Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Demolition work is officially underway to tear down the burned-out structure at 745 Main Street in Downtown Buffalo.
With the on-site investigation into the fatal fire that took the life of Buffalo Firefighter Jason Arno two weeks ago now complete, crews continued to tear down the one-story portion of the structure closer to Washington Street on Tuesday. The plans are for Wednesday to begin taking down the primary three-story structure closest to Main Street, which will hopefully be completed sometime next week.
While crews will continue to work to clean up after the major fire back on March 1, businesses along Main Street continue to wait things out with the 700 block remaining closed to vehicle traffic, and limited to foot traffic.
"We're getting through it the best we can with the street being shut down," said Matthew Keeler, owner and founder of Just Dishin' at the corner of Main Street and W. Tupper St. "Obviously there's a lot of everyday hiccups that come about, like it being tough to get deliveries here, whether FedEx or UPS. Obviously, foot traffic has been really difficult too with people coming to our doors. And people coming from Canada and Rochester, maybe people that don't necessarily know about the fire or what happened, and trying to park. But other than that, I think it's just getting through the best we can, and trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel."
"It's been difficult, it's been frustrating," added owner of Papillon Salon on Main Street, Lynne LaMattina. "Clients are nervous about coming down to this area, and we've had a small opening for them to access walking down the street. But still, it's a little nerve-wracking. People are putting off their appointments, hoping that they can come down once things are a little bit more cleared. And parking is very difficult, as well, even for us. We would normally have access to a parking lot in the back, and we've just now gained access to it. But we're limited as to how many spaces we have."
For Maria Colosi, manager of Ink Euphoria Tattoo Parlor on Main Street, she and her bosswere not sure what everything was going to entail the day of the fatal fire. She admits they were surprised they were only forced to be shut down for one day before getting back to businesses.
"We came back just a few days later to the street being closed off, nobody can park around here. At first, the police were kind of giving people a hard time for even just walking up to the businesses here. I don't think they realized we were open, we had to explain that to them. It's made it really hard for our clients to come in here," said Colosi.
Colosi adds it's been a tough time for everyone in the 700 block as the street continues to be shut down due to the investigation, and now the subsequent demolition. She says the event space next door, the Black Butterfly, had to shut down a little longer and reschedule a lot of their events.
Communication has been key for a number of the businesses in the 700 block, and everyone's been trying to support one another in the struggling times.
"I know the owner, Jessica, she knew a lot of the folks over at the costume shop, and talking to everyone around here, day-to-day and having seen what we saw and knowing how it affected everybody, it's really tough," Colosi said. We're all just trying to help each other out, and keeping lines of communication open and interact with each other in a positive way, support each other."
"Obviously, there's a lot of small businesses around here, whether it'd be City Wine or Oxford Pennant or ZoomCopy across the street, I think us just being together as a community, and updating people and other businesses as we gather information the best we can is what we can do to be there for each other," Keeler added.
As of right now, the hope is for Main Street to be able to re-open to the public sooner. That's because the work area will take place on Washington Street, so once the building is demolished, loading will take place from Washington. One of the city inspectors told business owners on Tuesday the hope would be to have the stretch of Main Street back open by early next week.
"One of the city inspectors came in and said that they are hoping to have the fences moved a little bit closer to the site so that not only will we be able to have pedestrians coming on the street, we will also have vehicles able to come. Then they can make the turn and go back down towards Tupper," LaMattina said. "That would help immensely, but the whole block has been surreal, because we're looking out the windows and it seems like I've been the only one working and there isn't any traffic, there's no foot traffic. It just seems very odd. It's a very tragic situation, but it's also hard to be working so close to the site."
Aside from the recent word businesses got on Tuesday, nothing much else has been communicated from anyone with the City of Buffalo other than when they needed to investigate certain matters the day after the fatal fire.
"We've kind of just been waiting, and knowing everything is up in the air. It's hard," Colosi said. "We don't want to sound selfish or feel selfish, 'Well, we're a business, we need to be up and running.' We understand what happened, we understand it was a tragedy. We almost sometimes feel guilty for being annoyed at the situation, because it's understandable that this is going to take a while to clean up and deal with, and we don't expect them to get it done overnight. So it's kind of a tricky situation."
While the shutdown and the lack of business flow has put a strain on several businesses along the 700 block of Main Street, they feel that once the street re-opens to traffic with no limitations, they will be able to get back on track without skipping a beat.
"I think that we'll get back," LaMattina said. "We've come back from so many things. I mean, COVID, we came back from that. So here we are. We'll just keep plugging away."
"We've obviously dealt with a lot this year, snowstorms and things like that. A lot of big storms that we don't usually have so many of that's affected us. It's a little bit of a struggle. I don't think it's going to be anything crazy long-term that we can't handle. It's just kind of a bump in the road," Colosi added. "In the beginning, we weren't sure what to expect. We didn't know if we'd even be able to be open or when we could open. It's better than we thought it could be, I guess."
As for Keeler and Just Dishin', they've been able to get by through a majority of this time with their ability to have a strong presence behind the scenes and online. While the shutdown may have impacted business, in terms of foot traffic and the face-to-face interactions they're able to have with the public, Keeler feels they've tried to put themselves in the best position moving forward with it all.
"Strengthening our online presence and our behind the scenes work that we do every day has been something we kind of took a page out of that book from COVID, and I feel like we've been able to really lean on the experience we've had in the past couple of years," he said. "We really just look forward to having the street back open, and having people being able to come in here, people from outside of Buffalo that not necessarily know about the street being shut down, but come here and they're looking for a place to park and stuff like that. So we're doing the best we can with it."
