Saying this building should be demoed and cannot be rehabbed is garbage. Recently the Book-Cadillac hotel was rehabbed in Detroit and I believe it is bigger in scale, and was abandoned for many years prior to its restoration. Also, in Jackson, Mississippi, yes Jackson, the former King Edward hotel, a 12-story grand hotel abandoned since 1967 is currently being rehabbed for apartments and a hotel. Don't give me this garbage that it cannot be rehabbed, I work with these types of projects every day. Yes government incentives are neccesary, but I also question the price tag associated with Issa. He had a very grandiose plan, I would think this building could be done for a lower cost if some sacrifices were acceptible in the secondary spaces.

Thanks WCP for getting on Buchheit's comment asap.

With Buchheit's mentality, and admission of ineptness after '74 [failed] ways' of trying to save the Statler over a decade--it's clear that HE is the one most responsible for the current state of the property.

I don't think the question is "Can it be saved?" the question is "Should it be?" I for one think $50 to $60M in public dollars would be better spent on 100 other more pressing issues.

This state and region need to stop acting like it has to save everything and meddling in the private sector (see: market economy) with public sectors dollars. It's foolish, wasteful and returns ZERO tangible results justifying the expenditures.

It's called creative destruction. Let it happen, we'd be better off if did the old phoenix routine, rise from the ashes, instead of trying to contain the fire by throw gas it.

In the face of a monster tax increase by the state, people still don't get it here. If we cut the tax incentives and public dollats given to companies we'd be able to lower taxes, which would be attactive to many business, not just the few who qualify for breaks and then fail to meet their hiring obligations.

Great, spend $50 mil on the Sttaler, $30 mil to remediate Spaulding Fibre, a couple mil to demo the Aud, the millions in breaks and incentives to Bass Pro and what do we have for that $100+ mil? A nice but vacant downtown building, a greenfield in the suburbs and the ability to buy a new fishing lure downtown. Sweet, all in the face of rapid population decline.

For a board that constantly rails against suburban development as completely nonsensical since we're bleeding population and theoretically don't need to grow, it sure doesn't hold that same logic for any development in the city, depsite a lack of need or development pressure. Are there hundreds of companies needing space downtown or is there thousands upon thousands of square feet already available? What about hotel rooms? Do we need more of those?

This save everything mentality is great if the private sector can support it, possibly through tax breaks at the most (not actuall dollars handed over). Otherwise, the city and region have other major issues it needs to address before it starts supporting unnecessary development of properties. Poverty, jobs, taxes, and regionalism would be better places to focus time, energy and money.

Strange the solution always seems to be demolition; especially with an architecturally significant and historical landmark like this. Why can't this once again become a hotel? Is this building truly that far gone and antiquated(plumbing/electrical/heating &cooling systems) that demolition would even be considered? Would restoration back to the original use as a hotel be more cost effective then trying to convert this building to office space?
All around WNY we see these God forsaken cookie cutter hotels going up like wild fire and collectively we can't find a way to save this landmark hotel. If this former hotel and historical landmark is so cherished by everyone then the effort to preserve it and find funds to restore it should go beyond the juristriction of the current owner/landlord. The Martin House Restoration Corporation and Roycroft Campus Corporation are great examples of what can be done to save and restore historical landmarks. Maybe it's time for something similar to these entities to be created for the Statler. Just a thought..

While you hate to hear the comments by Buchheit, he does have a valid point. The ROI on a massive redevelopment of the Statler does not work when you look at the math in the problem.

What may be a viable opportunity is to change the numbers in the problem. I think the best chance for the Statler to survive is as a hotel. But with the economy and the general health of the region, Buffalo does not need this many hotel rooms when you factor in the Hyatt, Hampton Inn and the Adam's Mark. This is also not considering the recently announced 65 room hotel by Croce in the Curtiss building and the 150 room Embassy Suites at Avant.

The Adam's Mark was just sold for $18.5M. The cost of demo, which would most likely be passed onto the taxpayers, would be in the millions.

I do not know how it could be done or if it could be done but what if the Adam's Mark was abandoned as a hotel? The new owners are already planning a multi-million dollar renovation of the Adam's Mark. If that investment was moved to the Statler...somehow...someway...the Statler project would become much much more viable.

After all, by removing the current Adam's Mark "off the books" you would remove 486 rooms from the vacancy rates in Buffalo. The Embassy Suites and Croce project would "pick up" 210 rooms. This would leave 276 rooms that "need" to be filled.

Even if the Statler were refurbished to a hotel with say 500 rooms, the elimination of the Adam's Mark would surely help the bottom line.

What this also would do is open the Adam's Mark for redevelopment into an office complex. The location is, in my opinion, more ideal for an office complex anyways. It is disconnected from downtown. Stripping down the Cold War Era exterior and gutting out the interior walls could create a office building similar to the Health Now complex. It has all of the amenities like Parking and access that suburban complexes are offering and an awesome view!

Can't be saved? I say Bull****. Check out "The Biltmore Hotel" here in Atlanta. Same setup, center lobby, double ballrooms etc, fully restored into mixed use office, condo and event space.

The danger is not that it will be demolished, it won't, but that it will languish unattended until it starts to fall apart again. Bashar may have attended to removing some of the falling bits of facia, but no actual repair work was done.

I believe the Statler should be saved. BUT...If public funds are used the public should own a proportional share in whatever we invest in. NO MORE FREE RIDES I’m really tired of the public "kicking" in on major projects and the developers, owners and corporations walking away with the profits. Or walking away from the project and leaving the mess for "US" to clean up. We don’t even get to take a risk with our money. It’s is a loss from the beginning. Let us invest into these projects should we choose to and share in the profits or losses.

PS - I'm afraid that all this "bailout" and "bonus" hysteria is putting a negative connotation on the availability and feasability of using funding that is already in place for historic preservation on the state and federal levels.

Not sure I understand how Park lane has bookings to 2011 when they have told wedding parties scheduled this October that they have no guarantee they will be around even then...needless to say...those wedding have been booked elsewhere

TEAR IT DOWN! place is a POS....

Where is Isaa's city tower...people on this site are smoooth, especially Norpark.

Or how about clean up the full facade and do a total rehab on floors 1 through 6 and mothball the upper floors until the market proves those floors are also viable finanically instead of taking the entire thing on at once?

speaking of $100m projects, and completely off topic, but has anyone else had difficulty digesting the Senecas' claim that they've already spent $82m on their Buffalo Casino site? If so, they really should have bought the Statler when the Masiello administration was pushing it on them.

If it takes some public money to get the Statler back to speed, so be it. There are far worse uses of public money out there. Just about anything that gets built has some sort of subsidy or grant or tax break attached to it. The real question is what sort of project we want to support -- and restoring a historic downtown asset seems like a better option than most that get thrown around.

For several months now, the saga of the Statler has been reminding me of our Rochester hotel nightmare nearly 20 years ago. When we'd go downtown, I'd ask my dad about the skeleton building, which was the partially constructed Hyatt Regency which Buffalo's Paul Snyder started but never finished. For 5 years this vacant thing made a mockery of our civic leadership, who kept waiting for Snyder to come back and finish the job -- when he'd already forgotten where Rochester was. Finally, a group of business leaders got tired of the nonsense and put together a "bailout" package and got the project going again as a public-private partnership. There is a great NYT article about this online, here: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/11/nyregion/companies-team-effort-yields-hotel-in-rochester.html

Every city and situation is different, but I think there are lessons here that could apply to the Statler. The basic one being, that if a project seems too big for any one investor or developer, it may take a consortium. If I'm not mistaken, that was the idea behind the Greystone group, in which Savarino was a partner.

Getting the state-level rehabilitation stimulus tax credit passed this year will definitely sweeten the pot for the Statler -- and could perhaps even become a poster child for the program. See my update on that here: http://www.buffalorising.com/2009/03/support-is-building-for-rehabilitation-stimulus.html

The same discussion was occurring when Graphic Controls announced it would vacate the mammoth, 600,000 square foot Larkin Terminal Warehouse in the mid-1990s. Economic development officials called it a probable real estate "white elephant" and openly talked of ways to demolish it for a shovel-ready lot. The shovel-ready lot was being planned as a "gateway" to the "Exchange Street Industrial Park."

People were patient. The Larkin Terminal Warehouse is now Larkin at Exchange, one of Western New York's most successful Class-A office buildings, nearly 100% occupied.

Of course it's not "too big to save". And it can be a phased development that begins with gutting the entire structure, restoring the lower floors with retail, ballrooms, a spa, and some offices, then doing the middle 12 floors as a good mid-range hotel (around 200 rooms), then saving the top floors for residential when that market comes back. Pretty much what Issa had in mind, but not all at once. The key is to quit fretting and get a solid developer some tax breaks to move on this. The credit markets will have to come back too, and that is maybe a year off. Not too long in 'Buffalo Time'.

whatever,

Where do you draw your line for taxpayer funding? Should airports not be funded with taxpayer's money and only be constructed if they can go it on their own? Should highways only be constructed by private monies? The government utilizes tax expenditures to incentivize or deincentivize activies and actions that have been deemed neccesary or in the public benefit, historic preservation and economic development being including in that category along with helping senior citizens, students, homeowners and the like. I don't own a home, so I don't want homeowners to get to write off their interest, but the govt thinks homeownership is a positive thing (like rehabbing historic buildings) so they provide an incentive.