Outdoor World, anyone?

Do any of my readers have any familiarity with Bass Pro stores? Apparently Buffalo is a done deal in getting one of these things for the currently empty Memorial Auditorium downtown, and it's being described as something incredibly cool that people come to visit from quite a long ways away. Is this true?

(For those completely unfamiliar with Bass Pro -- and I'm almost completely unfamiliar with them -- they are said to be the greatest outdoor gear stores around, to the extent that outdoor enthusiasts from hikers to hunters to fishermen to geocachers to hanggliders will road-trip hundreds of miles to shop at one of them. The details they are mentioning for the Buffalo project are somewhat humbling: Buffalo's Bass Pro will be the third largest in the company, at 250,000 square feet; it will also include a separate museum of Great Lakes history (I'm really looking forward to seeing this, actually); there will be a hotel (now, I'm not sure if downtown Buffalo really needs more hotel rooms), restaurants, and new parking. Memorial Auditorium has been a vacant shell for about seven or eight years now, ever since the Buffalo Sabres moved into the HSBC Arena down the street, and there have been lots of ideas floated on what to do with the empty building. Now we know: it's going to be a Bass Pro. The Auditorium is also located fairly close to the waterfront, which has been an undeveloped eyesore here pretty much since the Native Americans first came here and saw Lake Erie and whispered to one another, "So, do you think they should start Bledsoe or Losman this week?")

I'm excited by the project, but as a long-suffering Buffalonian, I'm a bit wary as well. We've seen a lot of "silver bullet" projects come and go, projects that were supposed to at long last jumpstart the development on Buffalo's waterfront or downtown or wherever, and all of them are just memories of press conferences that never produced anything beyond a few neat architect's paintings on an easel. What I like about the Bass Pro thing is this: over and above the projected economic impact (from construction jobs to generating tourism and downtown spending), it puts a positive spin on Buffalo. Having one of these here -- a juggernaut version, even -- sends a message to the outdoor types: come to Buffalo, because we've got some good outdoor stuff here. We've got water, we've got snow, we've got skiing, we've got hiking, we've got hunting, we've got fishing. We don't just go into our holes and hibernate from October to March. Buffalo's a cool place to be. That is what I really like about this project.

Incidentally, I also really like this project -- a renovation of an old office building into lofts and studios for artists -- for the same reason. Buffalo's arts culture is one of its greatest assets, and it needs to be both nurtured and used to continue enhancing the city's quality of life. This stuff is important, because the one thing that the city of Buffalo needs even more than big juggernaut businesses like Bass Pro is people living in the city. A vibrant arts community helps in that regard.

Returning to Bass Pro for a moment, a lot of public money is going to be spent to get this thing done. (We're talking about a project that is slated to be announced tomorrow and won't see the front doors opened to customers until sometime in 2006.) While it would be nice to think that public money didn't need to be spent to lure private businesses (and if we were talking about a new sports stadium, I'd be singing a different tune entirely), we don't live in that world, and all indications are that this thing will actually be a good fit for Buffalo, which wasn't true of the earlier "silver bullet" projects like Adelphia's rapidly-shrinking office tower and that domed amusement park thing they talked about briefly.

Now, if we could just get Mayor Masiello to stop babbling about damned casinos, I'd be even happier. There he is, talking about Bass Pro's ability to help convince the Seneca Nation of Indians to build their next casino in downtown Buffalo. This is a Godawful idea, and that Masiello continues to flog it annoys me to no end.

(Hey, speaking of the Sabres: if the NHL somehow never returns from its lockout, I wonder what Buffalo will do with HSBC Arena? I'd like to see the biggest bookstore on the planet, myself. But that's just me. And while I'm at it, what ever happened to all that talk about establishing Buffalo as a premiere locale for research in bioinformatics, thus helping to launch a biotech industry here? Is that still going on? Do any of my Buffalo readers know anything about that?)

(Oh, and I now see that Craig of BUFFALOg comments on Bass Pro and the "artist building", here and here, respectively.)