Published: May 09, 2008 12:32 am            

ADAMCZYK: The enduring nature of change

As songwriter Paul Simon once phrased it, everything sooner or later falls apart.

Cars, marriages, ideas of what constitutes faith or democracy or family. We live in an era of transience, and it’s not going away. Everything is temporary now, including happiness and hard times. Those drivers whose bumpers and back windows present allegiance to Dodge trucks and Myrtle Beach and various political attitudes will look at photographs, 20 years forward, and wonder what they were thinking.

The business district of Kenmore has several blocks of buildings that look and feel enduring, two story brick structures that went up in the years after World War I (Hertel Avenue in north Buffalo has a similar feel for the same reason, a push by real estate interests to fill in the gap between Delaware Park and the Town of Tonawanda at that time). Storefronts downstairs, offices and apartments upstairs (that’s called “mixed use development”), and if an address has something newer on the property, it’s likely a long-ago fire or the need for a parking lot eliminated the old building. It is not hard to find old photographs of old Kenmore to see what was standing before you arrived.

That gray and columned old building at Delaware Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard that looks as though the ancient Greeks installed it, now housing an M&T Bank branch, has the sturdy look and feel of a bank. It always was, starting with the long-gone State Bank of Kenmore. Across the street is a Dollar General store that once was Kenmore’s first Chevrolet dealership.

At the end of my street stood Kenmore’s second-oldest house, subdivided and remodeled far beyond original intent and occupied by an independent religious congregation (what were called “Jesus freaks” at the time) when I got here. It was plowed under to build a car dealership, and is currently an empty car dealership.

While houses tend to go up during various construction booms, and stay up with minimal modification, commercial property is expected to adapt to whatever way the business wind is blowing. Hardware stores become hair styling salons the way stables became auto service shops. Fast-food joints get a modest facelift and become chiropractor’s offices. That’s why it’s not hard to find a Chinese restaurant, for example, with a map of Sicily incongruously painted on the wall. Of course, it used to be an Italian restaurant, and the new owner is a businessman and not a decorator, and never got around…

One need not be an old-timer to walk or drive around the Village to play the game of “what used to be there”. One of Kenmore’s most popular new locations is the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Doing business in an admirably spruced-up building on Delaware Avenue for little more than a year, it is already hard to recall that it once was a derelict and vacant old Kentucky Fried Chicken shop. The HSBC Bank drive-up on Sheridan Drive was once a Ground Round restaurant and then a Howard Johnson’s, and I only remember that because I patronized those places. The adjacent strip mall went up only last summer, and I’ve nearly forgotten the abandoned Jubilee supermarket that stood in its place.

We get accustomed to this so quickly. The Walgreen’s at Delaware Avenue and Kenmore Avenues, landscaped like the 14th hole at Augusta by order of the Village of Kenmore Planning Board, was only recently a ramshackle collection of shops that included a saloon, a newsstand, a comic book store and a hot dog vendor, all housed in a leaky and rickety old building. A nearby former drugstore is now a workout facility. Pizza enterprises come and go like wildflowers.

It could be argued that this is a sign of municipal vitality, that in general, one business leaves and another comes to take its place. While downtown Kenmore has a few vacancies (notably the spaces occupied by Jeep and Ford dealerships), the shop-hopping implies that residents demand a constant turnover of new services (fewer places to purchase milk and more salons for fingernail maintenance, for example, and more gyms and dance studios to work off the kind of cuisine to which the citizens are attracted). Obsolete schools become offices and social service headquarters, and although it hasn’t happened in Kenmore in 50 years, mainline churches outgrow their buildings and construct mini-cathedrals in the Old World style.

A 12-year-old could run a tour of what used to be what, out here, and probably reminisce about his or her idea of the good old days. This is Kenmore’s version of moving at the speed of modern life. Bounded by cities on three sides, and a river, growing up and out is not the option it is in a place like Amherst. So we do what we’re supposed to do in the 21st century; we adapt what we’ve got.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears weekly in the Record-Advertiser. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.

        

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