In collaboration with Young Audiences of Western New York and the Friends of the Buffalo Story, the City of Buffalo has received an OUR TOWN grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Our Town is the NEA's primary creative placemaking grants program, and invests in projects that contribute to the livability of communities and places the arts at their core.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is the Ferry Street Corridor Project?

 

This year long project will involve the people who live and work, go to school and to church along this corridor,in a year long program that encourages and enables  them to learn their personal and community stories.

 

The intersection of Main and Ferry: where two sides of the Ferry Street Corridor come together.

 

Ferry Street is a long street, a corridor really, where long buried histories of war; of escapes to freedom; of entrepreneurial derring-do; of immigrant settlement;  of music and baseball; of blacks and whites, sometimes together, sometimes separately, creating neighborhoods, planting roots and nursing dreams for the future. Who knows this history? Who knows about William Miller's ferry to Canada in 1804; of the heroics of the runaway slaves making their way from Ferry's foot to freedom in Canada; about the last American stand against the British at Ferry and Niagara in that frightening winter of 1812? Who knows about the dynamic, old Italian neighborhood at the intersection of Ferry and Grant and the uplifting efforts of a new generation of immigrants to bring new life to that corner? And what about the Cold Spring; that Rebecca's well that for so many years gushed from its source at Ferry and Main, providing drinking water for the small settlement that called Cold Spring its home?  And yes, Offermann Stadium at Ferry between Michigan and Masten, home for almost fifty years to the Buffalo Bisons and the site, in August, 1960, of the greatest jazz concert ever held in Buffalo, New York? And, more darkly, who knows that it was at this same site, Offermann Stadium, the site of the great Luke Easter's greatest homerun exploits, that the Board of Education, in an act that lives in infamy, created the first intentionally racially isolated school district at Woodlawn Junior High School in 1964? There's still more that happened here, events that a new generation of Buffalonians need to know about and to understand: what was it like, for both African-Americans and whites, to live in the largely integrated neighborhood of Cold Springs from the mid-1930s through the 1960s? What can we learn from this most interesting place during that most interesting time? And what about the Humboldt Parkway story? How did it happen that this most magnificent boulevard was, in a ghastly act of destruction, obliterated and replaced by the Kensington Expressway?

 

Why this process?

 

The work of the Ferry Street Corridor Project is not only to raise these questions but begin to answer them as well. Learning the history of this corridor and the stories of the people that have lived on it and the places that line it, will help us understand our city and ourselves and in the process will empower us to create a future that builds on the best efforts and avoids the worst mistakes of our common past.

 

PARTNERS

We recognize the many arts and cultural organizations that contribute to our rich history and present day. It is with great honor that we embark on the project work with our partner organizations:
Young Audiences of Western New York, Anne Frank Project, African American Cultural Center, Emerging Leaders of the Arts (ELAB), The Wash Project,  Lafayette High School, and Buffalo Academy for the Visual & Performing Arts (BAVPA).