The Buffalo News Archives THE CANADIANS ARE COMING TORONTO TEAM HAS BIG PLANS FOR FALLS, N.Y. Published on January 18, 1998

Author: MICHAEL BEEBE © The Buffalo News Inc.

Eddy Cogan and David Crombie, two Canadians who get things done here in "The City That Works," have teamed up to take on Niagara Falls, N.Y., a city that specializes in wasting money reinventing itself every few years. They will present a plan Tuesday on how they propose to attract at least $140 million -- and they hope much more -- over the next eight years to restore Niagara Falls as one of the world's most desirable tourist destinations David Crombie is the likable, pint-sized former Toronto mayor of the 1970s who became known as Tiny Perfect Mayor during his three terms. He went on to serve as Canada's health and welfare chief, secretary of state and Indian affairs minister. He's now czar of Toronto's waterfront. Edwin A. Cogan helped develop SkyDome, is a backstage regular at Rolling Stones concerts he once helped promote and, despite shying from the limelight, may be Canada's answer to Donald Trump in the art of the deal. Over his lifetime, the Toronto man claims to have completed $25 billion in real estate projects. Now Cogan and Crombie are taking their show on the road. They're coming across the border, heading south to Niagara Falls to present their vision of what the onetime Honeymoon Capital of the World will look like in the 21st century. Bruce Jolley -- an urban planner with the Jerde Partnership, which put together the Mall of the Americas in Minnesota, the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas and Horton Plaza in San Diego -- will be front and center at Tuesday's 7 p.m. presentation in the Niagara Falls Convention and Civic Center. Jolley will be the one explaining how the proposed mix of housing, hotels, shops and restaurants will help spread the greenery and scale of Frederick Law Olmsted's park into the city over 200 acres of past failed development. Jolley will be the one expected to tell of the proposed removal of the Robert Moses Expressway, the four-lane expressway that cuts the city off from the Niagara River. But Cogan and Crombie will be the two selling a plan that, while asking for no public money, seeks control of the convention center, airport, Wintergarden, bus station and parking ramps. Will these two Canadians succeed in the rough and tumble world of Niagara Falls where so many others have failed? Those who have watched past urban renewal projects fail in Niagara Falls say this time the plan is different for a city that has defined how to do it wrong.

Ernest Sternberg, a professor at the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture and Planning, studies tourism in Niagara Falls. He knows what hasn't worked. "I think this is really serious," Sternberg said of Cogan's team. "This is not a joke. This is not a flyby-night outfit. They are not coming in here to change their minds. I have admiration for the people involved." Who are these guys? Across the border, mayor after mayor in Niagara Falls, Ont., over the past 50 years has tried to rip up an eyesore of a rail line that cuts off the city from Queen Victoria Park and the Horseshoe Falls. Crombie, originally called in to mediate a dispute between the city and Niagara Parks Commission over the height of new hotels coming with the city's $1 billion casino boom, went to work on this as well. He got the heads of Canada's two major railroads together. He told them how much more their land would be worth in Niagara Falls with all the coming casino investments. In six weeks, he undid a half century of stonewalling. The rail line will be gone. "He's a great listener, and he's an immensely likable person; people like to like him," said Kenneth Greenburg, who served as Toronto planning director for Crombie when he was mayor and has become one of North America's leading urban designers, now involved in Detroit's redevelopment. "I think there was a time when he could have become prime minister," Greenburg said of his former boss, who, elected with 80 percent of the vote, remains the most popular mayor in Toronto's recent past. "If anybody is going to be able to turn things around on the other side, it is David Crombie and his people," said Niagara Falls, Ont., Mayor Wayne Thomson. Canada's prestige was on the line last year when promoters of the much ballyhooed race between Olympic champions Michael Johnson and Donovan Bailey came up short on the $500,000 guarantees to the runners. Cogan's Heroes The call went out to Eddy Cogan. He lined up $1.5 million in last-minute financing, bailing out the Race of the Century, and the guarantees were paid. The Canadian Bailey whipped the American Johnson before a good crowd at SkyDome, and Canada's pride was restored. You can't blame Cogan for Johnson's pulling up lame. Sports Illustrated credited Cogan with pulling it off, saying the race was saved "by a swashbuckling Toronto millionaire whose nom de deal is Fast Eddy." Cogan's been pulling these financial rabbits out of the hat his entire career, so much so that Toronto's Business Magazine named him one of Toronto's Top 10 deal-makers along Bay Street, Toronto's version of Wall Street. "Eddy's a deal maker," said Lou Clancy, former managing editor of the Toronto Star. "He has pulled off some big deals before in the city of Toronto. He's good at bringing people together into a room and coming out with a deal." Cogan and Crombie are contemporaries in their early 60s, are intensely devoted to Toronto and love to take on seemingly lost causes. But the similarities end there. Where similarities end Had they gone to the same Toronto grade school, Crombie would be the short, well-dressed lad in the blazer and glasses, carrying a load of books and hurrying to school. Cogan would be the long-haired, street-smart kid hanging out at the corner, smoking a cigarette -- he now prefers long, thin, custommade Cuban cigars -- and encouraging Crombie to play hookey.

Crombie is a Waspish scholar, a former professor at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute and now the school's chancellor, a largely ceremonial post but one that he cherishes. Cogan is the son of Russian immigrant Jews, a ninth-grade dropout who went to work as a logger in Canada's rugged north country. He learned surveying in the woods, but gave it up on his return to Toronto when he saw a young fellow in a new car and realized the real money came from putting together farmland for the city's expansion, not surveying it. In one form or another, that is what he has done ever since. If you follow Toronto's subway lines and see the high-rise buildings around each stop, Cogan is fond of saying, he's the one who put most of those land deals together. Beginning of a partnership Cogan makes a habit of being in the right place at the right time. He was one of 25 original investors in SkyDome, and in return for his $5 million investment -- he was the only individual investor, the rest were corporations -- he received some concession rights and a membership in SkyDome's exclusive Founder's Club, where his portrait hangs. Cogan also served as North American adviser to Hammerson Property Investments, and the properties he controlled included Buffalo's Main Place Mall. He lured Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly from Market Arcade to set up a restaurant and nightclub in the mall. As with Johnson's bum leg, you can't blame Cogan for Kelly's pulling up lame in the restaurant business. Cogan does far better than Kelly's in restaurants. He has lined up a Who's Who of Canada, plus retired Chrysler Chairman Lee Iococca, to invest with him in the Canadian expansion of the California Koo Koo Roo restaurants. Crombie and Cogan met in the early 1970s, when Cogan bulled his way past the secretaries and blustered his way into the mayor's office without an appointment, furious about a 45-foot height limitation Crombie required to halt the spread of Toronto's canyons of high rises. The two had it out, Cogan bought into Crombie's plan that stopped the unlimited growth, halted construction of cross-town expressways and encouraged downtown housing. Developers like Cogan made even more money because downtown Toronto succeeded. Cogan and Crombie have been friends and allies ever since. Discovering Niagara Falls The Niagara Falls project got started when Cogan wandered across the Niagara River several years ago while scouting Canadian casino sites for the Mirage Corp., the giant Las Vegas gaming company. He was as stunned as most people are at seeing how badly Niagara Falls, N.Y., has treated one of the world's natural wonders. He recognized the development potential of essentially starting from a blank slate. Cogan formed the Niagara Falls Redevelopment Corp., hired a staff that eventually included Richard T. Reinhard, Mayor Masiello's former chief of staff, and signed a contract with the city that gives his company exclusive development rights to up to 200 acres. Once Cogan put together the team, his role has been lining up developers to invest in the plan's individual projects. He is not publicly saying who yet, but those who have expressed interest are household names. Crombie, a consensus builder, will try to keep everyone as happy as possible with the plan. As head of the Waterfront Regeneration Trust in Toronto, he has put together 80 projects along the

waterfront, including a nature trail from Toronto to Niagara-on-the-Lake. He's also directing Toronto's bid for the 2008 Olympic Games. Crombie took part in three of the community meetings on the Niagara Falls plan and said the development will be very different from the flashier Canadian side, with all its high-rise hotels and casino-style development. Crombie's influence "There is no way the rejuvenation of Niagara Falls, N.Y., will take place without due deference to what Frederick Law Olmsted envisioned some 100 years ago," he said. The Niagara Reservation, Olmsted's vision, is now marred by parking lots, concessions and a restaurant. Crombie doesn't so much blame city officials for past development blunders as he does their choice of priorities. "Urban renewal in Niagara Falls has been a quick fix as it has been elsewhere," he said. "You have to say you're in it for the long haul. It's not just build something and get out." And he recognizes other reasons past efforts have failed. "You can't talk about a new Niagara Falls, without dealing with the chemical plants, without dealing with the pollution along the river, without dealing with Love Canal for that matter," Crombie said. Mixing chemicals and tourism Sternberg, the UB tourism professor, makes the same point in a tourism analysis of Niagara Falls he wrote for a academic publication, The Annals of Tourism Research. "Niagara Falls, long a city in decline, further exposes tourists to empty storefronts, vacant lots and industrial relics," Sternberg said. "Yet the guidebooks, brochures and tour itineraries pretend that these surroundings do not exist." No plan succeeds that simply writes off such large parts of the city, Crombie says. "If it's good employment and it's going to last, you have to make it a part," he said of the chemical plants in Niagara Falls. "But clearly in the places where there are no jobs, where the plant is standing vacant, you have to take those down." Crombie's eyes light up when asked about the Robert Moses Parkway, the four-lane highway built by the late power broker Moses. As Toronto mayor, Crombie played a role in halting cross-town expressways, and he has become sort of the anti-Robert Moses. "When the mayor of Portland, Ore., decided to take down its expressway along the waterfront in the 1970s, David was the one he asked to come down and help sell it," said Jeff Evanson, chief of staff for two Toronto mayors who is now handling Toronto's Olympics bid as part of Crombie's staff. Tearing up the Robert Moses Crombie called tearing up the Robert Moses a top priority for the Cogan group. He now is involved in planning to dismantle and reroute the Gardiner Expressway that cuts off Toronto from its waterfront. "If I fail in bringing it down," he said of the Gardiner and then broke out in a big smile, "just before the doc says 'that's it,' I'm going to nuke the sonofabitch." "You look around the world. In Barcelona (Spain), they took their highway down with the Olympics. In San Francisco, an earthquake did it, and they didn't put it back up. The same people who said in the '50s and '60s 'let's build an expressway' are the same type of people now saying 'take it down.' "When we built these things, the price was the waterfront," Crombie said. "We make sure (now) we don't get into a car vs. anti-car battle. But the expressway is no longer king."

Will the dismantling of the Robert Moses be the beginning of the rebirth of Niagara Falls? Will Cogan and Crombie succeed? "I do know it is a daunting task, but they have a hell of a track record," said Clancy, the former Toronto Star editor. "I know they're not going to be involved and put up that kind of money without thinking they will succeed. I'd put my money on them.