Harry Stinson is the probable real-estate developer with interest in purchasing the long-shuttered East Side icon.

This week, the Buffalo News reported that a Canadian developer had designs to convert the structure into housing and multiple other uses. Central Terminal Restoration Corporation vice president, Paul Lang, refused to identify the developer, as is often the case when sensitive negotiations are underway.

But a YouTube video from last July reveals that the man behind the proposal is most likely Harry Stinson.

Stinson is a Hamilton-based developer who has made his fortune in Toronto’s ever-hot condominium market, but he has been leaning towards the redevelopment of what he calls “grand, old buildings” in recent years. The reason for this, in Stinson’s words, is purely economic.

Realizing that the condo high rises in Toronto are lacking a certain je ne sais quoi, he reasons in the video that, “People really miss the character in buildings. They’ll pay a premium for them. They’ll want to live in them… The iconic buildings, the buildings with character have kept their value, and have always been in demand. My fascination with buildings is customer-driven.”

And he sees a lot of undervalued properties in the United States as ripe for speculation. “In the States…there’s an enormous quantity of grand, old buildings. Canada? Not so much,” he explains in the video. ”We’re not a grand society. We don’t do thing in the same over-the-top way that Americans do.”

Stinson became aware of the Central Terminal while working with an architect on the historic Hotel Niagara, a beleaguered Niagara Falls, NY property he still owns. When he talks about the train station, he’s downright reverent:

The architect who was working on it said, ‘If you like this building, you’re gonna love the Buffalo Central Terminal.’ I said, ‘All right, fine I’ll look at it.’ Every day someone calls or sends me an email: ‘You gotta look at this building, it’s once in a lifetime, you gotta see this one.’ Every day. So I went and looked at it. This time, this was a genuine “holy shit” building. Everyone who’s seen this building walks in the door and wow. It is over the top. You’ve seen it. It is a spectacular building, It’s like [Toronto’s] Union Station, but it’s bigger. It occupies a 16-acre parcel of land. It has out-buildings that are grand, old warehouse-type buildings. It’s a stunning space. I was aware of it, I watched it and watched it, hoping that sometime maybe in my dreams, this thing might come available. And lo and behold, a few months ago, I got a frantic email from another one of the architects: “RFP, Buffalo Central Terminal; you gotta throw your hat in the ring.” And so we did.

Last May, our partner organization Investigative Post covered the developing crisis around the art deco monolith. Almost forty years since the last train left the station, the structural needs for the building are great, and perhaps encumbered by the weight of a million square feet of decaying yet treasured space, the board established to manage the property resorted to in-fighting and dysfunction, according to reporter Charlotte Keith.

The Hotel Niagara

But is Stinson the man who can shoulder the terminal’s rebirth? If his track record at the Hotel Niagara is any indication, perhaps not. Stinson bought the property in September 2011 for an undisclosed amount, just five months after a British Colombia developer purchased the property for $1.25 million. In 2012, he won Niagara County IDA tax abatements and PILOT grants for redevelopment as a boutique hotel with an eye on opening in 2013.

“My niche is restore old buildings and neat old buildings,” Stinson said at the time about the hotel. “This is my next ‘neat, old building’ project.”

The Hotel Niagara remains closed to this day, and the sale to another investment group that was originally scheduled for spring 2015 has run into delays.