Lamb as director of the expansion project when the PBA board decided Lamb was paying too much attention to community concerns and not enough to getting more trucks moving across the border ASAP.
Lamb was sincerely interested in delivering a grand bridge and plaza; Campbell is interested in getting the job done. They've worked on the same project but they may as well inhabit separate planets. Campbell talks about the bridge expansion as if it were only marginally and accidentally connected to the plaza restoration project; for him, the plaza matters only insofar as bridge access ramps run through it or adjacent to it. He embodies the segmentation-thinking that led to Judge Eugene Fahey’s 1999 order stopping the twin span project. He evinces little knowledge of how the project got to its current state and little interest in learning about it. His boss, he says without qualification at the Common Council’s Bi-national Peace Bridge Task Force meetings, is Parsons Bridge and Tunnel and their client is the PBA. Ask Jake Lamb who his client is and he’ll say "The bridge," which is probably why they edged him out. The PBA and the interests they serve are thinking of trucks coming from somewhere in Ontario and going down the eastern seaboard and producing profits at both ends; Lamb is thinking of a piece of public architecture that will be part of the local environment for a hundred years.
A replacement bridge project is more complex, though not necessarily more expensive, than a companion bridge project. Campbell has been working very hard to convince people that the old bridge cannot be taken down because it is eligible for classification as an historical site by the New York State Historic Preservation Act of 1980. He has arranged meetings and presentations on the subject. He has been vigorously proactive in his exploration and publicizing of it.
"Eligible" means just that and no more: it might happen, but it hasn’t, as in "eligible bachelor," "eligible for the draft," "eligible to run for president of the United States." "Eligible" and "is" are different words and different states of being. Sites that are eligible for historic designation have certain protections, but only to keep them from being destroyed while questions are being asked about them. If "eligible" were the same as being an historical site, then there would be no need for two categories.
The Act is online at http://nysparks.state.ny.us/field/fsb/1409regs.htm . You can read it yourself. Paragraph (e) of section 426.1 "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 totally absent from all of Bruce Campbell’s public statements on the matter is the restoration of Front Park, a major Frederick Law Olmsted work. The park was destroyed by expansion of the bridge plaza over the past 50 years. Restoration of it would surely interest SHPA officials as much as preservation of the Peace Bridge with its Parker Truss, which got there only by bureaucratic fiat of the Coast Guard. The truss is a functional anachronism, since nothing approaching 100' has traversed that waterway in the lifetime of anyone presently connected with or likely to be affected by this project. It harks back to the days of sailing ships with tall masts. Tall masts on modern sailing ships fold; the countryside doesn’t have to be designed to accommodate them.
Campbell proudly says that he is an engineer by training and profession, but fretting about matters of this order before determining what would work best at this crossing is lousy engineering. No competent engineering firm, which Parsons surely is, would adopt that as its operating modality. Engineers are people who solve problems, not people who manufacture them.
I assume that Campbell really is a competent engineer, so his throwing the possibility of historical designation in the path of the project again and again it is not him dealing with an impediment; it’s him announcing a choice. It's like those people who say "Yes, but," when you're trying to help them do something they say they want to do. After several "yes, buts" you realize the "but" problems have nothing to do with anything. What's really being said is that they don't want to do it, and they'll keep finding ways not to do it until you're plumb worn out.
Bruce Campbell is starting from his conclusion and working back from there, and what he’s working back to is a place we should not be going.
Resurrect Pat
The design of the bridge and plaza may still be an open question by the time Buffalo’s mayoral race gets going next year. If Andrew Rudnick and the Buffalo Partnership are successful in their current plot to install one of their puppets in City Hall, then everything may collapse. Rudnick and the Partnership have long taken the position that Buffalo’s health needs, park possibilities and aesthetic concerns are of no consequence; only increasing truck lanes as quickly as possible matters. Two of the three likely non-Partnership candidates for mayor—Tony Masiello and Sam Hoyt—are strong on getting a decent bridge here. Hoyt is unlikely to waver and Masiello is now so invested in this publicly even pressure from his business community friends is not likely to turn him into a quisling. The third likely candidate, Byron Brown, has been mostly uninvolved in the Peace Bridge issue, or trying very hard not to offend anybody anywhere in it. If he actually does step out and run for mayor he'll have to declare himself.
Instead of all this pettifogging and Prufrockery, we needs someone with vision, or at least someone who appreciates vision. The best man for that job died March 26, 2003: Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Pat’s gone but his words are still around. Here’s part of a letter he sent the Buffalo Common Council Peace Bridge Task Force on May 28, 1999:
The grand American architect and scholar Daniel Burnham – whose gift to Buffalo was the magnificent Ellicott Square Building – challenged us to ‘make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.’
The Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority proposal to construct a ‘companion span’ alongside its existing bridge is indeed a little plan. Should it ever be built, it would stand for decades to come as a bitter reminder of what might have been done in its place.
A new bridge over the Niagara could become for Western New York what the Golden Gate has become for San Francisco’s Bay Area. A new gateway, a defining moment of entry. To reach Buffalo or Fort Erie over the Authority’s dull trestle when one could otherwise soar across on a bold new single-span would be rough justice for anyone who had the opportunity to imagine what could have been. Ada Louise Huxtable said, ‘Cities and men get what they deserve.’ Surely Buffalo deserves better.
Bruce Campbell and Ron Rienas and the PBA would probably be unmoved by that letter. They would say Pat wasn't practical, and anyway, he's dead. That's them. You want to talk about practicality, take a look at the restored Grand Central Station in New York, an absolutely glorious piece of public architecture people in the know said couldn't be restored because the money wasn't there and Pat Moynihan said "Oh yes it is" and it was.
Anybody who cares about what's going on along this part of the Niagara River should read Pat Moynihan's letter again and again and again. Make no little plans. We all deserve better. And can have it.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.