Bass Pro: The fight to save the Inner Harbor

The effort to land Bass Pro was part-and-parcel of a long-standing effort by the administration of Mayor Masiello and County Executive Gorski to use lavish sums of  the public’s to entice private developers to  either stay in or come to downtown Buffalo. They’d done it with the  Bills and the Sabres during the 1990s, and would have done it with the Rigas Family until their company, Adelphia Communications, went broke and the Rigases went to prison. The effort to lure Bass Pro to the waterfront was simply the last, most desperate,  item on Masiello’s bucket list.

There had been talk among the inside set about Bass Pro for several years. The founder of the company, a man named “Johnny” Morris was good friends with Bob and Mindy Rich, the billionaire owners of Rich Products. They were neighbors in Islamorada,  Florida where the Riches lived long enough each year to avoid New York State income taxes. Once the Riches began to spread the word that their friend was interested in a Buffalo site for his store, politicians and economic development hot shots from Albany to Buffalo began to tout the advantages of a waterfront location for the “mammoth sporting goods complex.”

There were all kinds of offers considered and made in what seemed to be an increasingly desperate effort to  “lure” Bass Pro to the Inner Harbor.   From 2001 to 2003, there were myriad contacts between Mayor Masiello and Johnny Morris,  each visiting the other, sometimes in Buffalo, sometimes in Islamorada. After several years of various trial balloons, by the Fall of 2004, the outlines of a deal were in place. In November, Governor Pataki made yet another one of his regular “announcement” trips to Buffalo. He’d put together, he said, an $80 million package, a combination of state, federal and local funds that would leverage the coming to downtown Buffalo of Bass Pro.  He would put it, he said, inside the old Auditorium,  empty since 1996. As he result, he said, “ the Buffalo Waterfront will be transformed.”  When “Bass Pro comes to town,” he crowed, “they don’t just open a store….they change that town.”  County Executive Joel Giambra, needing to support the Republican governor, added his voice to the growing chorus. Bass Pro was, he said, “just the hook that the waterfront needs.”  Buffalo’s new mayor, Byron Brown, concurred:  “Bass Pro brings people—three million visitors a year--sales tax dollars and”….yes, he actually said it, “hope.” 

The Buffalo News was, as always when it came to projects like this, a mindless cheerleader. Under headlines like “Hope Soars with Bass Pro” and “Bass Pro Key to Revitalizing Waterfront,” The News conveyed the impression that Bass Pro was a fait accompli, a project which would accomplish what over fifty years of efforts to revitalize Buffalo’s waterfront had not.

With the newly-discovered pot of “NYPA money,”  generous pledges of support from state and federal sources, plus a new state agency---the ECHDC—now ready to spend it, there was nothing stopping the campaign to bring Bass Pro to the Buffalo waterfront. Indeed, it seemed to many that the primary, if not the sole, function of the newly created ECHDC was to do just that. Why else, some wondered, would Mindy Rich, the wife of Bob Rich, Jr, Johnny Morris’ Florida fishing buddy, Maureen Hurley, Executive Vice President of Rich Products, and Larry Quinn, Managing Partner of the Buffalo Sabres and ardent Bass Pro advocate, have been appointed to the ECHDC’s board?

 But where to put it? For years, there was talk of transforming the old Aud into a gigantic entertainment destination, a home to Bass Pro, a new hotel and an “intermodal” transportation center. But the cost was prohibitive, and  Johnny Morris wanted something new, flashy and dramatic for his hunting and fishing store. So, with money in hand and the authority, through the ECHDC to spend it, Morris  and the ECHDC board began “casting” around for a new location.  Why not, Board member Quinn suggested, a location directly on the Waterfront, on the edge of the water itself, on the exact site that the 2004 plan had designated for the Central Wharf?  Bass Pro liked it and the Buffalo News trumpeted the new location too. The problem was, Tim Tielman and his  increasingly well-oiled machine of preservationists argued, it violated the 2004 plan which, per Judge Skretny’s ruling, called for historical authenticity at that site. “Take one square foot of the Central Wharf,” Tielman warned the ECHDC, and “we’ll sue you.” Opposition in the community was intense. Donn Esmonde, who had been writing passionately about the importance of preserving history at the site, was incensed. In a Buffalo News column on July 1, 2007, (the Bass Pro controversy seemed to be dragging on forever!)  Esmonde called the proposed building a “Wegman’s size big-box” on one of Buffalo’s most “sacred sites.” 

 Increasingly wary not only of Tielman’s use of the federal courts as well as his uncanny ability to mobilize public opinion on behalf of preservation, the ECHDC  began in the fall of 2007 to abandon their interest in the Central Wharf site.  Without a site for their pet project, they looked at the Aud again. This time, they were interested in the site, not the  building.  What if,  the ECHDC suggested, the Aud were demolished and then, on its site, a  brand-new Bass Pro were to be built?  The powers-that-be-liked the idea and, in late 2007, the City of Buffalo sold the Aud to the ECHDC for $1. In early 2008, demolition of the structure began, the $35 million cost to be covered by the state.

There was nothing good about the Bass Pro deal. It was  a ghastly piece of public policy, violating nearly every principle of modern urban development. Conceived behind closed doors by a group of private citizens selected by the governor for their insider connections, funded by dollars that belonged to the public, rooted in an  architectural plan that flew in the face of any appreciation for and understanding of the historical context of the site, the notion of subsidizing a privately-owned hunting and fishing store on the site of the old Aud, was unimaginably irrational. It was an insult to all the work that so many of us had been doing to heal and  renew the fabric of the city. I was appalled by every aspect of the project. In mid-2009, I  lent my support to the effort to derail the fast-moving Bass Pro project by joining a lawsuit to stop it.

The opposition to the Bass Pro project was overwhelming, and in response to the growing public pressure, Congressman Brian Higgins, on July 19, 2010, issued an ultimatum imposing a fourteen-day deadline for reaching a final agreement with  Bass Pro. Faced with mounting hostility and continued delays, Bass Pro announced on July 31 that it was dropping out. Their flirtation with Buffalo was, we all rejoiced, finally over. 

Having played a part in the demise of the Bass Pro project, I wanted to use this opportunity to present to the people of  Buffalo ideas about waterfront development that I thought might point us in whole new directions. I wanted to bring additional players to the table, not the planners, politicians and developers who had always determined the rules of the game. I wanted to engage Buffalo’s “creative class,” the artists and the imaginative thinkers that I had had the great pleasure of working with at the Calumet. I wanted to take the discussion out of the mouths of public policy makers and put it into those of the artists and creative thinkers.   These were the people with visions for the future, who I felt needed to be at the proverbial “table.”

In order to bring this kind of sensibility to thinking about the waterfront in the wake of the collapse of the Bass Pro deal, I organized a conference called “Inspirations and Aspirations: Imagining Buffalo’s Waterfront.” I wanted to hold it in a large, public space. For this  purpose, there was no place better than City Honors: a magnificent, historic building set high on a hill. With that in mind I booked the auditorium for the afternoon of Saturday, November 6, 2010.

First, I  wanted my brother to come. Tony was a passionate, inspiring speaker who could bring an audience to tears with the compelling way that he spoke about cities and the role of history and art in their well-being. Tony had become a nationally-recognized leader in the preservation world, internationally known for his daring, seemingly instinctual understanding of how cities worked and what to do about fixing them. (The week before he came to our conference he was presented with the  Crowninshield Award for life-time achievement, the highest honor awarded by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.)  I also wanted Fred Kent, the founder of my favorite “place-making” organization, Project for Public Spaces, to be there.  I’d been following Fred for years and, along with our own Tim Tielman, there was nobody who understood and thought more clearly about the problems of the city than Fred Kent.

I wanted artists too, people whose work would inspire the audience to think creatively about Buffalo’s waterfront. I wanted the sounds of water to fill the auditorium, so I commissioned  Brian Wantuch to create a soundscape based on audio recordings that he made of the rushing waters of the Niagara River. I wanted to make a statement of bringing new ideas to old, cast-off spaces and materials, so I commissioned Dennis Maher to create one. He built an enormous assemblage of long-lost materials  in his studio, and then brought it to the City Honors lobby where it greeted  people as they came in. And I wanted something elegant and balletic, combining the movements of dance and puppetry, so I commissioned Michele Costa to build a set and then perform an abstract puppet performance that she created for our event, called “Here.”

I got  the word out, sending emails to anybody  I could. A full-page spread in ARTVOICE the week of the conference helped, but as a veteran of promoting events, I knew how hard it was to fill the seats. With no idea what to expect, we opened the doors at City Honors at about 1pm. Within  minutes, people poured in. By 2 p.m.,  the 700-seat auditorium was completely full. It was so inspiring,  I said in my opening remarks that we had, “not a meeting but a movement.”

The audience listened first to Brian’s powerful soundscape then watched Michele’s enchanting puppet performance. They were warmed up and prepared to think creatively about how to fix Buffalo’s waterfront. Fred Kent spoke first. Projecting dozens of slides, not of buildings and other images “fit for aviators and birds,”  but rather of children playing in spray fountains, of adults sitting on benches eating ice-cream, of people watching an outdoor movie in Bryant Park in Manhattan and of hundreds more milling around the temporary structures in Union Square. In his quiet, conversational manner,  Fred was  showing us how successful places were made, not by buildings but by people doing things and having fun.  That was the way to rebuild Buffalo’s waterfront, he said. Not only did it work but it was, introducing a phrase that ten years later is still the watchword for waterfront planning in Buffalo, “lighter, quicker, cheaper.” “Remember that phrase,” he said: “lighter, quicker, cheaper.” (Inspired by similar thinking, seventeen years earlier, in 1993, our own Tim Tielman had announced that his “Historic Buffalo Plan was “Better, Faster, Cheaper.”)

And then Tony took the stage. I’d taken him that morning to the collection of massive grain elevators that stood empty just off the Ohio Street Bridge.  Rick Smith, the owner of the elevators had plans to integrate them into an ethanol plant  he was hoping to develop there.  I wanted Tony to see them first. I knew he’d be overwhelmed by them and thought that, if anybody could get Rick Smith to think differently  about them, Tony could. On Saturday morning, Rick took us through these marvelous structures. Tony little at the time, but he was taking it all in, thinking, pondering, as we made our way through the dirt-strewn site. 

If there was anybody who could champion  the value of preserving an historic streetscape, it was my brother Tony. Crying out against projects like Bass Pro, he implored the rapt audience to “save your heritage. Protect it like you would your children.” He then shifted gears and talked about how art and artists transform our cities. Citing the work that he was doing in Wynwood in Miami, he turned to Rick Smith’s grain elevators. “These are your canvases. Your Sistine Chapel. Treat them that way. Every one of them. All of them,” he insisted, “should bear the mark of the world’s best public artists.” Upon concluding his talk, my brother stood there, delighted by the standing ovation that he received.

As for me, I was thrilled and exhausted. I knew we had done something good, but exactly what I knew not. By the end of  2010, with Bass Pro finally “dead in the water,” ECHDC retained Fred Kent and the Project for Public Spaces as a place-making consultant for the Inner Harbor, now known officially as “Canalside.” Over the next several months, PPS staff, working with the public,  developed a master plan for the area which became the template ECHDC still uses today. By the Spring of 2011, Rick Smith had given up on his ethanol plant and, working with me on a program called “Against the Grain,” planned and presented a series of music and dance programs that branded what my brother called “Silo City” as an arts performance venue. 

Our  meeting at City Honors  brought a renewed belief that the people of the city not only cared the most but knew the most  about what was best for Canalside and their waterfront.  Responding to the energy of the meeting, ECHDC created  a new  planning process, one that promised to be far more transparent and responsive to public opinion.  It was, Fred Kent said, “place making,” an approach to renewing the city that was rooted not in building buildings but rather in  creating programs. The function of place making is to create as many opportunities as possible for socializing in public places, for eating, for relaxing, for meeting and mingling, and for just plain hanging-out. It is programming, not big-ticket construction projects, that attracts people to places. Construction had been replaced by “place making” and  “Build it and they will come”   by “lighter, quicker, cheaper.” It was a brand new day. Those of us who had fought so hard for so long for an organic approach to waterfront planning and development rejoiced.

 Out with Bass Pro and in with Adirondack chairs. In an unspoken homage to Tim Tielman, at our insistence the ECHDC bought 200 of them. After we painted them in bright primary colors, they were placed randomly around Canalside. In July 2011, Donn Esmonde wrote a column in  The Buffalo News called “Giving the public what it wants on the waterfront. ”  “There’s some irony,” I told him, “that the major economic development success story in our community this year amounts to $5000 worth of Adirondack chairs. It’s the Adirondack chairs, stupid!”  Those Adirondack chairs filled with people doing nothing more than “hangin’ out,” laid the foundation for the creation at Canalside  of what would quickly become one of our region’s most popular attractions. They had, I crowed only half in jest,  done more to revise the waterfront than anything  since the completion of the Erie Canal..