A University at Buffalo professor and East Side expert warned this week that the $1 billion Kensington Expressway project will be a lost opportunity unless those in charge listen to what critics are saying.
Henry-Louis Taylor Jr., who directs the UB Center for Urban Studies and was the lead researcher on last year’s report, “How We Change Buffalo’s East Side,” said the East Side Parkways Coalition and Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy are right in calling for a section of Route 33 to be filled in to reconnect Martin Luther King Jr. and Delaware parks as part of a comprehensive plan to revitalize surrounding neighborhoods.
“This project has the ability to “alter the trajectory of the East Side,” Taylor said, but he warned that unless lawmakers change course, it runs the risk of squandering the largest investment ever made on the East Side.
The current Kensington Expressway plan calls for a ¾-mile tunnel between Dodge and Sidney streets, covered with grass and trees, in an attempt to reconstruct a portion of the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Humboldt Parkway destroyed during the highway boom of the 1950s and ‘60s.
Critics of the plan want to restore the nearly 2-mile parkway designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and have called for an agency other than the state Department of Transportation to develop broader goals that focus on community redevelopment and revitalization.
“Everyone believes filling in that area and reconnecting the two parks is the way we should go,” Taylor said. “If they do this project the way they are planning, I guarantee they will build this deck and nothing transformative will happen.
“We’ve seen these moments come and these moments go,” said Taylor, whose first study of the East Side was in 1990, with the report “African Americans and the Rise of Buffalo’s Post-Industrial City.” “Do we want a business-as-usual project, or do we want to do something transformative on the…
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