Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus—
Reversing the Trend of "Big Plans Gone Awry"

By Terri Parsell Hilmey
Buffalo Spree
January/February 2007

Buffalo’s Implementile Dysfunction

BassPro has been “in the works” since the late 1990s, but the city has seen only obstacles and setbacks, aside from the occasional photo op with politicians dressed up in camouflage. The Peace Bridge controversy, Twin Span vs. Signature Bridge, rears its head every now and again, spawns various impact statements and studies, and then hibernates once more. Elaborate, exciting plans for development on the Waterfront come forward, and then fade into nothingness. It’s no wonder Buffalo residents get a bit jaded when anybody has “big plans” around here.

But the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus has been thankfully different. There has been real progress and increasing momentum. Three new beautiful, architecturally significant buildings now stand in a part of the city which has sorely needed attention and rejuvenation. Funding from federal, state, and local governmental agencies and private foundations has begun to flow into the area, and more is on the way to create “an oasis of active living,” together with a world-class, state-of-the-art research and learning hub.

The Medical Campus and its Neighbors

The BNMC was created on 100 acres bordered by downtown, Allentown, and the Fruit Belt. The University at Buffalo, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Kaleida Health, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, and the Buffalo Medical Group Foundation, the founding members, already made their homes in close proximity, and had a history of sharing research, information, and leadership with one another. The idea of a world-class medical campus, along the lines of those already in place in cities like Boston, Baltimore, and Louisville, came about to enhance the relationship between the institutions and make the sharing of information easier.

Once the framework was in place, the idea grew into a larger plan to fully incorporate the streetscape, the buildings, and the research, as well as integrate the entire campus with its neighboring residential and business areas. The concept of combining information, people, learning, the cityscape, and a certain entrepreneurial spirit has generated 400,000 square feet of state-of-the-art research and lab space on Ellicott Street, called the Buffalo Life Sciences Complex, along with many other structural improvements.

Active Living by Design

Frederick Law Olmsted, retained by our city’s founders to plan its layout, once referred to Buffalo as the “best-planned” city in America. His strategy was to enhance environmental beauty, encourage physical activity, and create a system where citizens would be able to relax and maintain their health in a natural way. The BNMC’s hope is that we may return to that sensibility.

The BNMC has been awarded an important grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, making Buffalo part of their “Active Living by Design” program. The grant money will be used in a variety of ways which incorporate public art, encourage collaboration and physical movement among the member institutions and surrounding neighborhoods, and persuade people to enjoy ambling from the Fruit Belt and Allentown into, around, and through the Campus itself.

BNMC’s “Neighborhood Action Plan” specifically targets open access to the Fruit Belt, Allentown, and downtown, promoting walking and bicycling around the 100-acre footprint, and throughout the neighborhoods, linking up greenspace as well, creating a continuous greenway. Some improvements have already been made. Crosswalks have been restriped and streets and sidewalks have been repaved. The BNMC logo has been placed on the street signs, and a banner sign has been raised on the 33 Expressway to designate the Campus exit.

Issues being addressed in the Fruit Belt include streetlights that are car-oriented, not pedestrian-oriented. Tree branches hang low, trash receptacles are few and far between, crosswalks are not adequately marked, sidewalks are not paved, and, even if they are paved, they are sometimes too narrow. The planners took into account a respect for the neighborhood, and its separate identity, by creating a template for how the area’s infrastructure should be crafted, with a unique palette for those sidewalks, benches, trash barrels, streetlights, and curbing.

The Allentown neighborhood is obviously in much better shape, with some pavement treatments and historic light fixtures already in place. What is currently there needs reinforcing in terms of bike racks, missing crosswalks, streetlights, etc.

The largest infrastructure changes on the campus itself will begin construction in the spring or summer (geared to wrap up in late 2007).These changes will enable all members of the BNMC to have a presence on Ellicott Street, making it the signature street, or the “spine” of the campus, changing it from a one-way street to a two-way street, delineated by special lighting, special curbs, parking and streetscape planning. A skyway across Ellicott Street will also link the buildings, easing the movement of biological and research materials between the two institutions, along with a pedestrian walkway.

A capital improvement plan in the design phase extends Allen Street over Main and Washington, all the way to Ellicott, splitting the NFTA station in half. This idea has popular appeal, and was championed by Barry A. Muskat in the March 2006 issue of Buffalo Spree.

The Public Artscape

The success of the “Active Living by Design” program encouraged BNMC to collaborate with other community members to successfully pursue another grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this one focusing on public art. A prominent local gallery owner, Nina Freudenheim, helped to assemble an art committee which included Louis Grachos and Douglas Schultz, the current and former directors of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, along with Sandra Firmin, curator of the UB art gallery.

Their objective was to have all of the outdoor art integrated and incorporated into the design of the walkways to encourage public viewing. The winner, an architectural firm named nArchitects, embraced health as their subject matter and their design theme, using diagrams of vitamin chemical strands as intersection markers, etc. Their proposal, highlighted in the October issue of Architectural Record, is a holistic approach to the streetscape, incorporating all of the public spaces, and treating everything as art: the benches, the planters, the lighting, the sidewalks, curbing, and all of the materials used.

Bringing National and State Resources to Buffalo

National foundation grants, together with state and federal monies, contribute to a change in flow with which we are all too familiar. Money tends to flow out of Western New York, and into state and federal coffers. Local charitable organizations are devoted to improving Buffalo through donations and volunteer organizations, so it is not so unusual to get local buy-in. Bringing national money into Western New York, however, is better.

National charitable grants are difficult to obtain, which makes the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant all the more worthy of congratulations. The grant brings in $200,000 over five years, and is enhanced by grants of $50,000 for the Artscape program, and $50,000 for a “Healthy Eating by Design” program recently implemented at Bennett Park Montessori.

The WNY delegation in Albany supports BNMC as well, producing more than $20 million in state capital funding, bringing money into an area of the city which they feel is destined for growth. The BNMC’s plan has been designed specifically to take advantage of partnerships with both private and public organizations by being flexible.

All of these various projects work together to aid an entrepreneurial mindset, and facilitate the profit-making work of the Campus. Too often, an important discovery will be made in one place, and be exploited and utilized in another place. If a discovery has industrial and/or clinical applications, the BNMC puts scientists in a position to create companies and take advantage of their own projects. This also serves to bring more money into Buffalo, and keep local money and intellectual property here. For decades, the founding member’s scientists, researchers, and clinicians, including the area’s only Nobel laureate, Dr. Herbert A. Hauptman, have collaborated among themselves. Such well-known medical advances as the internal cardiac pacemaker, Nicorette® Gum, and the Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test, have been created in the past by the BNMC’s member institutions.

The partnership of the Medical Campus, the Fruit Belt neighborhood, the Allentown neighborhood, and downtown, benefits the city of Buffalo in many ways by eliminating obstacles and increasing free flow (of information, of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, of research, of patients, of money, of art, etc.), and aids the BNMC’s vision of a better Buffalo.


Terri Parsell Hilmey is a freelance writer and mother of two living in Williamsville.

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