Published: September 03, 2009 11:58 pm      

HAMILTON: Niagara needs an irreparable second opinion

I guess that every generation not only gets a chance to screw up, but we also get the chance to start screwing up by stating that we won’t make the same mistakes that our predecessors made — and then we embark precisely upon the same path that they took when they screwed up.

Gov. David Paterson was in town Thursday to announce money for Clint Brown’s market-rate housing conversion of the pre-WWII-built South Junior High School, the conversion of the old police station/courthouse at 520 Hyde Park Blvd. into a much-needed supported-living facility and for the conversion of the old 39th Street School into patio apartments for seniors.

Now don’t get me wrong, anyone of those projects as a standalone project may be a wonderful thing. I’d love to live in the renovated South Junior/City Lofts building myself — mowing lawns and climbing ladders no longer have the appeal to me that they once had. Each developer is excited about their prospective projects, as well they should, and they can see both merit and prospective tenants for each. The needs, such as they are, exist, and they are doing their jobs. But where is the institutional government knowledge that is supposed to be looking out for the people that are effectively footing the bill for all of this, and who is providing general oversight on the overall impact that these projects will have on the city?

Here is why I say that — but where should I begin?

Because now there is money to renovate the old police station, let’s start with the new courthouse and police station.

Remember, the police and courts had to move out of 520 Hyde Park because the building was irreparable. We could not fix it. It was too far gone. Yet, after spending $47-million on a new station to attract businesses to Main Street, driving out successful businesses to do so, and tearing down a large, fully-occupied, recently-renovated apartment building, lo and behold, we can repair the old building!

But because we destroyed fully functional housing on Main Street to put up the new courthouse, we now somehow have to replace them too. Why? Because, that is what we do?

But if you are having a de ja vu right now over the old police station suddenly being repairable, let’s go back to the South Junior High School for a moment. Didn’t our Board of Education say the same thing about that building and wasn’t it said at the same time that they were building the new Cataract Middle (code word for junior high) School on the smoky-side of the busy, truck-laden Interstate 190?

Kathy Kudela spoke eloquently at the Governor’s press conference. So a better example of our institutional ignorance than South Junior is her Niagara Arts and Cultural Center. No, I am not calling Kudela ignorant: she is, indeed, quite bright. I am talking about our lack of collective institutional wisdom, though I have to say that the NACC has done, by hook or by crook, a wonderful job with both their building and the concept to which they have adapted it. But, this too was an irreparable building that necessitated the merging of two irreparable high schools, with one school being built in 1959, just a few years before the irreparable police station.

One of the sites considered for the irreparable police station was the irreparable 39th Street School. Are we starting to see a pattern here? And what else can we see from that school?

Ah, yes, the beautiful new facades on the 166-unit Packard Court Housing Project. You know, they were completed in 1943, just a few months after the same contractors completed the Centre Court Housing Project to the same specifications. But somehow Centre Court failed where it was built and aged faster than Packard, and that necessitated the housing authority to have to tear down those 144-unit, irreparable, American-made brick and mortar buildings to put up 282-units of, what is likely single-generation, Chinese-milled wood and vinyl replacements. Does anyone really think that those buildings will last longer than Packard Court?

So, the day before yesterday I peered through the fence and down into the huge hole that Norstar had dug into the north-west corner of the old city dump, a dump that I warned them about five-years prior and the dump that was once DiAmelio-Center Court Park. There I saw the 4-foot foundations for the HOPE-VI replacement houses and I could not help but to notice a few things. Those foundations were some 16-feet below both ground level and the layers upon layers of incinerator ash that rose above them. I noticed that our city’s prospects were likely the same as those piles of contamination they paid the contractors some $3-million to dig out to build that unnecessary project. I also noticed the 40-plus kids that had gathered around the basketball court in one last hurrah of summer before school restarted — a court that was once slated to be removed because the developers said that basketball attracts a negative element.

And here’s why I said that I guess every generation gets a chance to screw up. Remember, Wrobel Towers was built under the same premise as the 39th Street School project and that HOPE-VI is being built just down the street from the nine homes that I, as vice-president of the Area One Preservation Corporation, back in the ’80s, pushed the city to build. Timberwolves basketball player Jonny Flynn grew up in one of those homes, so I can only wish that others literally rise from the ashes to reach similar greatness. But I still think that before we submit ourselves to another development project, we need to get a second opinion before contractors operate on our future.

Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. His columns run Fridays in the Gazette. He welcomes feedback at Ken Hamilton930@aol.com.