Buffalo, NY - In 1987, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and the Brandenburg Gate, imploring the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to “tear down this wall”. Two years later, it came down as a democratic revolution swept over the Warsaw Pact countries within the course of about 5 months.

The Berlin Wall wasn’t just a physical barrier. It was symbolic - it was the very embodiment of the East’s lack of freedom. It prevented its prisoners from visiting the West, where they would certainly come quickly to realize the inferiority of the brutal totalitarian state in which they lived. It was also one of the most brutally fortified de facto international frontiers in existence.

During the Berlin Wall’s 1963 - 1989 history, there were 5,000 escape attempts and 239 people perished trying to escape a communist totalitarian dictatorship and make a better, freer life in the West.

In 2007, a group of non-profits and community activists calling itself the “Waterfront Coalition” drenched itself in offensiveness and irony.

In order to protest one “wall” - the bermed Route 5 - the Waterfront Coalition purchased space on an actual wall. A billboard.