This is the first story in a two-part series that will analyze how the decision to build UB in Amherst, rather than Buffalo's waterfront, has shaped Buffalo's history and the student-community relationship. The second part can be found here.
Just for a minute close your eyes and try to see what Robert Coles sees.
It's a warm, breezy afternoon in April and two UB students just got out of class at the waterfront campus in downtown Buffalo. Behind them, the cool waters of Lake Erie shimmer under a bold sky. In front of them, a culturally and economically vibrant city rises up and spreads out for miles.
And all around them, UB's urban campus is alive with students heading out to eat downtown, going to study by the water or getting ready for a night out in the revitalized city of Buffalo.
Of course, Coles's vision is only a vision. There is no campus on the Buffalo waterfront, the city isn't revitalized, and the story of how UB could have been downtown is moot for those who know it and ancient history for those who don't.
But that doesn't mean we should stop telling it, because this particular "what if" story is just as much about our present and our future as it is about our past.
An Historic Choice
For Coles, a local architect and activist who still sees the campus and city that could have been every time he passes the waterfront site, UB's biggest "what if" story stirs his emotions today as much as it did four decades ago.
"Buffalo is a great city," said Coles. "But it could have been even greater."
In 1966, Coles was one of 40 Buffalo community members who founded Committee for an Urban Campus (CURB). Four years earlier, UB had been incorporated into the SUNY system and everyone realized that with an enormous influx of students expected, the lone campus on Main Street would be soon become inadequate.
In 1963, SUNY trustees issued a report that explored the pros and cons of five potential sites for a new campus: Cheektowaga, Elma, Grand Island, the waterfront and Amherst.
The report, which was kept secret for three years, highly recommended the waterfront. Yet in June 1964, the SUNY trustees voted unanimously on Amherst.
As chairman of CURB, Coles led an 11th-hour charge to have UB's new campus built downtown. With growing support, CURB argued UB's waterfront placement would mean a rebirth for the city of Buffalo, which was changing in the late 1960s as factories closed and residents moved to the suburbs.
"We said, my God, if that money (from a new campus) could be spent in Buffalo, what a difference it could make," said Coles. "We were aghast at what was happening."
That money, of course, never ended up inside city lines. Over the next 40 years the city's backbone industries moved out, and Buffalo lost nearly half its population.
Despite community efforts, the Amherst decision may have been inevitable. Local historians who have researched and written on the topic believe many of the actions taken by SUNY in response to the outspoken petitions by CURB and other community groups were probably a charade.
According to Coles, one reason for the 1963 report's secrecy and the choice of Amherst was that Charles Diebold, then the director of the SUNY Board of Trustees, also presided over Western Savings Bank, the mortgage holder for the Amherst land. Owing money to Diebold's bank, the Amherst landowners sold their land to Diebold's developers.
"We always had a certain cynicism that some Buffalo industrialist was getting his pockets lined by selling the (Amherst) land to the state," said UB alumnus Jim Brennan, a 1971 graduate who served as The Spectrum's editor in chief.
Whether he's right about Diebold's impact on the site choice, Coles said he still believes that had the campus been put downtown, it would have halted and reversed Buffalo's decline, injecting it with fresh blood and giving it a purpose again as an intellectual and cultural mecca.
"There's no doubt about it," said Coles. "We felt that if you could build this university downtown, if you could get 25,000 to 30,000 students down there, it could create demands for new housing, and then for the students it would give them a sense of what cities are like that they could not get living in Amherst."
Those who didn't support the waterfront plan, however, were skeptical. Among this group was former UB president William Greiner, who said he never believed a downtown campus would have changed the city's luck.
"Has anybody ever seen that happen?" said Greiner, who didn't play a role in the site selection but was a faculty member at the time. "There's simply no empirical evidence for that hypothesis."
According to Greiner, urban campuses work well as longtime fixtures in cities where they benefit from the city's growth, but not as catalysts for growth.
In fact, Greiner said he thought what made the most sense was not to move but to expand the Main Street campus, which many professors supported. But faced with moving, the faculty and alumni favored Amherst.
"It was an impossible site," said Greiner of the waterfront. "No one in his right mind would have considered it."
Favoring Amherst, Greiner echoed the SUNY trustees' opinion: building downtown would have meant transportation and parking problems, and would have left the university with no room to expand. As the reports pointed out, Amherst offered three times more land than the waterfront.
According to Coles, the waterfront's 450 acres wouldn't have been a problem.
"It's what might have been, with a big might," said Greiner. "Would it really have been good for greater Buffalo to jam UB downtown? I find so few people who posit the downtown solution."
Another voice not to be forgotten in this debate is that of the student body, which in 1966 took over the university president's office in protest and had been at odds with the university and community over social issues and the Vietnam War.
"We were very crowded on that campus so it was very appealing to move to where there was more space," said Brennan, the editor of The Spectrum.
The Amherst site meant "geographic exile," which was exactly what officials and community members wanted for the outspoken activist student body they considered dangerous, according to Brennan.
"I always thought it made much more sense to revitalize downtown," said Brennan.
"In It Together"
No matter how good this "what if" story is, there is a catch to telling it: it's all too easy to get caught up in the differences between the story's two sides, when it is the similarities that make it relevant, important and worth telling.
Coles and Greiner will never agree on the past, but they do agree on the future - that all was not lost on one decision made 40 years ago. For UB, its students and Buffalo, there is still a lot to smile about, still much to be gained, and it all starts with knowing the past and acting now for the future.
"I'm a great believer in the city and I want it to succeed," said Greiner. "But the city and the whole region has to think about what it can be instead of what might have been."
According to Greiner, even though UB isn't downtown, it's done a great service to Buffalo by building itself into a great university and a valuable asset, which is what's most important for now and for the future.
"It kills me when I hear my friends in the city putting down people who live in the suburbs and vice-versa," he said. "We're all in it together."
For Coles, the key lies in the axiom that those who do not know history are subject to repeat it.
"I think it's not only necessary for students to know," he said, "but it's necessary for everybody to know."
