8 May 2005
Bruce Jackson
The Peace Bridge is right on schedule
The judge's 1999 decision
According to Joe Illuzzi, editor of PoliticsWNY.com , Peace Bridge general manager Ron Rienas recently said that "If it hadn’t been for the Judge’s decision in 1999, we would have a bridge built already."
That's like saying, "If it hadn't been for the cops my bank robbery would have been a total success." Perhaps, but you shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.
It wasn't because of Judge Eugene Fahey's October 1999 decision (PBC #17:"Endgame at the Peace Bridge") that the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority didn't get to build an anachronistic steel twin span to expand truck capacity at the Buffalo-Fort Erie border crossing. All Fahey did was force them to start obeying New York's environmental law. If they'd followed the law in the first place, we'd be living with that steel twin span now, which was not only ugly but which would have vastly increased the amount of pollution on Buffalo's West Side and been far more expensive to maintain in comparison to modern concrete bridges.
The design consultants on that job were out of the same company that did the PBA's bridge maintenance, so it was fine with them if a bridge going up at the beginning of the 21st century used 1927 technology and was therefore far more expensive to maintain. The money was coming out of your pocket and going into theirs.
If the Public Bridge Authority had obeyed the law in the first place, they'd probably have gotten away with it. The Buffalo Niagara Partnership and the Buffalo News supported them in what they were trying to do to Buffalo. Fortunately, the PBA chose to cut corners and they got caught. The fault is all theirs; it is not the fault of Judge Fahey or the Public Consensus Review Panel or the New Millennium Group or any of the citizen groups that called attention to what was going on.
Relax, we're on track
Some people complain that even so, this is taking forever. Look, they say, at other projects, like the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan, which got going far more quickly. Well, not exactly: the Freedom Tower is currently totally stalled, with fights raging about purpose, design and designers—just what happened here. (See Peter Slatin, "Getting Free of Freedom Tower," Slatin Report, 5 May 2005) More important: the WTC project is domestic, involving one country with one set of laws. The Peace Bridge crosses an international border; everything about it involves at least four sets of not always compatible laws: Canada, the US, Ontario and New York State, plus the ordinances of Fort Erie and Buffalo. The political legal problems are exponentially more complex.
The PBA perhaps overcompensated for its pre-Fahey bullying ways by opening up the process, experimenting with a great deal of public discussion tied to a poorly designed voting process that was, finally, a lot of sound and fury but pretty much without significance. That public voting process didn't accomplish much in terms of design, but it got a lot of issues on the table, and meanwhile the environmental impact study was going on at the just about the same pace it would have gone on had there been no public meetings and voting at all. Those meetings and voting were in addition to, not instead of, the necessary process. The calendar is just about the same as if they'd never happened.
Now that process is almost done. They're moving toward selection of final architects and planners. The process will involve judges appointed by the governments of Fort Erie and Buffalo rather than ten politically appointed PBA commissioners meeting in closed session. As far as scheduling goes, there really is nothing to complain about.
What's it gonna be?
What kind of bridge are we going to get? The politicians and the PBA say they're going to build a "signature bridge," which most optimistically seems to mean a bridge interesting enough to join the area's other important architectural works, the ones you name when you finish a sentence that begins, "There's a lot of great architecture in Buffalo: Wright, Sullivan, Richardson, Bunschaft, Olmsted, Saarinen, Burnham, and now...." It won't be a Golden Gate bridge or a Brooklyn Bridge—the view from Olmsted's Front Park is interesting but not that interesting—but it will surely be a lot prettier than the twin span dog the PBA, the Partnership and the Buffalo News were trying to foist off on us six years ago.
Which brings me to an apology I owe Buffalo mayor Anthony Masiello. At a March 1999 meeting of the Common Council's Peace Bridge Task Force, Masiello, who was vacationing with his family in Florida, sent a message through Peter Cutler, then one of the city attorneys, suggesting that the apparent design deadlock be resolved by building a new signature bridge alongside the old bridge with its Parker truss. People snickered, made jokes about Tony's solution being to avoid making a decision, etc. I wrote about the fence-straddling absurdity of Masiello's vacation message in PBC #5 "Don't You Build No Ugly Bridge."
It now appears that Tony Masiello's vacation suggestion is what is going to happen. The new bridge (which people in Buffalo are desperate to get) will, in all likelihood, be built alongside the old bridge (which people in Fort Erie are desperate to keep). Bridge designer and engineer Christian Menn says there's no reason an interesting modern design couldn't work in partnership with the 1927 bridge. Look, for example, at I.M. Pei's spectacular glass pyramid at the Louvre, built in 1986. Anything's possible, if you take your time and have the nerve to be interesting.
Downriver
What about the threat from the Detroit gang, Manuel "Matty" Maroun's Ambassador Bridge Company, which has been buying up property around the International Railroad Bridge on both sides of the border, saying it was going to build its own truck bridge that would compete with the Peace Bridge? They've bought all that property, people say, so they must be serious.
Not necessarily. Once the design for the new Peace Bridge is fixed and there's no more uncertainty about the fate of the neighborhood the value of that property will go up. Maroun will be able to sell it and get his money back; he'll probably even make a profit on the deal, even with the few bucks he's laid out for the local front he's set up here, run by Senator Daniel "Pat" Moynihan's former Buffalo chief, Jim Kane.
Setting up an international bridge is a vastly complicated affair. A score of federal and state agencies on both sides of the border are involved. Two expensive, time-consuming, and complex environmental impact studies have to be done. Connections from the private bridge to the public Queen Elizabeth Way on the Canadian side and to the downtown extension of the New York Thruway would have to be designed, approved and built.
You don't just do that, even if you're as rich as Matty Maroun. Just because you say you're going to do it doesn't mean anybody's going to let you do it, or even that you have any intention of doing it. So far, there's no evidence that Maroun's people have done even the preliminary groundwork for those complex and extended agency negotiations. All the public presentations of his bridge plan have been simple stuff, facile designs with no detail beyond the obvious. If there's any substance there, they've got it buried deep.
Matty Maroun's real bridge interest is in Detroit. That's the bridge operation he's trying to expand right now and that's where he's putting his real money. So far as I can tell, he's just blowing smoke in Buffalo, hoping to slow things down locally and confuse enough people so a chunk of the international traffic shifts to his Ambassador bridge linking Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario.If there's going to be a new bridge in Buffalo, it's going to be alongside the 1927 bridge with its graceful supporting arches and its absurd Parker truss, just as Tony Masiello suggested six years ago.
Copyright 2005 by Buffalo Report, Inc.