If you live anywhere near the Casino in the Delaware Park area of Buffalo (as I do), you have been deluged recently with pseudo-information in just about all media telling you what a great idea it is to put a privately run stand-up bar and restaurant in the Casino, the publicly owned building on the south side of Hoyt Lake. 

There have been emails, Facebook postings (“click if you’d like a new facility in an unused building” or something like that), petitions, two-page mailings from the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy saying how much they need the money from the bar and how much good it will do for them. Nothing to give you a chance to say no: You can only approve or do nothing.

There have been articles in the Buffalo News describing the new operation as a done deal, and two public informational meetings at which the bar/restaurant operators have said they intended to do good things and at which the chair of the Conservancy and the Conservancy’s director talked about why this was necessary so they could meet their budget guidelines and obligations.

There have been postings saying that a majority of people in the neighborhood want this bar. At the time that posting went out, no one had polled the neighborhood about what it thought about the proposed bar. The posting was entirely fictional.

There is even a “Marcy Casino” Facebook page (I don’t know who runs it) that constantly posts stuff on how good it will be to have that privately run bar/restaurant in that publicly owned building.

What’s missing

The pressure and PR have been huge and relentless. The only thing missing has been any public consultation. 

The entire discourse has been one-sided: The restaurant/bar managers and the Conservancy staff have been out there on the show-and-tells and in the media.

The public has been excluded entirely.

There has been no public consultation. None.

You couldn’t put a gas station on Elmwood Avenue in Kenmore without public hearings and consultation. You couldn’t put a bar anywhere in Erie County without public hearings, environmental impact studies, and all the rest.

These folks are trying to deliver a done-deal bar in a publicly owned Frederick Law Olmsted Park with no conversation with anyone. Except for the conversations in the deals they have cut in private.

History

Some years ago, Buffalo’s City Hall got the idea of rehabilitating the Casino in Delaware Park, which was then derelict and pretty much unused. Several bar owners came up with ideas for how they might use that space for money-making operations. Al Coppola, then a member of the Common Council, got the city to create a citizens’ committee to consider those proposals. I was a member of that committee.

Three proposals of substance were submitted. They each had developmental plans and budget outlines. The community group’s primary requirement was that the facility be a restaurant, not a bar, that its primary function be to serve the park users, not the bar-owners. One member of the committee was a prominent local restaurant owner. He walked us through the three budgets and showed how they were bars that served food on the side, not food places that provided drinks to their diners.

We rejected all three proposals and recommended that the city partner with the people who ran the Juicery or something like that. There are plenty of late-night bars in this part of town; what the park needed was a facility that would be useful to the families using the park during the hours the park was open. 

Everyone I’ve ever talked with since has said pretty much the same thing: We’d like something there while we are in the park.

Nothing ever came of it. Not one of the bar proposals moved forward. For some reason I never learned, the Juicery was never invited in. 

A dead dog and big bucks

Shortly thereafter, our dog was poisoned. She was a lovely Samoyed, perfectly healthy one week, then in collapse and dead the next. Our vet said, “Healthy dogs don’t just die like that.” Maybe it had nothing to do with that selection process. Maybe it was some other villain. Maybe. 

Not long after, one of the bar proposers told a friend, “Those people in that neighborhood, your friend in particular, cost me millions.” 

That is what a bar in Delaware Park may be worth. This is not a mere convenience. It is big bucks.

The current bar/restaurant proposers are promising the Olmsted Conservancy $100,000 to $200,000 a year. If that’s BOPC’s cut, what are the people running that proposed joint on public property expecting to make?

Now

As I noted above, there have been two public meetings about the bar/restaurant in the Delaware Park Casino. Both were long after the negotiations had taken place and the designs had been done. They were show-and-tell, not public consultations: Here is what we did. Any questions? 

Several of us at those meetings had questions, all of which were dismissed by either the proposed bar operators or the current heads of the Conservancy: Kevin Kelly, chair of their board, basically said, “We need the money”; Stephanie Crockatt, the Conservancy’s executive director, when I asked, “Why didn’t you have any public meetings about this,” replied, “We are having one now.” I said to her, “This is not a consultation meeting, this is an informational meeting.” She shrugged and turned away.

My questions were after the deal had been cut. All of our questions were after the deal had been cut. They were patronizing us. There had been no public consultation, no open competition to run a bar in a city-owned facility, no requests-for-proposals, no bids. It was all over before got there. 

Why the secrecy?

When I emailed Crockatt to ask why none of this had been let out for public scrutiny, she wrote me that the City of Buffalo prohibited such scrutiny. I have been able to find no Buffalo official willing to say he or she issued such an injunction. It may be true that the city wanted secrecy about a deal as important as this one. If so, who wanted it and why? And why would the Olmsted Conservancy join such a sneaky plan? Why would a philanthropic organization agree to a process that was a total fix? If not true, why such a lie?

Why not have a Delaware Park casino food operation?

There should be a food operation in Marcy Casino. It is a great building and it should be used. That is what Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux wanted. Everything in that park should serve the public. But they also wanted the park run so nothing in it should screw up the park itself or the surrounding neighborhood. 

The current PR barrage coming out on social media from the hopeful managers and the Conservancy say it will be a swell site for nighttime eating and boozing. That is true: It would be. They propose only an hour extension of park hours. 

Delaware Park now closes at 10pm; they say they want last call at 10pm, shutdown at 11pm. What if you get there at 9:50, order dinner, drinks, a bottle of wine, and cognac after? And they want another hour for cleaning up. 

So the current proposal being hyped by the Conservancy and its partners, has, in real time, just shifted park closing hours from 10pm to perhaps 1am. Plus the comings and goings of the service trucks all day and into the night in one of the most-used sections of the Park.

Parking

This new joint will call for something like 75 new parking spaces in an area pretty much full already. It’s a busy neighborhood: Buffalo State, the Albright-Knox, the park itself, events in the park such as the Shakespeare in Delaware Park performances, and more. One document the Olmsted Conservancy issued said that the casino operators will provide valet service. Does this mean visitors to Shakespeare in Delaware Park and people taking their kids to the park at mid-day will now have to pay the casino operators for parking? If not, who will pay for it? Will it come out of the Olmsted cut? Or be added into the drink and sandwich prices?

These are questions that could perhaps have been answered, had there been any public hearings. There weren’t any hearings, so there are no answers, there is just the PR hype.

Deception

There are a lot of other deceptions in the PR barrage. I’m tempted to say that much of it is like the ads for Trump U, but I won’t say that because we already know that Trump U was totally phony and about this operation in Delaware Park we can only speculate.

So I’ll say something else instead. Please pardon the vulgarity to come. I worked in Hollywood for a while. I cannot remember how many times I heard this riff: “How do you say ‘Fuck you’ in Hollywood?” Beat. “‘Trust me.’”

That’s what the Olmsted Conservancy and the proposed bar-runners are saying to the rest of us: “Trust us.” That is what they said, several times, at the second of the two public informational meetings: “Trust us.”

Given the pathway to here, the secrecy of it all, the lack of public scrutiny, the resistance to public inquiry, the hostility to public input: Why should we?

What they’ve done with the greenery in the park is superb; we can trust them on that because we’ve seen what they’ve done and they’ve been out front and open about what they were up to. This time they have not been the least bit open and the only reason they’ve given for this operation is not that it makes the park beautiful, but because “We need the money.”

What next?

What if the bar operators  say, “We need another two hours to make this profitable? We need to go to 2am final call to meet our nut?”

 What will the Conservancy do then? How will it engage the community then? It has not engaged the community thus far. It has moved the park’s real closing time deeper into the night without talking to us at all. 

Buffalo has an astonishing tradition of destroying Frederick Law Olmsted’s designs. There was once a grand parkway that connected the Parade (now Martin Luther King, Jr., Park) to Delaware Park. What was a splendid swath of space for vehicles and pedestrians and trees was all ripped out to make room for the 198 and the 33, the Kensington and the Scajaquada. What was Olmsted’s Front Park is now mostly federal inspection stations and truck lanes.

The reason we don’t know what might happen in Delaware Park next is because of what just happened: Crockatt’s Olmsted Conservancy has kept everything secret, and has thus far refused to let the rest of us in, until everything was a done deal. Why should we assume the next steps will be any different?

A neighborhood joint

Shall there be a late-night bar in the Delaware Park casino? If so, what kind of bar shall it be? Whose interests shall it serve? What kinds of hours should it maintain? How much should its profit motive be allowed to reconfigure how we manage our park? Who shall determine the hours of the city’s public venues—bar operators or community people? 

All these questions have discussable answers and discussable conclusions.

The problem is that the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy has not been willing to offer any forum for any such conversations. The Conservancy, or perhaps its current director, worked instead to block them. 

They have barraged us on social media and in the mail with PR for the proposed bar/restaurant in Delaware Park.

The Olmsted Conservancy currently manages Delaware Park in contract with the City of Buffalo. It does not own Delaware Park. The park’s Marcy Casino should not be turned into a money machine for the Conservancy. That is the tail wagging the dog. 

There should be a good eatery in that building. But it should not be configured in service to the Olmsted Conservancy. It should be in service to the Park’s users, the community. 

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Bruce Jackson has lived across the street from Delaware Park for 40 years.