Got the news that Grandma Byrnes died last night from her University District home. She was 90 and lived a very fulfilling life.
She came with her sister from a small Canadian town to Buffalo in the 1940’s to pursue a better life and did. Grandma lived on Ellicott Street downtown (a current surface lot next to St. Micheal’s) until she met her husband and lived in the same Minnesota Ave house for 55 years.
A devout catholic whose 50 something years of tithing at St. Josephs must have single handedly kept the church going
Graduated from Bryant and Stratton, a secretary at the old Marine Trust Building downtown, and a waitress at the Buffalo Club on Delaware but most importantly a mother of 7, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 2. A strong woman who stayed strong ’till the bitter end.

The Washington Capitals have a new skating facility. It’s right next to the Ballston Station on the orange line and is on the 8th floor of the Ballston Commons.
PS The Sabres should think about using retired number banners that look like the ones in the back of the top picture.
So after the practice I got to meet the biggest enemy in Buffalo…Alex Ovechkin

Hate him all you want, he’s a great guy for a superstar. Never says no to a photo/autograph request and on the ice, plays his heart out every single shift
That said, I enjoyed Briere’s retalliation spear.
And then I got to meet one of the best/most experienced fighters in the NHL, Donald Brashear…

Only in DC can you be the star goalie of your hockey team for 10 years and be able to walk around a shopping mall with your teammate and not be noticed. That’s what happened when Olaf Kolzig walked around the mall after practice. Hell, he even had to start a conversation with someone (me) just to be able to talk. Imagine Ryan Miller or Marty Biron walking around the Galleria…a completely different situation.
After visiting the facility, I was reminded that Capitals fans are the wierdest hockey fans I have ever met. They obsess about players but they can’t even recognize any of them without their uniforms on. Most of them are middle aged ladies (nothing wrong with that but its just…bizarre), families from Europe who have never really liked sports but hockey “looks fun”, and then the other type are people look like the kids who always sat by themselves at the lunch table in High School.
Being a hockey fan around here is almost being an outcast to DC society and today’s crowd was a reminder of that. Hockey is the anti-washingtonian way of being.

I miss my Buffalo and I miss my Sabres fans.

Big fan of this new place. What used to be here was a terrible strip mall and one of the larger surface lots I’ve ever seen (only one bigger is the plaza right next to it!).

They razed the thing and put a plaza up front with only two rows of parking between the sidewalk and the building, put stores behind it, and beside it (these stores are built up to the sidewalk)

and get this…put residential units on top! You never see that in suburbs!
The place even has a parking garage that blends in really well with the place (in other words, only the big gaping hole and sign saing “retail parking” gives it away that its a parking garage)

So these hundreds of residents don’t even need a car to go shopping. And if they get bored, theres another huge shopping plaza right across the street.

Some sort of smart density movement is occurring and that is awesome. But my god the sprawl down here is insane. Northern Virginia is losing acre after acre of natural land to three-story office complexes and large housing developments and huge strip malls…all apart from each other and with no public transportation in sight.

Maybe Buffalo’s shrinking status is good.

Here is the other side of the White Flint metro station near my old stompin’ grounds. The glass cover is a pretty cool new thing they did for the underpass to avoid the dreaded cross of the pike.
The wide brick sidewalks are new too. Behind me is the brand new “Bethesda North Marriott/Conference Center” and on the other side of the picture is a new cobblestone median to make it a little easier for pedestrains on the other side.
No dobut the place is still a hardcore suburb but its cool to see they’re putting thought into the place.

Wanna know what else makes this place a cliche suburb?

That McDonalds in the picture is where anyone who was anyone in all the private and public high schools of the area went to meet up. Yeeeeah I like living in cities, thanks.

A major road in Rockville, MD (20min from DC and 3min from my parents’ home) has seen a serious change in its skyline since I first lived there in 1995 and only since 2004 have the high rises really started to pop up on the street.
Montgomery County (warmly referred to by me and my associates as “MOCO”) has made it a goal to humanize the car-only design of the Pike. New brick sidewalks, and now a heavy encouragment of high rises being built up to the street with 1st floor retail…closer to the metro the better.
These three are new to the skyline. The intersection behind it is brutal for a pedestrian…usually a 10min wait and then a 5 second window to cross before turning cars honk you out of the way.
The tower furthest to the left has six retail outlets on the 1st floor and has rather large brick sidewalks.

Its’ going to take a lot more to get this part of town to look like the very urbanized neighbor, Bethesda but its never too late to start and it looks like they finally have.

Two things of note..
1. These condo towers look much better than the proposed one for Waterfront Village and thats sad.
2. Next post will be about a pretty cool suburban living area. Very human, with a lot of urbanist thought put into it (with much suburban compromise too but still good).

It’s interesting that a city can take lessons in design from a suburb 400 miles away that never even had any though put into it until three years ago.

I went to the small town of Easton, Maryland today. It was founded in 1710 and its downtown is perfectly in tact. Great use of preservation and their new builds blend in with the old ones. This particular street, “Washington St” made me think of Ellicott Street in downtown Buffalo including what Rocco Termini is doing with his Ellicott Commons as well as the historic/infamous Genesee Block.
Apartments and offices on the top floors, banks, stores, and restaurants on the bottom. Real nice flow of traffic, good landscaping.
Hope this is Ellicott St. in Downtown Buffalo next year

I’ve called city hall last week, and today…case is still open. If anyone else frequents this part of Main street and is as embarassed as I am to see it, call up City Hall and complain!

City Hall says they close cases within 30 business days so I believe they have about 20 days to get around to it.

EDIT: The number to call is 851-4972. Tell them to fix the window at Dragon Express 525 Main Street. Victory will be ours!

Slowly (very slowly)but surely, Issa’s “City Tower” is getting closer to becoming a reality. The planning board is looking at it and of course, someone on the board actually objected to it…saying it was too big. Nice.
If Issa can pull off 40 then goshdarnit, let him pull off 40. I’m a bit impatient though and would like to see beams in the ground by 2010. So I wouldn’t mind seeing it go down to 35 or 36…but this building is more important than just its function. It’s a statement about our city…by being the tallest it says that it’s the dawn of a new era for the city and that the past will not continue to tie us down. Buffalo is notorious for settling for less though, still…anything over 30 stories in Buffalo is huge.

Correction: Anything over 5 stories is huge in Buffalo.