Perhaps the biggest disappointment in recent years has been the waterfront. Cleveland,
Pittsburgh, Baltimore and other faded industrial cities have pumped millions into redeveloping land along the piers that had made them thriving hubs during a bygone era. Buffalo has lagged, and its expansive Lake Erie shoreline feels abandoned.
But now, there is a sense that just maybe Buffalo’s losing streak is coming to an end. There is tangible movement on long-awaited plans to reclaim the waterfront, along with dozens of private and public real-estate projects downtown under construction or in the works.
Restoration work on the historic inner harbor, the point where the Erie Canal met the Great
Lakes, is well under way. In the downtown area a few blocks away, two developers — one from Long Island, another from England — have each bought historic buildings that were empty or underused, with plans for major mixed-use projects. And a new office building, with almost a half million square feet, is going up, the largest to rise downtown in at least 20 years.
That office building is just one of more than a dozen that helped make the Buffalo region one of the top areas for office construction in the final quarter of last year.
“I’m not going to say that this whole thing is going to take off in 18 months and that we’re going to look like Toronto,” said Charles F. Rosenow, president of the Erie Canal Harbor
Development Corporation, a new state agency charged with developing the city’s inner harbor.
“But the pieces are beginning to fall in place, and we’re working diligently.” Not everyone is so optimistic. Even Mr. Rosenow jokes that you could fill a library with the dozens of waterfront plans that have gone nowhere for lack of money. Skeptics particularly recall the promise of another grand waterfront project — an office and retail complex to be anchored by Adelphia Communications. That deal collapsed when Adelphia officials were indicted on conspiracy and fraud charges in 2002.
“For a community that thinks they’ve been waiting for a half-century for something to happen, it’s not fast enough,” said Thomas A. Kucharski, the president and chief executive of Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, a nonprofit economic development organization.
Still, many people think this time might be the real thing. Buffalo has a new mayor, Byron W.
Brown, who has aggressively pitched the city’s potential from California to Massachusetts. There is financial support from the state and federal governments, spurring highway projects and cleanups of polluted former industrial sites.
And there is more diverse private investment from developers attracted to the city’s
inexpensive real estate and the panoply of architectural riches and elegant parks built in the city’s heyday.
At the foot of Main Street, for instance, cobblestone streets and the original commercial slip at the terminus of the Erie Canal are being restored. A new building for an existing naval history museum is under construction, and a new promenade meanders along the shoreline where three Navy ships are anchored. Also planned is a market modeled after Faneuil Hall in Boston, and a museum devoted to the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes.
An important development was the creation of the Erie Canal Harbor Development
Corporation, a subsidiary of the state’s economic development agency. The new corporation has the power to issue bonds and should keep momentum going to develop the harbor.
The corporation made a splash this spring with the hiring of Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn
Architects of Manhattan, which worked on both the Baltimore Inner Harbor project and
Battery Park City, projects that Buffalo is eager to emulate.
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