One Building at a Time: Read More About Buffalo Preservation
Jessie Schnell’s Vision for
a Buffalo Renaissance
By Anna Hausmann
When sixty mile-per-hour winds turned Jessie Schnell’s newly acquired historic building into a pile of bricks and rubble, it may have seemed like a sad ending to her long odyssey through the minefield of historic preservation. But last November’s debacle was just one more wrinkle in the story, one more incarnation for the Genesee Street building she had just adopted. Granted, it was a very sad moment: “I think I cried every day for a week,” Schnell admits. But for a number of reasons, Schnell has been able to keep the building’s collapse in perspective, and emerge even more determined to turn that block around.
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Jessie Schnell is one of a handful of individual activists turned developers who are tired of waiting for the city to protect historic buildings and to redevelop downtown’s potential. Her story reiterates the lack of communication and coordination in city hall.
It is also the story of a different perspective on adaptive reuse and redevelopment of historic downtown properties, one largely not shared by big developers or, so far, by city hall. One that, refreshingly, sheds the dusty notion that preservation is charity work rather than something that makes good economic sense for investors and for the city.
Jessie Schnell grew up on Buffalo’s West Side and is convinced that the neighborhoods of Buffalo hold the key to revitalizing our community. “First off,” she explains, “it’s simply the instinct to save their own history, the houses they grew up in and the buildings they remember.” But also, as people travel and see other cities with no old buildings they understand the value of what we have here. “The people understand it,” she says, “It’s the politicians who need educating.”
“It just seemed like they were tearing down everything.”
Schnell’s involvement with the buildings on Genesee Street began a few years after she returned to Buffalo from living out west in early 2000, when a friend who worked in city hall called to tell her that the buildings, 85 and 91 Genesee, were slated by the city for demolition. It was just too much for Schnell. “This came at the end of a long string of buildings coming down,” she explains, “They had just taken down the Paris Hotel on Main Street, there was talk of tearing down seven blocks to make room for a new convention center. It just seemed like they were tearing down everything.”
Schnell notes that the buildings are on the last intact Civil War era block in the city, “no vacant lots, no parking lots, it’s beautiful architecture, an incredible streetscape, and just an amazing corridor into downtown.” The two buildings are next to each other at the end of the block, next to Eddie Brady’s, a bar that has been on the block for decades. The rest of the block, from Brady’s to the corner of Oak, right off the exit of the Kensington, is made up of several buildings owned by Willard Genrich.
Though it sits as the entrance to the city, the block has the aura of a ghost town. At the corner are three hulking, hollowed-out buildings awaiting development. These Genrich has mothballed, and they sport enormous billboards that read “Support the Mohawk Ramp Site” and “Senecas Welcome,” references to two silver bullet development projects, a new convention center and a casino.
Next to these are two beautiful buildings, not mothballed, but not yet decaying. One is fronted in stunning copper and includes a third story atrium with a copper sheathed skylight. The skylight has fallen in, but at the city’s insistence, Genrich will be restoring it this spring. To his credit, Schnell notes, Genrich is “head and shoulders above other owners in terms of how he’s kept those mothballed buildings buttoned up and sealed.”
While these buildings sit relatively preserved, 85 and 91 sat for years with leaking roofs, the architectural equivalent of breathing asbestos. The effects of water damage are devastating to buildings, Schnell explains. For a few thousand dollars to seal a roof or chimney, entire buildings can be saved. It is worth noting that just as the city has the legal power to demolish buildings in danger of collapse and bill the owners for the demolition, it also has the legal power to make necessary repairs to prevent collapse, such as roof repairs, and bill the owners—generally for thousands of dollars less. Thus far, for whatever reason, the city has chosen demolition over repair.
When she heard the buildings were on the chopping block, Schnell was vice president of the New Millennium Group so she got the group to write letters to Joe Ryan, then director of the city’s Office of Strategic Planning, expressing interest in the buildings and presenting a hastily assembled plan to acquire the buildings for their own office, which staved off the demolitions for the time being.
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An artist’s view of Genesee St. Charles Burchfield’s Study for Street Scene, c.1940, graphite on paper, from the collection of the Burchfield-Penney Art Center.
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Schnell heard nothing else about 85 Genesee until the spring of 2002 when the city was about to close on the property—not for the developer, that deal had apparently never materialized, but, according to Schnell, so they could tear it down along with 91. At this point, Schnell came up with a development plan and two silent partners with investment money, and tried again. The city finally agreed to sell her 85 for one dollar, provided she took 91 as well. In July 2002, Schnell agreed to take both buildings and mothball them for future development. And in November, just one month after she’d acquired them and a few days before reinforcing steel beams would be installed, 85 collapsed in sixty mile per hour winds.
Such a charming little block
In his bar, Eddie Brady has an enlargement of a postcard of a Burchfield painting of the block. The print is fuzzy, and one can only imagine the beauty of the painting, which hangs in a Dallas museum. But from it you can see the charm of the old streetscape. The buildings present cheerful facades, ornate detailing, that beautiful copper skylight. It would be terrible to amputate two members of this tight-knit little group.
Eddie Brady, who has operated his little bar for thirteen years, and owned it for seven, says that Schnell’s decision to buy the buildings beside him was his “dream come true.” Brady’s bar stands out—a charming beacon of window boxes and good cheer—in the middle of the deserted block. But Brady has hope that Schnell’s plans will add to momentum he already sees in the area. “When I got down here, the City Center was a bombed out building with holes in it and the Radisson was an empty lot. But I’ve watched the progress block by block.” Brady points to Larry Quinn’s latest development where the old Burger King used to be and to Ellicott Lofts, slated to open this spring.
Brady describes the fallen 85 Genesee as “beautiful, such a nice little building, with a little corner stairwell…it was a shame when it fell, (Schnell) sat there and cried, God bless her.” As for the rest of the block, owner Genrich denies he is waiting for a big project to come along—“we stopped waiting for a new convention center a long time ago.” he says. Brady says he has sent many people to Genrich who expressed interest in his buildings, but according to Genrich “sometimes people back out when they can’t make a deal on their terms.”
In fact, Genrich says that he’s been hampered by the condition of 91 and 85. “We have plans and we’re going forward with them, but it’s a difficult block and a difficult city. I haven’t been able to get bank investment until we see what’s happening with those two buildings.” Genrich says he is anxious to see what Schnell will make of her buildings: “We’re very happy to see someone go forward with them. We were heartbroken to see 85 go down.”
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Jessie Schnell’s vision for Genesee St.
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Schnell considered forming a not-for-profit to develop the buildings, but finally decided with her partners to form a limited partnership for profit and her thinking on this reflects her view of the role of developers in relation to historic preservation. “It’s unfortunate that preservation is so often seen as unprofitable or as a good deed, not as good business,” she explains. “We wanted to show that you can renovate a historic property and be profitable and smart economically but do it thoughtfully, for the long term, as an investment with future dividends, and not just as a cash cow for the short term.
“To a big developer, a six percent return on an investment is almost like a loss,” she explains, “but to us a six percent return is better than the stock market. If you are really looking to invest for the future, not to sell and turn a quick profit, a lower return makes economic sense. In the short term, the profit is not high, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t profitable.”
It’s a long view of the city’s future, Schnell explains, the view that the city is something enduring: “I saw someone quoted in the paper a few weeks ago who said ‘it’s do or die time for the city’ and I thought, I don’t even know what that means. There are no examples in human history of a city just fading away. ...The question is not whether Buffalo will survive; of course we’ll survive. The question is whether we want to continue to muddle along as we have been or if we want to make things better for the future.”
Scot Fisher, president of Righteous Babe Records, echoes this sentiment. He feels it is the city’s abandonment of small development projects that has crippled the city and investment in these small projects can be part of its renaissance. “In our business,” he explains, “Ani and I have always felt that, okay, you have to sell twenty million records if you want to be a superstar, but if your goal is to survive and to be able to pay your employees, you only need to sell twenty thousand records. Utah Phillips says ‘make a living, not a killing.’ We’re about making a living.”
Fisher says it’s the same with buildings in Buffalo. “This city acts like you have to be a superstar project in order to succeed, a Darwin Martin House or a Guaranty Building.” But Fisher stresses that not every project needs to hit it out of the ballpark: “If you can pay your employees and yourself, that’s successful.” A few years ago, when the stock market was posting double digit returns, this point was harder to see, but as Fisher points out, “everyone’s looking at two percent returns today.”
A changing mindset at City Hall
In terms of development and preservation, Dave Sengbusch, the city’s Interim Executive Director of Strategic Planning, admits that there have been mistakes in the planning department. “We don’t have a good preservation plan in place in the city,” Sengbusch concedes, “we’re reactive and we need to be more proactive.” Sengbusch says, for example, that the city is learning from its mistakes, like the situation with the Michigan Avenue Church, which lost an important building next to it last fall because the owner had a permit to demolish that had never been approved by the preservation board. “There was no real process on that, but we’re getting a better process in place now. Right now, there’s some confusion in this building over who takes the lead on these issues—there’s fire, inspections, the zoning board, the preservation board, the planning board. We need to get better.”
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“With the scarce resources in this city,” says Sengbusch, “we have to make sure we get the most bang for our buck, that we get some real projects for our public dollars. But the key is to get a balance of smaller projects like Jessie’s as well as the larger ones.” Of Schnell’s project, Sengbusch has only praise: “To have Jessie step up with her own money, to the tune of a quarter million dollars, to save these two buildings from the wrecking ball is just great. It may be a small project to some minds, but to me it’s huge.”
“Planning is like a French dinner”
Such a comprehensive approach would be welcomed by Schnell and others who see planning as the key. “Maybe as a planner by trade I’m biased,” she laughs, “but I just think everything grows out of the plan. Without a plan, neighborhoods have to reinvent their vision every time a project comes up.”
When asked about the much-touted Downtown 2002! Project, Schnell says its flaw is that it is “unwilling to make decisions, so the casino is in there, the new convention center is in there, downtown residential is in there, the inner harbor is in there. It wants to please everyone, so it refuses to take anything off the menu. The Queen City plan is like a Chinese menu, I’ll take one of those and one of those. But planning is like a French dinner—if you have this entrée, you must have this wine. You must make choices. To my thinking you can’t have a downtown casino and downtown residences, they’re just incompatible to me.” The other problem with a plan that refuses to make choices is that it perpetuates the hopes of those owners of empty buildings that someday the city will come calling for their site.
When asked about the city’s comprehensive plan, Dave Sengbusch concedes that there is something lacking. “We have a local waterfront plan, the 2002 plan, the mayor’s comprehensive plan, but someone needs to be responsible for bringing all these plans together. When we bring all our plans together and get them adopted, then we can line up our budgets to implement them. But the devil is in the details...”
The power of organized neighborhoods
Schnell just finished working on a five-year plan for the Avenue Association, an advocacy group for Delaware Avenue from Elmwood to Virginia to Franklin to Niagara Square. “We call ourselves the hole in the donut,” says Avenue Association president R. Cameron Miller, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church. “We’re surrounded by the Elmwood area, Mainplace Mall, the West Village, and Allentown... We felt that what had once been a pretty thriving area was in need of some planning, so we hired Jessie to come up with a five year strategic plan that includes...design guidelines, zoning requirements, a demolition moratorium, a plan for public art, and marketing.”
Miller notes that a strong organization can advocate on the community’s behalf with the city and with developers. “Our mission is to create an urban village with residential and commercial elements and we’re not waiting on the city.”
Schnell emphasizes the power of community advocacy. “You know, the design guidelines utilized by Forever Elmwood to control development in the Elmwood area are not binding by law. They haven’t been adopted by the city, but every developer knows that this community will raise such united opposition, that basically they adhere to the guidelines.”
Picking Up the Pieces
So what’s next for the little developer who could? Originally, Schnell acquired the buildings with the thought that she would stabilize them and clean out the decay and think about reuse for a while before coming up with a plan. But the collapse of 85 has changed all that.
Now Schnell will move forward with renovation plans. “We’ll start by roofing a one story portion of 85. The façade remains and it’s really beautiful. ...then we’ll clean and stabilize 91 and probably have a construction and renovation plan by the spring.” Schnell tentatively plans to create first floor commercial space in both buildings and residential units on the upper floors.
Schnell says that many people who remember 85 Genesee have contacted her since reading of her involvement with it. “Even the descendants of the architects have gotten in touch with me,” she says.
Schnell’s experience leaves us with this lasting lesson: as long as there are buildings in Buffalo, buildings that people remember, that they love, that they feel a connection to, there will be a community called Buffalo.
Anna Geronimo Hausmann is a teacher and writer living in Buffalo.
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