Gone is the gritty, post-industrial thoroughfare that once provided a speedy back-door route into downtown Buffalo for thousands of Southtowns commuters.
In its place: a leaner, tree-lined residential street.
But $12 million in improvements brought more than just a spiffed-up street that looks nicer than most others.
Ohio Street has been transformed into a “green street.”
Among the changes:
- The number of vehicle lanes went from four to two – with total width decreased from 50 feet to 24 feet – along the seven-tenths of a mile stretch between Louisiana Street and Michigan Avenue.
- The width has been reduced by one-fourth along the half-mile stretch between Ganson Street and Fuhrmann Boulevard.
- A 12-foot-wide bike and pedestrian path – along with parking areas – were built with specially designed porous pavement to absorb rainfall and snowmelt. That allows the water to seep into the ground rather than run off into the road and sewer.
- Less pavement meant the restoration of nearly three more acres of lawn and green space, including wider areas for snow piles.
- Crews planted 272 trees from seven hardy varieties.
- Some 3,200 tons of hazardous fill were removed and replaced by nearly 6,000 tons of clean topsoil.
Energy-saving improvements include the installation of LED street lights. Medallions on the street’s storm sewer grates deliver an environment-friendly message: “No Dumping. Drains to Waterway.”
In many ways, all hide in plain sight. But, they’re key to preventing hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater from pouring into the nearby Buffalo River. The prevention helps as the city grapples with combined sewage overflows into waterways.
“At the basic level, we need to keep the rain out of the drain,” said Jill Jedlicka, the Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper’s executive director.
If all goes as planned, the amount of stormwater run-off in the project area should decrease by one-third because of the green infrastructure efforts and the 30 percent reduction in impervious pavement.
“Thirty percent is going directly into the ground, rather than going to the sewer plant,” Ranalli said.
Ranalli said standards require engineers to design for “the 10-year storm.”
In Buffalo, that’s about 4.8 inches of rain.
For that kind of storm, the improvements made along Ohio Street will reduce the peak flow of stormwater runoff into an already over-stressed combined sewage system by about 3,200 gallons a minute, according to engineering calculations.
“Instead of stormwater running off the pavement, the rain water percolates into the pavement and is retained,” said Michael F. Leydecker, associate principal and senior transportation engineer at Wendel Companies, which designed the project.
Then the ground absorbs the rainfall and snow.
Coaster-sized blue and silver medallions now adorn all of the street-level storm sewer receptacles in the corridor. The Boy Scouts of America, Western New York Stormwater Coalition and others helped affix the labels to the storm drains.
The medallions caution against dumping anything in them because they drain directly to the Buffalo River.
“That’s really just our public campaign to encourage folks to help out with the solution,” said Oluwole A. “OJ” McFoy, general manager of the Buffalo Sewer Authority.
Meanwhile, the additional 272 trees along the route also absorb excess water and keep it out of the river.
Species were picked for their ability to thrive in the redeveloped neighborhood. The varieties include the freeman maple, skyline honey locust, bloodgood London planetree, golden raintree, accolade cherry, harvest gold crabapple and Austrian pine.
“I would suspect we’ll have a gorgeous tree canopy 5 to 10 years down the road,” Ranalli said.
Riverkeeper officials call stormwater mitigation efforts like this one essential to any redevelopment in the Ohio Street corridor. Riverkeeper became involved in the redevelopment of the Ohio Street corridor along with the Buffalo Sewer Authority, Empire State Development, Wendel and neighborhood community organizations.
“Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper is a catalytic agent for moving the needle,” said Sam Hoyt, regional president of Empire State Development Corp.
As the sole connecting corridor between the city’s inner and outer harbors, Ohio Street became a key piece in the redevelopment along Buffalo’s waterfront, Hoyt said.
“The project was fast-tracked,” Leydecker said.
Leydecker said design work was completed in six months and construction occurred over the last year and a half. He said the company is finishing its final punch-list items.
“The vision of Ohio Street goes as far back in our records as 1996 with the Buffalo River Greenway plan,” Jedlicka said.
The keys to making the environmental and functional improvements were managing stormwater, restoring the shoreline and providing public access to the waterfront.
“The strength of Ohio Street is the collection of all the pieces that are coming together,” Jedlicka said. “Ohio Street is a great catalyst for the vision of the entire Buffalo River greenway.”
That’s unfamiliar territory for the newly transformed neighborhood.
“This area has been forgotten about for a full generation,” said Laura Kelly, the executive director of the Old First Ward Community Center.
“It was a white area on planning maps,” Kelly said. “It wasn’t a twinkle in anybody’s eye. This is no longer a dump site. It has a really different feel.”
Kelly scored a $100,000 grant to beautify the entrance to the neighborhood – Triangle Park – just north of the Ohio Street lift bridge.
Once a muddy, pitted place where tractor-trailers and other heavy equipment just drove through, the new passive park will be enhanced by natural bioswales that divert rainwater from the street and landscape plantings to curb stormwater runoff. And, with some artistic decor and benches, “it’s our little piece of heaven,” Kelly said.
The project thrusts the Old First Ward into a role as a model neighborhood for the rest of the city.
That next one is already underway on Niagara Street in the lower West Side.
©2015 The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
