CHEEKTOWAGA
Town residents urged to help make their community picture-perfect
As the Planning Board develops guidelines intended to make Cheektowaga a better-looking, more-prosperous town, it wants residents to go online and help by choosing favorite looks from photos of other cities.
The survey posted at www.town.cheektowaga.ny.us has pictures of options — houses, urban brick buildings and suburban plazas with sidewalks and plants —from Washington, D. C., Fayetteville, N. C., Celebration, Fla., St. Louis, Portland, Ore., among others. “You’ve got to use a little bit of imagination with it and project out,” said John Marriott, a Planning Board member who urged residents to fill out the questionnaire during a Town Board meeting earlier this week.
The survey — online through the end of July — is posted within the comprehensive plan link at the center of the town’s home page, www.town.cheektowaga.ny.us . Clicking through and selecting preferred photos can take 25 minutes to an hour. The town style quiz has attracted 100 people in the last month it has been posted, a fraction of the 33,000 households Marriott counts in Cheektowaga.
“I would like to see every one of those households do it,” he said. “I think that would give us a very good cross section of what people want.”
The survey will help the board prepare a draft of the new comprehensive plan for a public hearing next March. It was designed by the Amherst architectural and engineering firm Wendel Duchscherer, which has worked on plans with other towns locally, including West Seneca and Hamburg, said Wendy Salvati, a senior planner, at the company.
There are three districts being considered for new design ideas: the Walden Avenue and Harlem Road area, the French Road corridor and the airport plaza.
“The town needs to find ways to improve its identity and its image,” Salvati said of Cheektowaga. “It has to look at ways to effectively redevelop [and] it has a lot of things it can capitalize on. . . . How can it do that better?”
Marriott also sees promise in the town’s asset as a transportation center. It is home to Buffalo Niagara International Airport, rail lines and highway exits.
Yet too much of the development has a plain, boxy unattractive look.
“You have a lot of buildings that were built in the 1950s with no particular style,” he said. “They were just plopped down.”
“Cheektowaga does not have a street that invites people to walk and shop in the same way that the long stretch of shops and restaurants along Main Street in Williamsville does. “We need to create that,” he said.
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