Bob Waters was one of the best newspapermen I have ever had the privilege to know.
The long-time owner and publisher of the now-defunct Journal-Register in Medina didn’t give me my first reporting job.
He was just there to greet me on when I arrived for my first day of work in the newsroom in the late 1990s. He was as courteous and accommodating and kind as I was nervous and unsure and, well, terrified.
By that time, Bob had already made the difficult decision to sell the family newspaper business his grandfather started to our company, CNHI.
Lately I’ve been thinking about Bob in his different, yet no less important, capacity.
Bob took his job as community steward seriously.
He followed the words of advocacy he wrote with actions that had lasting impacts.
Few examples sum this up better than Bob’s work to save the old Medina armory building on Pearl Street in Medina.
The building, constructed with Medina sandstone in 1901, served as a New York Army National Guard post for decades. In 1977, the state decided to close the building.
That’s when Bob, with help from his newspaper pulpit, helped form Armory Action Committee, a group that worked to determine what might be done to preserve the 90,000-square-foot site.
“We were very much afraid if it was left empty nature would ruin the building,” Waters recalled in a 2013 article published by the online publication, the Orleans Hub. “It was too nice a building to turn your back on.”
Indeed it was.
And so Medina leaders, with help from Waters, developed a new plan to use the building the National Guard discarded as a center for fitness and other activities under the banner of the YMCA.
In the decades since, the old armory building has been a place for kids to play sports and adults to learn yoga and for seniors to take exercise classes.
Imagine the alternative.
You don’t really have to in the Falls because you can drive up Main Street to find the city’s own armory building as it has been for many years now: vacant and inaccessible to the public.
Nobody in the Falls stepped up to create a plan for its future and look at the results.
I bring all this up as I think about the idea that there are people in and around the Falls who see no value in trying to resuscitate one of the coolest buildings in all of Western New York and maybe even all of America — the former Native American Center for the Living Arts, commonly known as the Turtle building on Rainbow Boulevard.
The core concern for most critics is the perceived lack of an idea for what to do with the building if the community could wrest it out of the hands of its long-time owner, the private firm Niagara Falls Redevelopment.
It’s the wrong way to look at it.
It’s the wrong way to look at any effort to preserve any unique building of historic, cultural and architectural significance.
Such things are not a matter of how.
They are matters of must, the idea that action is needed to prevent prominent and unique structures in downtown areas from being allowed to rot because such things diminish communities as a whole.
Think of the Restaino administration’s interest in preserving the old Rapids Theatre building on Main Street and you get the idea.
It may not be made out of Medina sandstone, but the Falls building shaped like a turtle and designed by a Native American architect to serve as a site for honoring and sharing indigenous culture and for sharing that culture with the world has a ton going for it.
It has the same going for it as two other marquee buildings downtown, the first being the Giacomo Hotel, formerly the 1929 art deco beauty known as the United Office Building, and the second being the former Hotel Niagara, a 12-story 1924 building that has been empty for decades.
Tearing down the Giacomo or “The Grand Old Lady” of the Falls would be akin to demolishing The Statler in downtown Buffalo.
It would be an act of madness, lunacy, an affront to the history of the Falls and the attractiveness of the city’s downtown.
Old, unique buildings are special. They harken back to bygone eras. They evoke history. They offer a sense of place that cannot be replaced once they are gone.
Other communities, many far more successful than the Falls, have recognized this and embraced the idea of preservation with purpose.
Many have succeeded where the city has failed.
Niagara Falls need only look back at the ravages of Urban Renewal to find out what happens when you tear down buildings of significance and character to replace them with more modern boxes that lack real charm or appeal.
Bob Waters understood this with the armory building made out of Medina sandstone and the village is better for it today.
The idea that something similar can’t be done with a building shaped like a turtle in downtown Niagara Falls — a place nearly completely void of affordable, fun and educational experiences for local families and the nine million or so people who visit Niagara Falls State Park across the street each year — is shortsighted at its best and misguided at its worst.
Medina’s historic armory building, destined for the dustbin after the National Guard pulled out in the late 1970s, has been an active YMCA site for decades.
If Bob Waters and company had a turtle building to work with, imagine what they would have done with it.