Buffalo Central Terminal

TERMINAL’S CLOCKS GET REPAIRS
(LOCAL) Kevin Collison. April 24, 1999
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 The Buffalo News. All rights reserved.

KEVIN COLLISON - News Staff Reporter

Jeff Ingersoll swung in the raw wind outside the broken face of one of the New York Central Terminal clocks Friday, marking the start of a $15,000 project to restore time to the old landmark.

Ten stories below, his admirers on the ground — a half-dozen preservationists and East Side activists — pointed to Ingersoll’s volunteer assistance on the clock restoration project as another example of the loyalty many people have for the building.

On May 8, supporters hope that several hundred turn out for a volunteer cleanup. More than 500 came last year. There’s no doubt the massive terminal, erected in 1929, has a legion of fans both in the nearby neighborhoods and among railroad buffs all over the area.

But despite the $370,000 in federal funding obtained by Fillmore Common Council Member David A. Franczyk for securing the terminal, progress on redeveloping it has not moved forward since the last train pulled out 20 years ago.

Developers cringe at the $55-million-plus price tag associated with renovating the main structure, and Mayor Masiello has vowed it would not become a pit for taxpayer money. The Gorski administration also has stayed away.

Masiello has not recommended any funding despite a burgeoning interest in historic preservation by his administration. A list of buildings put together by the Community Development Department as being targets for preservation omitted the Central Terminal.

At the same time, the private foundations and corporate donors that have taken an interest in restoring the Darwin Martin House and the Buffalo Psychiatric Center also appear to be taking a pass on the old train station located two miles from downtown off Broadway.

Assemblyman Paul Tokasz, D-Cheektowaga, acknowledges the $15,000 he obtained from the state is not the vanguard of more public funding to come.

“The small amount we got was to electrify the clock and light it to keep it in the mind’s eye,” he said. “Cities warehouse buildings regularly. There’s no reason why not this one.”

Paul Ciminelli, president of Ciminelli Development, said the community needs to choose which buildings it can afford to save.

“With the limited resources we have, there are going to have to be buildings that will be sacrificed,” he said.

That leaves it up to the East Side neighborhoods and loyal preservationists to continue pushing for the station’s future.

“We do have to battle against the fact that there’s prejudice the (terminal) area is not so affluent,” said Sue McCartney of the Preservation Coalition of Erie County. “We cannot throw this kid out.

“It’s $17 million to demolish it. It would be a lot cheaper to baseline seal it up.”

The $15,000 grant to repair and light the clocks, Niagara Mohawk is helping out with the project, is part of a preservation strategy to beautify what had become a gap-toothed hulk of broken glass in the hopes it will someday woo a developer.

Many of the shattered windows have been boarded up, and the leaking roof has been repaired with the money obtained by Franczyk. More importantly, a new chain-link fence encircles the terminal to keep out vandals who had stripped and abused it for years.

Still, preservationists aren’t even sure how much it will take to achieve their modest goal of preserving it as a monument until it can eventually find a reuse. Their best estimate is $4 million, and there is no solid plan for raising that money.

“Unless we make the building more marketable, you won’t see some developer come in,” said Ms. McCartney. “We want to beautify the site and light it up from the outside. Our short-term goal is to make it a magnificent monument.”

When or if any private developer will be interested remains very much a question.

Ciminelli said the building is just too big and too far away from downtown or anywhere else to be commercially viable.

“The scale is a dollars issue,” he said. “It’s going to take an enormous amount of dollars and resources to develop it. The other challenge is location.”

When the terminal was built in 1929 on Paderewski Drive, Broadway was one of the busiest commercial streets in upstate New York, Buffalo had close to a half million people, and supporters believed if the terminal wasn’t in the city core, it would be soon.

By 1955 however, the passenger train boom — and Buffalo’s — was over. New York Central began looking for a buyer for its Art Deco masterpiece. Amtrak ran the facility until 1979 and then the old building went dark.

After a succession of owners who allowed it to deteriorate, the Central Terminal Restoration Corp., a non-profit firm associated with the Polish Community Center, took over the building in 1997.

Ciminelli noted the building has limited access and poor “exposure.” Its massive scale dwarfs the surrounding neighborhood of aging doubles and storefront businesses.

Chris Dirr, who joined Iskalo Development Co. after working for a city development agency four years, said it would take a large, multimillion dollar public subsidy to make any kind of project work in the Buffalo Central Terminal.

“It’s an awesome structure, but there’s an awesome price tag associated with it,” he said. “The best entity to approach it would be a national concern that specializes in the reuse of historic structures.”

Dirr noted it cost the city $12 million to renovate the Market Arcade, a far smaller downtown project. He estimated that a private developer would only be willing to put up a fraction of the estimated cost of doing the Central Terminal.

None of this discourages Ms. McCartney, who was recently chosen chairwoman of the Central Terminal advisory board. “We’ll push it till we die,” she said. “We won’t give up on Western New York’s most popular landmark.”