Buffalo Community: Challenge is drawing crowds aside from shows

By Mike Desmond
(Image above: John Cimperman, Randall Kramer, Kristin Bentley, Donny Kutzbach, Brian Higgins and Investigative Post Editor Jim Heaney on the forum dais. Photo by Mike Desmond)

John Cimperman knows the problems of Buffalo’s Theatre District through his own 42 North Brewing Company restaurant on Main Street.

Speaking to an Investigative Post forum on the district in Shea’s Smith Theatre on Tuesday night, he told a packed house, “There’s two people there right now, customers, and there’s eight employees. You can’t. That’s not sustainable.”

Continuing, he pointed out a key issue, citing other panel members,

“Seven to 9 p.m., with what Donny (Kutzbach of the Town Ballroom) and Brian (Higgins, of Shea’s) and everybody here does, you can’t find a table from 5:30 till 7. But when curtain goes up, we go down, It’s a ghost town, 9 o’clock, sometimes 9:30, and it’s tough to keep all those 8-12 employees active until people show back up again. So, I think that missing link to help fill up that gap is definitely, definitely residential.”

There are a lot of people living in the Theatre District, but speaker after speaker said there aren’t enough.

And for restaurants, their lunch crowd shows the loss of an estimated 20,000 workers in the wake of COVID.

That’s starting to change, as M&T Bank and Delaware North pull more people to more days in the office.

And, there is the opportunity represented by the shift of 1,300 workers Ingram Micro workers from their former home in Amherst to the old Highmark health insurance building on the waterfront.

Another Amherst migrant is MusicalFare, pushed out of Amherst in the fight over parkland.

Executive/Artistic Director Randall Kramer said the theater company has worked hard to retain the audience it had in the suburbs, even creating a shuttle to the new location in the Shea’s 710 Theatre, once the home of the Studio Arena Theatre.

He said paying customers in the seats went from 5,000 two theater seasons ago to an expected 35,000 this year.

Kramer said parking in the district can be a problem, saying prices can be much higher when there is an event than during the day.

Second Generation Theatre is becoming a fixture in the Theatre District, either in the Shea’s Smith or the 710 Theatre. Managing Director Kristin Bentley says she worked at Ingram for 10 years and knows the company. She said workers have mixed feelings.

She told the meeting, “There are some that are very excited and there are some that are very resistant to it. And, a lot of the commentary is like: ‘What can I walk and do there or what errands can I run Downtown?’ when they’re so used to having that in the suburbs.”

Much of the discussion revolved around the lack of street traffic, the people who might walk by a business or a bar or a restaurant and decide to stop in.

The late Vincent O’Neill, an Irish Classical Theatre co-founder, once commented that you could shoot a moose on Main Street there was so little pedestrian traffic.

Most agreed it’s a conundrum: do you need foot traffic to attract business investment or does the presence of business attract foot traffic?

At the same time, many see perhaps thousands more residences as a key, just having potential customers a short walk away.

That’s at a time when the economy is forcing developer Douglas Jemal to sell off properties he had planned to turn into housing.

Speakers and audience members said City Hall has to take a greater role in getting things done and some say Mayor Sean Ryan’s administration is starting to show up and ask questions about how to help.

Given city fiscal issues, what might make up that help isn’t clear.

Several panel members and audience members said things don’t get done, pointing right across Main Street to the now-closed Buffalo-Niagara Hostel and uncertainty about when and if it will re-open and bring travellers seeking things to do and to potentially spend some cash.

Marika Woods-Frankenstein is on the hostel board and said efforts are underway to get the facility open: “We were a mini-economic driver in that we had 6,000 to 7,000 guests come and stay with us. We provided affordable housing 48 beds.”

Frankenstein says much of what the hostel did continues.

“We had programming that went on until 1 o’clock in the morning,” she said. “Sometimes, we’d have 500 people in front of the hostel just enjoying themselves. So, we are a third room. We’re not done yet. We’re still here.”

Participants say a key element in getting more people out there will be the re-opening of the Market Arcade Cinema under an independent owner, after AMC closed it.

There is a lot of support to converting one or two of the eight theaters in that complex into live theater, operating as the Road Less Traveled company did in its early days, before reaching its current home two blocks down, on Lafayette Square.

Shea’s President and CEO Brian Higgins said re-opening the movie theater will help in a new effort to make people feel safer by walking between Main and Washington through the movie center, with more lighting in the passageway between Shea’s and the Alleyway Theatre and next to the hostel, Michael Bennett walkway to Washington Street.

Shea’s is also in a brick and mortar attack on the empty sidewalks, with the $5 million renovation of She’s 710 Theatre to house MusicalFare, the $35 million expansion of the Shea’s Mainstage and the future renovation of the Shea’s Smith Theatre, potentially with a substantial addition of housing, possibly for artists.

Higgins said what has happened on the city’s Waterfront shows things can be done and he had a lot to do with that, bringing in tens of millions of federal dollars and long-term hundreds of millions from the State Power Authority.

The Shea’s boss said there is a fundamental problem: “Buffalo doesn’t have a problem getting the big projects finished. Buffalo has a big, big problem getting the big projects started, because when they start, they finish and it just requires leadership. You know, human nature is to wait, to be cautious, to want all the risk removed before they move. The visionaries take risks and they try to outline a vision that people buy into and public support gathers around. That’s how it works.”

Many of those at the meeting stressed the importance of keeping the International House group of restaurants going because it attracts people and provides restaurant jobs.

Buffalo Place Chairman Steve Carmina says the new ZamZam Indian cuisine restaurant is a vote of confidence in the area.

It replaced the closed TGI Friday’s in the highly visible corner of Main and Chippewa in the Holiday Inn Express & Suites.

While the total number of people to really pump up the Theatre District is large, perhaps in the thousands, many of the speakers and audience members see it as incremental, with each change adding something. with more housing as a key element.