For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
- John Greenleaf Whittier, “Maud Muller,” 1856
The Wagner & Nauland Block, a composition of two Italianate commercial structures at 742-748 Seneca Street, was demolished in the late 1990s. Was it necessary?
This photograph, taken at about 1979 by Black Rock activist Scott Glasgow, shows the block in its final iteration as Mindy’s Home Service, a used appliance store that occupied the site into the mid-1990s. The heritage structures, which would have finely complemented the streetscape of any city, were reportedly in good repair at the time of their demolition, only a few years before the 2002 rehabilitation of the Larkin Terminal Warehouse, 500 feet away, shattered misconceptions about the potential marriage of preservation and economic development in Buffalo’s “near downtown.”
As little as fifteen years ago, economic development officials viewed the Hydraulics as a strategic location for new shovel-ready parcels that could act as an extension of the Exchange Street Business Park, located to the west of Hamburg Street, and the notion of repurposing the district’s existing building stock for economic development was not yet appreciated. Today, the idea of a revived, mixed-use neighborhood, with varied economic activities, is now on the table, but unfortunately for pioneering urban investors who may have acted on the untapped potential of the Wagner & Nauland Block, this opportunity was laid waste by the city’s ubiquitous bulldozers. Here is the same site today:
Seventy-five years ago, the corner of Seneca and Emslie was a hotbed of urban activity. The corner had a stop for the yellow #15 streetcar, replaced by buses in 1941. A line-up of commercial structures fronted the street, a setting for a bank, taverns, groceries, barber shops, a post office, a drug store, candy stores, and a movie theater. Many of these commercial structures still exist, holding out potential for new economic activity, but the Wagner & Nauland Block is only a memory, the panoply of activities it once housed a subject for historians: N. A. Carroll’s wholesale liquor, Casper Wagner’s boarding house, the A & P grocery, a Deco restaurant, Frank Trautmann’s meats, Joseph Romanello’s restaurant, Emele Nicholas confectionery, Frederick Nauland’s market, and Oliver Hosterman’s bakery being only a few examples of productive uses the structures housed since their construction around 1880.
The Wagner & Nauland Block was not only a charming pair of buildings worthy of preservation, they were economic development tools in waiting, capable of housing inexpensive, attractive space in which new ideas, providing new jobs, could have been attempted. While the vacant lots that remain could be still be developed, albeit more expensively, the lost opportunity represented by the demolished structures forces one to ponder: What might have been?
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
April 3rd, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Very similar to the string of buildings that became the Granite Works at Main/Virginia. Buffalo’s problem is many believe sealed and boarded up is equated with ‘blight.’ If only we hung on to some of these for a few years until a new use came along…