By Staff Reporter
BUFFALO — The Broadway Market has stood on the same East Side corner since 1888. Its $45 million rebuild can’t seem to get started.
Construction was supposed to begin this past summer. In July it slipped to the fall. Last week, Empire State Development told 7 News WKBW that work will now start in spring 2027. The reason is the sale of the historic tax credits that make up part of the financing.
“Throughout the project, we try to take our best guess on when we’re going to close on that financing, but sometimes it just takes longer,” said Paul Ray, who is leading construction for ESD.
The delay matters for more than the calendar. Those tax credits shape what the building will look like. To get them, the 1956 market has to be restored to federal preservation standards. That decides which walls stay, which come down and how much of Broadway’s Art Moderne past survives.
What’s being paid for
According to a March ESD release, the state money comes from two pots. One is $10 million from the 2019 East Side Corridors Economic Development Fund, which has paid for the business plan, start-up planning and design. The other is $29 million in ESD capital funds approved in 2022 under the Regional Revitalization Partnership. A separate $2.5 million Broadway-Fillmore Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant is set aside for the facade. ESD put the total cost at $40 million to $45 million.
Ray said about $7 million has already been spent on design. “We’ve already invested $7 million in this design and a whole team is built around this to make it happen,” he told WKBW.
In February, the National Park Service found the design eligible for a Type 2 Historic Preservation Certification, ESD said. That is the step that opens the door to historic tax credit financing. The building is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and sits inside the Broadway Fillmore local historic district.
What the design changes
The plans filed by Flynn Battaglia Architects for city review this summer amount to a gut renovation inside and a careful peel-back outside.
- Year-round vendors would be clustered along a central main aisle, with an overflow area for the Easter crowds. There would be new production stalls, a grease waste system and shared cold storage.
- Non-historic add-ons would be stripped from the facade, including EIFS panels and glass-block infill. They would be replaced with aluminum storefronts on a granite base, in an effort to “better capture the original 1950’s design intent.” ESD says the curved Art Moderne walls and window features are among the “character-defining” elements to be restored.
- The rear portion of the parking garage and both ramps would be demolished at the southernmost expansion joint. A surface lot, a truck loading dock and an outdoor plaza for market events would replace them.
- The south wall, now hidden under the open-air garage, would be rebuilt in brick and storefront glass, with a larger share of glass facing the new lot.
The filing says “extensive structural work” is needed on the exterior columns, some of which will be “partially or substantively rebuilt.” Slide bearings will be added to remedy what the architects called “flaws in the original design and concrete composition.”
Fewer parking spaces, more green
The parking plan has already changed once. At a July board meeting, the planned lot was cut from 135 spaces to 75 after the design team talked with Mayor Sean Ryan, WKBW reported.
“He’s not a big proponent of surface parking lots,” designer Chris Less said at the meeting. Part of the area set aside for parking will be green space for now while the team studies how much parking is really needed.
That is a real urban design choice, and a defensible one. Few things deaden a commercial street faster than an oversized lot. But it lands on a market whose busiest customers drive in from the suburbs for one week every spring. Whether 75 spaces can handle Easter week is a question the board should answer in public before the asphalt goes down.
Vendors want a date they can trust
The people who sell kielbasa, butter lambs and horseradish there have heard several timelines. At that July meeting, about nine vendors spoke up about being left in the dark.
“[Construction] was supposed to start taking place after Easter, and here it is near the end of July so when is it actually going to start taking place?” said Suzanne Maciejewski, who runs a wine stand with Carl Schmitter.
David Franczyk, the longtime Fillmore District Council member who now sits on the board of Broadway Market Management Inc., the nonprofit that runs the city-owned building, said the project is not in doubt. “But the project is gonna move forward. I mean everyone wants it to happen,” he told WKBW last week. For shoppers, he said, Easter 2027 “shouldn’t look any different from what it did last Easter.”
ESD has said the market will stay open, “albeit in a modified manner,” for an estimated 24-month build. Vendors will be moved around inside the building as work progresses.
The open questions
The math invites a few. In July, WKBW reported the renovation was expected to be finished in 2028. A spring 2027 start and a 24-month schedule put completion closer to spring 2029, which would mean two Easters inside a construction zone, not one. ESD has not publicly reconciled those dates.
Nor has it said what happens to the budget if the tax-credit sale closes at a lower price than planned, or whether the 1950s curved walls and the new south wall will be protected if costs climb.
When ESD laid out the plan in March, ESD President Hope Knight said the state was “pursuing a plan that firmly reestablishes the market as a bustling hub in the heart of the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood.” Board chair Peter Cammarata called the nonprofit takeover “a pivotal turning point in the history of the Broadway Market.”
The design is ready. The money is mostly committed. What Broadway-Fillmore is waiting on now is a closing date.
Featured photo: Shoppers crowd the Broadway Market in March 2015. Photo by Andre Carrotflower via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.
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