I received my December issue of Buffalo Spree magazine last night. I noticed a feature article called “Development” on the cover, and flipped the pages until I found where it was, on page 34. In the article, architecture professor Barry Muskat documents all of the recent downtown developments we’ve been reading about on Buffalo Rising for the past several months. He starts out by stating that, in total, nearly $2.6 billion in public and private sector development projects are officially on the city planning slate. In comparison, our most recent 5 year development project average was less than $50 million, annually. That’s 51 times higher or an increase of 5,100% from the average. Those are impressive and exciting numbers, indeed!
But, even more encouraging is the quote from Stater Hotel developer, Bashar Issa, that ends the article:
“Development is my business and has been my business for a decade. We want to grow our business with additional projects. We are committed to the city of Buffalo and need to address the city’s future, not just the Statler’s.”
A statement that inspires me to offer the following invitation:
Mr. Issa,
You are, no doubt, a man of great intelligence, vision and taste. The Statler Hotel is but one example of Buffalo’s grand and elegant past. As evidenced by your statement above, you have obviously done your homework on the city and its many architectural treasures. I am sure that this note to you is informing you of something that you might have already researched.
One of our city’s saddest architectural neglect stories is that of the Art Deco masterpiece, the Central Terminal train station, on Buffalo’s impoverished east side. It shares an architect (Alfred Fellheimer) and many similarities to Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, and was once the main terminus for rail travel between Chicago and New York City. Unlike Grand Central, whose decay was corrected in the early ’90’s, our proud railroad monument was routinely stripped and neglected by irresponsible owners for decades.
In 1997, the non-profit Central Terminal Restoration Corporation was formed to oversee the maintenance and preservation of the terminal, and have been the only caretakers ever since. As an all volunteer, unpaid group, we’ve worked very hard to raise nearly $2 million in private and public funding, to seal the broken windows and fix the roofs of the tower and main concourse, thereby protecting it from any further deterioration. But, there is much more yet to be done, and time is running out. We desperately need to seal and mothball the attached, 5 story baggage building and 2 story mail handling building to preserve them for future use, before it’s too late.
