COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: Termini sees gold in what city once was
Mr. Downtown stood in the grand old ballroom with the flaking plaster and water stain on the ceiling, his face a glow of anticipation.
“It’s like a time warp,” he said. “That is the original chandelier. It’s 110 years old.”
The words revealed the secret of one man’s success and the value of the city’s long-ignored treasures. One cannot come to Buffalo and see only what is. One must picture the glory of what was, and imagine the possibility of what again can be.
I stood Wednesday in the once-stately Crystal Dining Room of the Lafayette Hotel. With me was Rocco Termini, the developer who has revived a string of battered downtown buildings. In the seven- story, 367-room Lafayette— once-grand hotel, now flophouse —he has found his latest object of infatuation.
Its ground floor is an ode to hand-laid mosaic tile, marble-paneled walls and detailed plaster molding. Wind the clock back 70 years in the Crystal Dining Room. Close your eyes. Picture a black-and- white movie with Cary Grant in a tux at a corner table, while couples sway on the dance floor. This is what this place was—and again can be.
“It is a beautiful building,” said Termini, who last month signed a conditional purchase deal. “The cornices, all the architectural features are intact.”
An imagination-deprived developer sees the now-tattered ballroom and thinks: Gut it and slap up drywall. Mr. Downtown sees the same room and says: Thank you, economic gods, for a decline that left standing such architecture- as-art buildings.
“[Downtown] is the only place you get something like this, with this character,” said Termini. “You go to the suburbs if you want a plain banquet room with drywall.”
With his neatly parted hair, wire-rimmed eyewear and preference for pastel sweaters, Termini could be a hip accountant. He is a master at finding pots of out-of-town funding. He has the requisite friendly relations with City Hall. Although affable, he predictably can play hardball—as anyone standing between him and a project finds out.
Yet he greets by name workers at a nearby project who are laying brick and scraping walls. I have always liked his appreciation—whether purely practical or otherwise—for preservation, the quality of his projects and his can-do track record.
Termini wants to transform the circa- 1904 Lafayette into a banquet facility, small boutique hotel and about 100 apartments. Financing is almost in place. On the same block, he is putting 48 apartments into the old AM&A’s warehouse. Across Washington Street, he has a purchase option and sketchy hotel/apartment plans for the vast, long-vacant AM&A’s building.
To the Mr. Magoos of the development world, these buildings are eyesores. To Termini, they are resources. Brick walls, hardwood floors and gargoyle- encrusted cornices add character. Character means value. Value means higher rents. Reviving glorious buildings is not just good aesthetics. It is good business.
“We are lucky to still have these old buildings,” said Termini. “There is value in preservation. You make more money.”
Termini, for all of his talents, is no visionary. He acknowledges what anyone who regularly gets out of town realizes: Other cities have been doing this for decades. Only in our relatively buttoned-down, risk-averse local development world is reviving old buildings regarded as radical.
“We can be just as successful here as other cities have been,” he said. “This is not reinventing the wheel.”
Preservation is practical. Relics are resources. Salvation makes dollars and sense. Keep proving it, Mr. Downtown.
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