Excerpts from
Court testimony argues we need to do canal right

by Donn Esmonde, Buffalo News Columnist

Reprinted from The Buffalo News, March 13, 2000

The public battle rages over a new bridge. Meanwhile, the fight to save Buffalo's historic equivalent of a Bunker Hill or Abe Lincoln's birthplace is being waged in a courtroom before a handful of spectators.

Local preservationists have sued to save the historic Erie Canal wall, streets and buried building foundations on the Inner Harbor, including what's thought to be an Underground Railroad site.

In case you missed it, archaeologists last spring found on the downtown waterfront the walls of the Commercial Slip, the historic terminus of the Erie Canal. It was here Gov. DeWitt Clinton 175 years ago filled a bucket of water and headed to New York Harbor, opening the waterway that changed Buffalo's history and the face of America.

U.S. District Judge William M. Skretny - to his credit - is taking a long look at this. Skretny soon will decide whether planners tried to take a shortcut around history and have to go back and do this thing right.

Rather than view the find as an opportunity, the city and state - which are running the Inner Harbor project - saw it as an inconvenience. Their plan is to rebury the Commercial Slip "for posterity" (i.e. forever) and build a cement-lined "replica" next to it instead - a replica that will look more like an in-ground swimming pool than a piece of our past.

That was no surprise. Years of plans treated the 12 acres like any chunk of waterfront, not the most historic site on a revolutionary waterfront. In fact, they hadn't bothered to dig for the canal wall preservationists said was there until weeks before the bulldozers were supposed to roll in.

Preservationists say that this whole thing was done mule-ass backwards. That's because the necessary environmental impact statement, which measures any historic and environmental harm the project might do, was finished months before anybody dug to find out what was there to harm.

U.S. District Judge William M. Skretny - to his credit - is taking a long look at this. Skretny soon will decide whether planners tried to take a shortcut around history and have to go back and do this thing right.

Some folks already have weighed in.

"I don't understand how you can possibly do a determination of no (harm), " Robert Melnick testified, "without knowing what you are affecting."

Melnick isn't some yokel; he's dean of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon. He helped write the national guidelines for evaluating historic landscapes.

The reason he testified, via satellite hookup from Oregon, is that he thought the folks running this show screwed up.

"That's why I was willing to get involved, because I thought the process was faulty," said Melnick by phone. "I think it's wrong to go about it that way."

"If you don't fully understand what the historic resources are, how can you understand what will be harmed or given up?"

Amen.

The city and state give a laundry list of reasons why they can't excavate the slip and more of the streetscape: It would take too much time to pull down the 1920s storm drain that runs down the middle of the slip. The canal wall stones would dissolve, explode or otherwise vanish. We don't have the money.

None of it holds water. An engineer who restored part of the Erie Canal Schoharie, brought here by local preservationists, said the Commercial Slip can be excavated, restored and refilled with water. UB geologist Rossman Giese says the canal wall's rocks "will survive for thousands of years" if the slip is restored.

Washington has thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at restoring the Erie Canal. The money is there for the asking - we just haven't asked.

The way I see it, the real reason they don't want to excavate the slip is, well, because they don't want to. You've got a mayor with precious few accomplishments who's desperate to get something done on the waterfront before next year's election.

You've got state people, who's earlier plans would have obliterated the slip ( how's that for historic sensitivity?) who think this has dragged on long enough.

Since discovering the wall ten months ago, the city hasn't hired an engineer to check it out. It hasn't done more digging for the rest of the walls or to see what kind of shape they're in. The city says it cares-- but acts like the neglectful mother who wants custody of her kids but can't remember their birthdays.

What happens on this 12 acre patch doesn't stop Adelphia's John Rigas from building a satellite headquarters next to it, with 1,000 jobs. It doesn't stop any grandiose, taxpayer subsidized plan to reuse the Aud as a sports entertainment/ retail center.

All it stops is another mistake.

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