NEWS ARTICLE: BUFFALO NEWS (07/2003) Media praise affirms what we've got By DONN ESMONDE Jim Sandoro gathered a couple of hundred friends last week at his downtown Pierce-Arrow vintage car museum. He's launching a $7 million expansion, including a gas station Frank Lloyd Wright designed for a client here in the 1920s but never built. If he can pull it off, it's another card in our already-stacked deck. We'll be done restoring Wright's Darwin Martin House complex near Delaware Park in two years. It's the centerpiece of a cultural tourism bounty that makes larger cities weep with envy. The question is if we can get our act together, to package and promote it all, by the time the Martin House goes prime time. We've got the goods, the buildings and art museum that - more than anything else - makes Buffalo world-class. Reviving the Martin House complex leapfrogs us to the top of the Wright heap. We've got a handful of Wright-designed houses in the city, Hamburg's Graycliff and the coming Wright boathouse and gas station. With masterpieces by the rest of America's "Big Three" architects - Louis Sullivan and H.H. Richardson - plus everything else, we've got enough culture to choke an art critic. The Martin House is limiting tours during restoration. There is no visitors center, few amenities and little marketing. Yet close to 15,000 people will visit this year, most of them from parts distant. "Any given week, we get people from Italy, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Australia," said Margie Stehlik, director of volunteers. They want to know where to eat. Where to stay. What else there is to do. It's a hint of what's to come - if we do it right. The restored Martin House should draw 100,000 people a year. It's not Disney World numbers. But it's a monied crowd and we've got enough attractions - cultural and otherwise - within an hour's drive to keep them for days. If we don't make it user-friendly, they'll be gone in hours. It doesn't take a genius - as I'll now prove - to see the obvious packages: The Martin House and the Albright-Knox gallery. Or a tour of local Wright sites, ending lakeside at Graycliff. Or coupled with Sullivan's Guaranty building and the H.H. Richardson towers. Link it to a show at Shea's, a play, a ballgame, Niagara Falls, Roycroft, Chautauqua Institute, Niagara-on-the-Lake or a dozen other lures. We're talking destination. But only if we package and promote it. Right now, we don't even have decent interpretive signs on our great buildings. The clock is ticking. We've got two years until the champagne cork pops on the Martin House. The good news is people are working on it. "A lot of this is under way or being talked about," said Ed Healy of the convention and visitors bureau. "We know we need to get better at this. The onus is on us to link the Martin House with other sites, so people stay a couple of nights." Build a come-one-and-all family attraction, like the proposed theme park on the South Buffalo waterfront, and tourists won't be an endangered species. We're on the verge of finally cashing in, both in tourism dollars and image-changing (and ego-boosting) national attention. The potential was reconfirmed by the recent buzz off the "Bruce Almighty" film and the Summerlong Sensation push. There was a gushing piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, headlined "Buffalo Almighty." "Buffalo is a vast outdoor museum," wrote Terese Loeb Kreuzer, "displaying the work of many of the greatest architects. . . . The homes and public buildings they erected are often breathtaking." Mary Ellen Slayter in the Washington Post said Buffalo "has character and spunk" after spending a weekend roaming book stores, shops, theaters, clubs and coffee houses. Dan Davis of the Bergen (N.J.) Record found "some of the nation's finest architectural landmarks and a major museum stuffed with terrific modern art." There are enough theaters, bars and restaurants to keep anybody happy after hours. With the Martin House coming on line, with great buildings and museums and the rest of it, we're finally getting dressed for dinner. We've been a secret long enough. Let's figure out how to tell it.