“The father of the waterfront” is how Paul Marzello introduces Brian Higgins when the congressman drops by Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park.
In an exclusive interview, Higgins refused to confirm what other sources told The News and other media outlets last week: that he's leaving to become president of Shea's. But he said he plans to resign from Congress in early February – and sounded glad to be leaving.
“I’m a Buffalo boy, and I was here when there was absolutely nothing on the waterfront,” said Marzello, naval park president and CEO. “Brian Higgins found the funding that provided the financial stimulus for Canalside to be created. That was the turning point.
“We’re going to miss him,” he said.
Higgins, who announced Sunday he is leaving Congress after 19 years, will be remembered for many things.
His support for Flight 3407 families and their quest to strengthen pilot safety improvements. As a binational leader on U.S.-Canadian border issues. Helping veterans receive overdue medals and other recognition. Standing with retired Bethlehem steel workers for fair compensation, and boosting cancer research and championing historic tax credits critical to the city’s redevelopment.
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His legacy will be remembered most for reclaiming Buffalo’s waterfront.
“The common refrain, whether from someone 18 or 85 when you talked about waterfront development, was ‘not in my lifetime,’ “ he told The Buffalo News on Sunday in a conference room at the Buffalo History Museum, shortly after announcing his resignation from Congress to a cluster of Buffalo media.
“The opening of Canalside was a proud day for Buffalo, and it was more than just a celebration of a project – it was the celebration of the rebirth of a community,” said Higgins, who will step down in February. “I think a lot of confidence followed that, and I would say it inspired the Buffalo Billion. People began to look at Buffalo differently.”
Higgins’ most far-reaching accomplishment, achieved in 2005, his first year in office, was leading a successful crusade against the New York Power Authority that brought $279 million to fund Buffalo’s waterfront renaissance.
“Brian is the guy. He should be elevated to superstar status for what he did,” said Thomas Dee, former president of Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp., the state waterfront agency Higgins proposed to oversee public development.
Changes to the Inner and Outer harbors leading from Higgins’ efforts are easy to spot.
Take a walk along one of the asphalt or dirt trails that weave through the Outer Harbor, use the bike, skate or new crawler parks, or frolic on the nautically themed playground at Buffalo Harbor State Park.
Take a tour boat, hop on a carousel horse or ice skate on the historically aligned canals at Canalside, where the first residences are now under construction.
Higgins, a congressman since 2005, has been offered and plans to accept the position of president of Shea's Performing Arts Center, sources have told The Buffalo News.
The congressman didn’t turn the waterfront into a year-round destination alone, of course. The State of New York has played a leading role and continues overseeing public and private investments on the waterfront under Gov. Kathy Hochul. But it was Higgins who is widely seen as the architect for what’s occurred.
“He was the visionary who said let’s get the public down to the water’s edge,” Dee said.
Ice hockey on Lake Erie
Higgins’ interest in the waterfront goes back to his childhood in South Buffalo, playing hockey at Gallagher Beach when the ice froze on Lake Erie.
“We would lose pucks in ice fishing holes,” Higgins said.
Summers were spent on the Canadian side of the lake, adding to his affection for the water.
As Higgins got older, he realized the waterfront was built for the once-bustling grain industry without easy public access, and the waterways were badly polluted. Companies including Bethlehem Steel, Republic Steel, Buffalo Color and Mobil Oil dumped toxic chemicals into them for decades prior to the 1972 Clean Water Act.
As a South District Buffalo Council member in the late 1980s, Higgins became involved with Friends of the Buffalo River, which would lead to later efforts to marshal federal dollars to remove toxic sediments. He has helped do that through his work with the Congressional Great Lakes Task Force and support for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“We have removed 67,000 semi-truck loads of toxic chemicals from the river,” Higgins said, crediting Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper for its leadership on riverbed cleanup and habitat restoration.
Higgins has made a major contribution to improving the health of the river, said Jill Jedlicka, Waterkeeper’s executive director.
“He played one of those roles that, if we didn’t have Brian’s support and advocacy in Washington, the efforts for the Buffalo River could have been derailed,” Jedlicka said. “He worked with the partners and the community to see it through to the end.”
While in the State Assembly in 1998, Higgins obtained state funding to clean up Gallagher Beach, with financial matches from the county and the city. But it was when Higgins went to Washington that his vision for the waterfront began to take hold.
It began with the NYPA settlement.
Clinton to the rescue
With NYPA’s 50-year federal license expiring in 2007, Higgins’ staff found the law governing renewal of hydroelectric projects required a mitigation settlement to the local community. With NYPA deriving hundreds of millions annually from Western New York, Higgins demanded the region’s fair share, even debating a NYPA official on public radio.
Higgins received a powerful assist during the effort from then-U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton during a pivotal October 2005 meeting at the U.S. Capitol the congressman has not publicly revealed before. Without her help, he said, it’s doubtful the NYPA settlement would have happened.
The high-stakes meeting, called by Sen. Chuck Schumer, included the Western New York congressional delegation – both U.S. senators from New York, Higgins and Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-Clarence, and Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-Fairport, among them – and NYPA officials, headed by President and CEO Timothy Carey.
As a junior congressman in his first year in office, Higgins was slated to speak last by order of seniority, and he had good reason to be worried about the outcome.
“I didn’t have any friends in the delegation except for Hillary Clinton,” he said.
When it was Clinton’s turn to speak second, she deferred to Higgins, but not before advising everyone to listen carefully to what he said.
“We are here for one purpose, and that is to listen to Brian Higgins,” recalled Bonnie Lockwood, Higgins’ former legislative aide now serving as Hochul's regional director. “Congressman Brian Higgins believes the Power Authority should be doing more for Western New York. So, I’d like to hear from Congressman Higgins.”
Lockwood said the looks on NYPA officials were dismissive as Higgins went through his presentation. She heard later they had kept a cab running outside.
“There was eyerolling going on, like here he goes again,” Lockwood said. “That’s when Sen. Clinton interjected, ‘Gentlemen, if you disagree with the amount that Brian says the New York Power Authority makes off of Western New York each and every year, then what is that amount?’
“At that, there was a full stop in the room,” she said.
Clinton had called their bluff.
“ ‘Well, gentlemen, in that case I really look forward to hearing from you as to what you will be doing to help Buffalo and Western New York,’ “ Lockwood recalled Clinton saying.
As Higgins and Lockwood walked back to his office in the Cannon Building, her boss left a voicemail message for the senator.
“What you did today will change the future of Buffalo’s waterfront,” Higgins said.
“That was classic Brian Higgins,” Lockwood said. “In that moment he picked up the phone and acknowledged her significant contribution. He always credited others.”
‘Chip on his shoulder’
The NYPA settlement, which continues to be the primary source of funding for waterfront projects, played well with voters, too.
“I won my first election with 3,800 votes, and my first re-elect with 78% of the vote, and that was a Republican district,” Higgins said.
“Brian, thankfully, had a chip on his shoulder about our long underutilized waterfront, so he pushed the heck out for funding during the NYPA relicensing,” said Howard Zemsky, developer of the Buffalo Larkinville district and former president of Empire State Development. “He seized the moment.”
The creation of Canalside was the first sign that big changes to the waterfront were coming, but progress was stymied until Higgins gave Bass Pro a 10-day ultimatum in July 2010. He called on the company to complete a heavily-subsidized deal with the waterfront agency they had delayed for years, or cut bait, which the company leader did – opening the door to an ongoing series of public and private projects.
The Outer Harbor presented another kind of challenge. Some 350 acres had sat inaccessible to the public for the 60 years it was owned by the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority. Higgins succeeded in getting the NFTA to transfer the land to the state waterfront agency in 2014, but not before Higgins beat back a plan that would have still kept part of the property in NFTA hands.
Higgins said he called Gov. Andrew Cuomo to say he would oppose such a plan, and the governor dropped it. When the governor asked about establishing what became Buffalo Harbor State Park in 2015, Higgins said he would support the idea under one condition.
“I said state parks derive their revenue from parking fees, and people have been denied access to the Buffalo waterfront for decades,” Higgins said. “You can’t charge them, and he said there won’t be any fees.”
When the waterfront agency in 2015 proposed putting residences and cultural attractions on the Outer Harbor, Higgins and then-Assemblyman Sean Ryan successfully amplified the concerns of critics by calling for the development to be stopped.
Higgins was willing to have development around Terminals A and B, where there had been development before and where a music pavilion is opening in 2024, but not further north, he said.
In 2012, the congressman called for the transformation of Ohio Street from an industrial street into a riverfront parkway, where there are now flourishing residences and businesses on both sides of the river.
Higgins also provided more than $50 million in federal money to transform Fuhrmann Boulevard, which runs parallel to the Outer Harbor, into a parkway.
Another waterfront accomplishment he led was the removal of Robert Moses Parkway North to reconnect the City of Niagara Falls with its waterfront.
Eclipsed by Cuomo
As Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp. pursued projects under Cuomo, Higgins was sometimes the odd man out.
“It’s fair to say Gov. Cuomo pushed Brian to the sidelines,” said Robert Gioia, a chairman of the waterfront agency during Cuomo’s tenure. “In some cases he was communicated with, but after the press conference, or he read it in the news, and that was very unfair to him. I think it was just Andrew saying we’re going to do this and let’s go. It wasn’t about any animosity between the two men.”
It was during that time that Higgins began to publicly sour on the waterfront agency he had helped create for not getting more accomplished. He and Ryan held a press conference calling on the agency to address the lack of development where Buffalo Memorial Auditorium stood.
“There’s tension, everyone wants to get stuff done, nobody more than I did,” Higgins said when the subject was brought up. “If you are going to make progress, you’re going to rub people the wrong way, but that’s going to happen.”
Still, Gioia said Higgins’ contribution to the waterfront can’t be overstated.
“I think that if you ask anyone, the waterfront is a lot better place to visit, and for that you can thank Brian Higgins,” he said.
Gioia said there should be “public, ongoing recognition to thank him for what he’s done,” such as naming something waterfront-related in his honor.
On Monday, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced she is accelerating the pace by obtaining the remaining $54 million now rather than waiting seven years for the last of the funds to roll in.
About $50 million is in the pipeline for two more Higgins-initiated projects – converting Tifft and Louisiana streets into parkways leading to the waterfront.
Construction is slated to begin in 2024, when Higgins will be a former congressman.
Higgins, a historian and avid reader of history, takes no small measure of satisfaction looking back where Buffalo was when he took office, and where it is now as he prepares to leave.
“I think Buffalo is becoming the waterfront city we always hoped it could be,” he said.
Hochul said Higgins will be long remembered for what he accomplished.
“Congressman Higgins is a legendary figure whose impact on the Buffalo waterfront will be felt for generations,” the governor said. “At a time when there were few believers, his efforts to push this vision forward made our waterfront what it is today, and he ensured we had the necessary funding to continue our ongoing work.”