April 21, 2002
Chewing up the ground in Delaware Park
Drunks, owners of ATV's who don't know how to get beyond the suburbs but who want to run in the woods anyway, and other idiots proving something, now and then tear up the grass and grind up the topsoil in Delaware Park. In a year or two, usually, the grass grows back and the gullies even out. The most recent attack on the Delaware Park landscape was an offensive by the City of Buffalo Forestry Department, there to pick up trees felled in the ice storm and to take down trees likely to go in the next one. Along the way, they tore up the landscape. They focus on trees; the ground is somebody else's concern. Here's a single photograph that may give you an idea of the fingerprint one of their drivers left at the scene. This isn't one of those no-other-way-in-there situations: the mess in the photo runs from Rumsey Road to the gravel path on the south side of the stone bridge, which means the vehicle that made it could have entered and exited the park entirely on gravel road by driving another 200 yards and making a single turn. It wasn't malicious (remember when Jimmy Griffin's Parks commissioner poured poison into the Delaware Park lake because he lost his hotdog franchise?), it was just laziness. That's not an excuse, just a description. (This is a big file—273K.)©2002 Buffalo Report, Inc.