COMMENTARY
Bruce Andriatch: Overbuilding is leaving us with eyesores
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Pat Bannister fought so hard to prevent Walgreens from building a store in Kenmore that even after the store was built, he vowed to never go in there.
Then one day, he needed to make a purchase, and the store was so close, and . . .
“I broke down,” he said.
But he never became a fixture at the store on Delaware Avenue. Really, no one did. The store wasn’t there long enough.
In most ways, that now-vacant drugstore is no different from the hundreds of empty buildings that dot the landscape across Western New York. But it is a stark reminder that for all their certainty about how great a project will be, developers are no better at predicting the future than anyone else.
That point was reinforced most recently in Evans, where officials were prepared to welcome Walmart to the community. The nation’s largest retailer wanted to build on the site of the former Grandview Drive-In Theater.
Town residents issued the standard ABW response—Anything But Walmart —and fought the project for three years.
In the course of that fight, a residual battle was waged to save the drive-in. It was unsuccessful. The screen was razed to make way for the store.
Now it turns out that the store won’t be coming. Tony Troidl, who led the group that fought to save the Grandview, could not hide his frustration.
“I’m just disappointed that we lost the drive-in for nothing,” he told a Buffalo News reporter last week.
If you want to understand frustration, drive down Delaware Avenue in Kenmore and look at the block between Palmer Avenue and West Girard Boulevard.
“You mean that abomination that I have at the corner which I warned our village fathers would happen?” said Thomas Garrity.
The proposal to build a Walgreens there caused quite an uproar a few years ago. Village residents—including Bannister and Garrity—responded by fighting the developer, the village and other residents. On the night the Village Board finally had to vote on the project, one trustee said he could not recall a more difficult decision in more than a decade on the board.
That’s where these stories usually end: The board gives its approval, the threatened or actual lawsuit goes away, the bulldozers arrive, and the store opens.
But this story has an epilogue: Within eight years of that fight ending, a developer was seeking permission to build two Walgreens within a mile of that location, both on Delaware, bookends at Sheridan Drive and Kenmore Avenue.
The original one that caused all the fuss? It turns out that was the developer’s second choice. When the more desirable first choice became available, the store was “replaced.” And now it sits vacant, with a sign in the window encouraging residents to shop at a different location.
Bannister ended up moving even closer to the former Walgreens after fighting against it, so he sees the vacant building all the time.
“I’m not angry about it. I don’t sit there and seethe,” he said. “But it is disappointing what happened and how it eventually turned out.”
Garrity said the problem in Kenmore and Evans is the same one in Amherst and Clarence and Lancaster and everywhere else. And it’s not that people aren’t playing by the rules. Maybe it’s that there’s something wrong with the rules.
“In a region that has so much vacant property, we have no reason to build where we don’t have buildings already,” he said. “We have so much of this kind of blight that needs to be addressed.”
bandriatch@buffnews.com
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