Backers buoy boathouse
Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 10:11 am
Backers buoy boathouse
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Funding sources fall into place to bring Wright design to life
By TOM BUCKHAM and MARK SOMMER
News Staff Reporters
1/13/2006
Buffalonians are not the only ones itching to get Frank Lloyd Wright's Rowing Boathouse under construction on the Black Rock Channel.
Arm-twisting by award-winning television writer and native son Tom Fontana has brought in $125,000 for the project from an impressive roster of show business luminaries.
The list of donors includes actresses Mary Tyler Moore, Blythe Danner, Dana Delany, Edie Falco and Olympia Dukakis, actors Richard Belzer, David Morse and Billy Baldwin, comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, directors Barry Levinson, Sidney Lumet and Grant Tinker, TV writers David Milch and Diane English and playwright A.R. Gurney, among other celebrities.
Milch, English and Gurney, of course, are also Buffalo natives.
There's more. State officials disclosed Thursday that $1 million has been allocated for the boathouse from the $44 million once earmarked for an Adelphia Communications office tower downtown. Another $3 million from the Adelphia fund will be used to build the Frank Lloyd Wright Gas Station and expand the Buffalo Transportation/Pierce Arrow Museum at Seneca Street and Michigan Avenue.
Fontana, whose late father, Charlie, was a legendary Buffalo rowing coach, was eager to help the boathouse campaign. After personally donating $500,000 during the "quiet" stage of fund-raising, the creator of groundbreaking television series including "St. Elsewhere" and "Homicide: Life on the Streets" agreed to hit up his show biz friends.
"Fund-raising is my perpetual role in Buffalo," cracked Fontana, who with fellow Buffalo State College graduate and "Murphy Brown" creator English spearheaded renovation of the Warren Enters Theatre on the Elmwood Avenue campus in 2003.
Design created in 1905
For boathouse backers, the cash influx means work can begin this spring on the $5.4 million facility off Porter Avenue next to the West Side Rowing Club.
"We're getting it done. It's going to happen," said Sharon Courtin, executive director of the nonprofit Frank Lloyd Wright's Rowing Boathouse Corp., which resurrected an unrealized design that Wright created in 1905 for the University of Wisconsin.
The 4,500-square-foot pressed-concrete structure, with storage bays for racing shells at ground level and a clubhouse adorned with art glass windows above, is to be completed in mid-2007. It will be an architectural tourism destination and a working boathouse operated by the rowing club.
The private and public investment in two Frank Lloyd Wright projects is bound to further enhance the city's appeal to fans of the architect's work, a tourism official said.
The boathouse and gas station will join another previously unrealized Wright project, the Blue Sky Mausoleum in Forest Lawn, completed in 2004, and the landmark Darwin Martin House and Graycliff estate, both undergoing multimillion-dollar restorations, as must-see Wright destinations.
Rowers hooked Fontana
"Wright is a brand unto himself," said Ed Healy of the Buffalo Niagara Convention & Visitor's Bureau. "Having this many attractions will make Buffalo one of the premier Wright sites in the world."
A pep talk from several rowers who had been coached by Charlie Fontana, who died 22 years ago, was especially persuasive in getting his son, Tom, involved.
"They told incredible stories about my father and how he changed their lives," Fontana said. "They were clearly passionate about building this extraordinary boathouse and honoring him.
"The great thing about the project," he added, "is that it's not just about Buffalo but about great architecture and a great sport. So you can talk to people about it on three different levels."
Fontana is still collecting donations toward the boathouse fund drive, which is $800,000 short of its goal.
"I'm just about to do another big push with people I haven't asked yet. I won't raise another $125,000, but maybe $75,000," he said.
As usual he is very busy in his Manhattan headquarters, writing series pilots for Home Box Office, the Fox Network and NBC as well as a new series for the WB cable channel, "The Bedford Diaries," set to debut in March.
"This work business is getting in the way of my fund-raising," Fontana quipped.
e-mail: [email protected]
and [email protected]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Funding sources fall into place to bring Wright design to life
By TOM BUCKHAM and MARK SOMMER
News Staff Reporters
1/13/2006
Buffalonians are not the only ones itching to get Frank Lloyd Wright's Rowing Boathouse under construction on the Black Rock Channel.
Arm-twisting by award-winning television writer and native son Tom Fontana has brought in $125,000 for the project from an impressive roster of show business luminaries.
The list of donors includes actresses Mary Tyler Moore, Blythe Danner, Dana Delany, Edie Falco and Olympia Dukakis, actors Richard Belzer, David Morse and Billy Baldwin, comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, directors Barry Levinson, Sidney Lumet and Grant Tinker, TV writers David Milch and Diane English and playwright A.R. Gurney, among other celebrities.
Milch, English and Gurney, of course, are also Buffalo natives.
There's more. State officials disclosed Thursday that $1 million has been allocated for the boathouse from the $44 million once earmarked for an Adelphia Communications office tower downtown. Another $3 million from the Adelphia fund will be used to build the Frank Lloyd Wright Gas Station and expand the Buffalo Transportation/Pierce Arrow Museum at Seneca Street and Michigan Avenue.
Fontana, whose late father, Charlie, was a legendary Buffalo rowing coach, was eager to help the boathouse campaign. After personally donating $500,000 during the "quiet" stage of fund-raising, the creator of groundbreaking television series including "St. Elsewhere" and "Homicide: Life on the Streets" agreed to hit up his show biz friends.
"Fund-raising is my perpetual role in Buffalo," cracked Fontana, who with fellow Buffalo State College graduate and "Murphy Brown" creator English spearheaded renovation of the Warren Enters Theatre on the Elmwood Avenue campus in 2003.
Design created in 1905
For boathouse backers, the cash influx means work can begin this spring on the $5.4 million facility off Porter Avenue next to the West Side Rowing Club.
"We're getting it done. It's going to happen," said Sharon Courtin, executive director of the nonprofit Frank Lloyd Wright's Rowing Boathouse Corp., which resurrected an unrealized design that Wright created in 1905 for the University of Wisconsin.
The 4,500-square-foot pressed-concrete structure, with storage bays for racing shells at ground level and a clubhouse adorned with art glass windows above, is to be completed in mid-2007. It will be an architectural tourism destination and a working boathouse operated by the rowing club.
The private and public investment in two Frank Lloyd Wright projects is bound to further enhance the city's appeal to fans of the architect's work, a tourism official said.
The boathouse and gas station will join another previously unrealized Wright project, the Blue Sky Mausoleum in Forest Lawn, completed in 2004, and the landmark Darwin Martin House and Graycliff estate, both undergoing multimillion-dollar restorations, as must-see Wright destinations.
Rowers hooked Fontana
"Wright is a brand unto himself," said Ed Healy of the Buffalo Niagara Convention & Visitor's Bureau. "Having this many attractions will make Buffalo one of the premier Wright sites in the world."
A pep talk from several rowers who had been coached by Charlie Fontana, who died 22 years ago, was especially persuasive in getting his son, Tom, involved.
"They told incredible stories about my father and how he changed their lives," Fontana said. "They were clearly passionate about building this extraordinary boathouse and honoring him.
"The great thing about the project," he added, "is that it's not just about Buffalo but about great architecture and a great sport. So you can talk to people about it on three different levels."
Fontana is still collecting donations toward the boathouse fund drive, which is $800,000 short of its goal.
"I'm just about to do another big push with people I haven't asked yet. I won't raise another $125,000, but maybe $75,000," he said.
As usual he is very busy in his Manhattan headquarters, writing series pilots for Home Box Office, the Fox Network and NBC as well as a new series for the WB cable channel, "The Bedford Diaries," set to debut in March.
"This work business is getting in the way of my fund-raising," Fontana quipped.
e-mail: [email protected]
and [email protected]