A CFEA press conference today regarding our master plan for Buffalo’s waterfront and the City of Buffalo as a whole.

You have staked out a position in direct opposition to that of Rep. Brian Higgins. I think it’s safe to say that few politicians have done more to advance the cause of the waterfront - especially Buffalo’s outer harbor - than he.

You use rhetoric that is either hyperbolic or patently false. Route 5 is a road - not a wall. I have been told that the reason why it was bermed in that location has to do with continuous wintertime snowdrifts due to the unimpeded wind off the lake. The at-grade section further south has the former Bethlehem Steel plant land as a buffer. Did you know that?

You constantly bring up the Skyway even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with this particular project. The Southtowns Connector project has one aim and one aim only - to reconfigure Fuhrmann Boulevard to a 4-lane boulevard, and to improve access to and from it off of Route 5. As you well know from your press conference this morning, it is extraordinarily difficult to navigate around the outer harbor. All you’re doing, whether you know it or not (and whether you care or not), is hindering and delaying the improvement of that access.

Congressman Brian Higgins released the following statement today regarding the construction of a new tree-lined parkway on Buffalo’s Outer Harbor Waterfront:

“Buffalo has been waiting for fifty years for access to the Outer Harbor waterfront, and in the 2008 construction season they will see the construction of an easy-to-navigate, two-way, tree-lined parkway which will provide this access for the first time. This project has been the subject of fifteen years of study and public comment, is fully permitted and fully funded at $55 million, and Buffalonians will not tolerate delay in the construction of the waterfront parkway they deserve.

The Parkway which will be constructed next year provides better linkages to the surface-level bridge for which I will seek funding in the coming years to link downtown directly to the Outer Harbor. This bridge will work well if it is linked to a two-way parkway, rather than a disjointed system of one-way road segments called for in the boulevard alternative.”

Podcast Archive: Click through to listen to Congressman Higgins explain his position:

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.

With respect to the elevated I-190 that runs like a gash through downtown Buffalo, we are hardly alone. Back in the 50s and 60s, many other older cities actually wanted to separate their thriving downtowns from their smelly, industrial waterfronts. An elevated highway to make it easy to pass through or commute to downtown was a welcome addition. In Buffalo, the I-190 snakes its way not too far from the shore of the Niagara River, and is at-grade pretty much all the way down until it reaches the Niagara Street exit.