Reformers seek to wrest the Broadway Market from the hands of a static board

Noon on a Tuesday at the Broadway Market. Outside a man is hawking athletic socks, while another challenges passersby to a chess game in the scant shade of a maple tree in a concrete planter. About a half dozen people stand in line at a hot dog stand. The corner is a meeting place, alive with action and conversation. Traffic is brisk, on the street and on the sidewalk.

photo by Rose Mattrey

That’s the outside. Inside, the market is quiet and nearly empty. But for the PA system playing classic rock, you could hear a clock ticking. Twice in the past two weeks I’ve visited the Broadway Market at lunchtime and counted no more than a dozen customers in the cavernous main hall. Half of those are elderly men and women sipping coffee from paper cups in the food court. At least a third of the active vendors left in the market—there are 34 right now, compared to more than 50 just 10 years ago—are shuttered. Excluding the Save-a-Lot grocery store and the market’s four lunch counters, which were busier, I counted six cash transactions between customers and vendors in one hour.

Six sales in an hour. Fewer vendors, fewer choices. What’s wrong with this place? The Broadway Market has survived 120 years, and the last 30 have been tough, but never has its prognosis seemed so grim. Where are the customers? Why have so many vendors leave? Is it the neighborhood, whose economic decline mirrors that of most every other East Side neighborhood? Is it racism? Is it competition from suburban supermarkets? Is it poor public transportation and the market’s distance from the downtown core? God knows it can’t be lack of parking—thanks to a car-centric reconstruction of the market in 1late 1950s, there are 1,300 parking spaces in the attached ramp, which are almost always mostly unused.

“It’s a shell of its former self,” Eddy Dobosiewicz says of the Broadway Market, ticking off a list of painful departures in the last decade: Max Poultry, Redlinski’s Meats, and Charlie the Butcher among them. “It’s like walking though a ghost town.”

In contrast to the sleepy corridors of the market, a political fight to change the way the market is run, smoldering in back room negotiations for a year, has suddenly caught fire these past three weeks. The players are a handful of community activists, the market’s board and executive director, and Buffalo Common Coucil President David Franczyk.

A board with no direction

Franczyk acknowledges the decline of the surrounding neighborhood as a contributor to the Broadway Market’s decline, which he recently called a “slow-moving train wreck.” He ought to know about the neighborhood: He and his wife live a couple blocks from the market on Fillmore Avenue. And he knows aboutm(and, to some degree, should answer for) the market’s dysfunctions too: He’s represented the Fillmore District since the 1980s, with one stint in the private sector, and so has appointed his share of baord members.

In the past week, however, alongside a group of East Side community activists and former Broadway Market board members, Franczyk has argued that the market’s torpor is the result of poor governance, lacking in vision and plagued by conflicts of interest. Franczyk’s efforts in the past year to populate the board with active, forward-thinking members—who brought new ideas for promoting the market and using it as a venue for regular events—have met with resistance from board members, some vendors, and the market’s executive, Richard Fronczak. Fronczak and his board, says Franczyk’s coalition of reformers, have been managing the market’s decline rather than seeking ways to revive it. Whether that’s the result of incompetence or indifference, they say, something needs to be done quickly.

At the June 24 meeting of the Common Council, Franczyk proposed a solution: The city owns the building that houses the Broadway Market, and the Broadway Market Management Corporation’s lease is due to expire on June 30. Franczyk proposes that the city allow the lease to expire. Then, he says, a new governing body can be formed and city can negotiate a new lease with that body. The current board and management structure would simply dissolve—no negotiations, no resignations.

Franczyk’s drastic solution is a response to this combative resolution drafted by the current board leadership at the Broadway Market and issued last Thursday (grammar and spelling errors intact):

Whereas reports have arisen in the news media regarding the need to reimagine the Broadway Market.

Whereas Former Council Member Karen Ellington obtained a One Million Dollar Bond for the Broadway Market several years ago.

Whereas the city of Buffalo, Common Council has authorized, but not delivered the One Million-Dollar Bond for the Broadway Market.

Whereas it has become apparent that the Broadway Market is in need of immediate delivery of the authorized One Million Dollar Bond, which would allow the Board to reimagine the Broadway Market.

Whereas David Franczyk is the Common Council representative for the Broadway Market and is the Common Council President and as our representative has a duty and responsibility to obtain the delivery of the One Million Dollar Bond.

Whereas David Franczyk was critical of the Broadway Market and it’s management but has failed to obtain the delivery of the One Million Dollar Bond over several years.

Be it resolved the Broadway Market Board of Directors here by schedules a public regular meeting to be held in the Broadway Market front public area Thursday June 26, 2008 at (12:00 P.M.) Noon.

Be it further resolved that Council President David Franczyk as an Advisory Broadway Market Board member be directed to attend and report on the time of delivery for the One Million Dollar Bond issue.

The angry resolution invited the public and city officials to attend a public forum on the Broadway Market’s future at noon today (Thursday, June 26). The meeting takes place at the Broadway Market.

That resolution was drafted in response to a June 17 Buffalo News article, whichoutlined criticisms of the market’s current management, as seen by community activists like Eddy Dobosiewicz, Christopher Byrd, Marty Biniasz, and others. The article irritated Fronczak, who said the doom and gloom frightened tenants, who wondered if the market was in danger of closing.

And the resolution infuriated Franczyk, who disputes the claim that he has ignored the market’s needs. He quickly issued a letter to Broadway Market tenants refuting the claims made in the resolution, which was circulated by board vice president Helen Wybluski and signed by board vice president Cheri Altemoos. It was he, not Ellington, who acquired approval for the sale of $1 million in bonds to improve the market’s infrastructure. That $1 million disappeared with the state’s imposition of the city’s control board, which put a tight lid on the city’s capital expenditures, canceling projects that were not deemed essential. He detailed the financial aid and relief the city had directed to the Broadway Market over the past 20 years: nearly $400,000 in community development block grants; nearly $800,000 for infrastructure improvements; paying half the utility bills since 1988; in 2000, dismissing $362,000 in utility bills that went unpaid despite that relief; forgiving the annual requirement that the market budget $50,000 into a capital reserve fund; a lease deal that costs just $1 per year.

Fronczak argues that the Broadway Market has become profitable under his management and the current board, running a combine surplus of more than $80,000 over the past three years. The grants and forgiven debts, Franczyk counters, are the only reason that the market manages to stay in the black.

Fronczak calls Franczyk’s efforts “a poltical struggle,” whereby the council president seeks to gain control of the market. “We don’t want political arguments going in here,” Fronczak says. “For that reason we don’t really want politcal grants and funding going on here.” Nonetheless, he wants that million-dollar bond in order to give the market a facelift. And he wants a new lease, to provide security to current and prospective tenants.

“The million dollars is a red herring, a canard,” Franczyk says. “Money is not the problem. All the money in the world is not going to save the market with this leadership. You could put in gold urinals and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

Missteps and bad politics

Christopher Byrd, who resigned in frsutration from the market’s board in January, agrees with Franczyk that more city money is not enough to right the foundering market. The onerous utility bills might certainly be relieved by updated systems; the boiler in the basement, for example, is at least 50 years old. That’s the responsibility of the city as the market’s landlord. But infrastructure alone won’t bring new customers, despite the market’s habit, as Byrd described it in his resignation letter, of putting “its hands out waiting for someone to help it.” A new boiler is no subsitute for a marketing plan.

“There is that relationship between the market and the city that is fractured,” says Byrd. “And, having sat on the board, I don’t know if they city can fix it, the way the board views the city. ‘Throw money at us and leave us alone,’ that’s what the board wants.”

The problem, Byrd says, is lack of vision. He took a position on the board because he imagined that it could be a part of the larger effor to revitalize Buffalo’s old Polonia dsitrict, which revolves around fixtures like the Central Terminal, St. Stanislaus, Corpus Christi, and the Adam Mickiewicz Library. This year Byrd was voted in as president of the board by a bloc of similarly minded progressives, offering a glimmer of hope for those who hoped to change the way business is done at the market.

But the current board leadership managed to retain power by invalidating the vote that won Byrd the presidency, through a series of shenanigans that included ousting one board member on a technicality and fetching a compliant former board member from a nursing home to take his place, in order to make a quorum. In the aftermath, Byrd resigned; the old leadership returned and booted reform-minded board members Marty Biniasz and Father Anzelm Chalupka of Corpus Christi Church for missing too many meetings, which are held at 8:30 in the mornings on weekdays—tough to make for working professionals.

For all the complaints about lack of public money, the current management practically threw away $1.2 million from Congresswoman Louise Slaughter in 2006. Slaughter, who was instrumental in the successful rejuvenation of Rochester’s public marketplace, earmarked the money for a public kitchen and a variety of much-needed infrastructure improvements. But Fronczak and the board conspired to use $1 million of Slaughter’s earmark to lure in a new tenant who proposed to open a factory outlet selling discount clothing—not at all in line with Slaughter’s vision of the market as a hub for community development and a source of healthy food in a multicultural neighborhood. Slaughter took her money off the table and walked away, disgusted, vowing never to help the market while Fronczak was still there.

“They wanted to give this guy $1 million, Slaughter’s money, to open a factory outlet,” Franczyk says. “Is that right for the market? He subsequently went out of business. If you had given this guy $1 million, he probably would have skipped town.”

More recently, when the departure of KeyBank left the market with nagging vacancy and a loss of $6,000 per month in rent, Fronczak and the board courted a check-cashing operation based in New York City. Maybe check-cashing is a sevice the neighborhood needs, says Dobosiewicz, but it hardly burnishes the market’s already downtrodden image. “This is the plan there: Get whoever you can who will pay rent, don’t worry about who they are and how they fit in with the market,” he says.

Fronczak says that the fight Franczyk has started has threatened to scared off even that new tenant. “People want some assurance that the market is going to be there before they invest,” he says. “[Franczyk saying the market could be closed by Easter doesn’t help us bring in new tenants.”

What the future might look like

Fronczak says that the Broadway Market will never be the market of 30 or 40 years ago, when food was its central product. He says the market now serves its immediate neighborhood day to day, which means services like check-cashing and goods like makeup and clothing. It serves the broader region at Easter time, when its main products are the meats, breads, and butter lambs that folk associate with the name.

Beverly McLean doesn’t buy that the market’s focus on food is a thing of the past. McLean is a professor at University at Buffalo Department of Architecture and Planning, and has worked closely with the Broaway Market’s management. She is lead author of a recent study, “Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood Food Alliance: A community food development strategy for Broadway Market,” which ably describes the market and the community it anchors. McLean has visited public markets across the country, and she too believes the failures of the Broadway Market are, at least in part, the result of shortsighted management.

“It’s run right now with the emphasis on operations, without an understanding of economic development,” McLean says, adding that she believes Fronczak has been a strong fiscal manager. “It’s very difficult for a market to succeed without an undertsanding of its community role.”

In other words, the management of the market is doing its best to get along without engaging any strategy to grow the market, engage the surrounding neighborhood, and perhaps serve as a catalyst for the neighborhood’s recovery.

That’s not entirely the management’s fault, McLean says. The city has not been an especially good landlord, and politicians have fought proxy battles through the Broadway Market’s board for decades. The place needs a physical overhaul, which costs money, and its governing structure needs reform, which also requires governmental intervention.

“It goes beyond the current regime,” she says, and indeed the current board leadership was put in place in the wake of a 2000 audit performed by then City Comptroller Anthony Nanula, who said at the time that the causes of a purported $380,000 debt ranged from poor planning to outright theft. That crisis led to public outcry that the market was closing, and in the ensuing power struggle the debt was forgiven in exchange for new management.

Public markets in Columbus, Cincinnatti, and Seattle have almost closed, as well, says McLean, but two things saved them: cash investment in infrastructure and community groups that formed in order to advocate for governmental support, to program events, and to promote the markets. She says the Broadway Market needs a “friends of the market” group, too, and a board of directors who are willing to entertain their ideas.

The current board has been less than receptive to new marketing ideas; they only halfheartedly went along with a Christmas market event last year, for example, which turned out to be hugely successful. Tenants who suggested a Fourth of July promotion were told it was bad idea. Why? Because it had never been done before. And management seems unwilling to accept the conclusions of customer surveys that indicate the market would attract more business if it stayed open past five o.clock on weekdays and instituted Sunday hours.

Sandy Starks is a founding member of Western New York’s convivium of the Slow Food movement and a career professional in the food and wine industry. She was one of the organizers of the Christmas market, an effort in which she received so little cooperation from the market’s management that it wound up costing her money. She’s one of a number of Broadway Market enthusiasts who are waiting in the sidelines to contribute their ideas and expertise to the rebirth of the market. Starks imagines organic vegetable stands, high-quality coffee, good cheeses, and microbrews to draw in customer with expensive tatses; she imagines reaching out to potential new vendors in the Fillmore District’s burgeoning Vietnamese and Muslim communities, as well as a consistent effort to include the district’s majority African-American population in the market’s cultural history and governance, which have been an island of Eastern European whiteness in a neighborhood that is predominantly African American. Starks imagines events every weekend, promoted not only by individual participants but by the market’s management. Starks, Byrd, and Dobosiewicz point to the Clinton-Bailey market—in an equally distressed neighborhood, even further removed from downtown—as an indication of that the Broadway can succeed.

Franczyk is convening a task force comprising people like Starks, McLean, Byrd, and Dobosiewicz to discuss the market’s future. He says he hopes to professionalize the board, removing the influence of politicians who currently name most of the board members. (He names two.) And he says he has the support of Mayor Byron Brown in whatever that task force decides, which decreases the possibility that the Broaway Market—a place with no patronage to speak of, where instransigence seems more of a habit than a question of personal gain—might once again become the victim of a political struggle.

“If I blame myself for anything, it’s that I waited too long,” Franczyk says.