Moreover, if you’re not careful, you may create a backlash. If you rely on an economic impact argument, you can often create a backlash. So, stick to your guns about quality and the qualitative reasons for doing what you’re doing. The economic impact argument is only one way to inform your decision. It’s an important argument, but it’s only one.

Part of the reason why I think you need to be careful here is that as heritage tourism has become more popular the value of its imprimatur, conversely, is declining and that’s because a lot of people have figured it out. So, they’re slapping a heritage tourism label on everything, you know? And, sometimes it’s legitimate, but there’s no standard, okay? It’s not like a scenic road where there’s a connotation to the phrase of what the experience is going to entail.

You’re going to have to do some creative marketing. You have an opportunity to do some really neat stuff here. For example, I’ve got another client — I’ll just give away this idea right now. Anyway, one of the things that I’m trying to do with this client is get them to work with the Mormons in Utah and their gargantuan genealogy database so that they can track the relatives of the people who used to live in their town and organize them to come back. You’ve got massive family reunion-type potentials here: come back and find out what happened to the rest of the relatives of the people that came through on their way West with your family, you know, that kind of thing.

It’s pretty interesting stuff. But, no matter what you pick as far as that interpretation spectrum goes, there are going to be market implications as far as who’s attracted to it and there are going to be marketing implications in terms of how you get them to the Inner Harbor.

So, in closing, a couple of things:

The preservation mission is really important, but fulfilling it doesn’t guarantee visitation and it doesn’t guarantee that the thing is going to pencil out financially, either at the beginning, on the capital side, or ongoing, on the operating side. It may create a need for ongoing subsidization. But pretty much, every interpretative experience does.

Think about that when you think about how to divvy up the uses of the parcel and how much you want to devote — in the short run versus the long run — to telling that story. Because you’re going to have choices to make and at bottom, you’re going to have to answer the question, who is “they?” Because interpreting the Canal story, no matter how you do it — unless you just put up a plaque — but somehow I get the feeling that that’s not in the cards here — it’s going to cost money.

You gotta find it. You gotta figure it out. Because almost all interpretative efforts from the smallest museum all the way up to the mega-plexes, the Henry Ford and Greenfield Village-type places, require endowment revenues and subsidization.

You gotta know who is going to be in charge. Who’s going to run it? Because the organization can’t be an afterthought. There’s got to be a bunch of people who are dedicated to stick to the course and to create this place so that it fulfills those aspirations.

The process is probably going to take a long time. You know, as I mentioned earlier, people point to places like Baltimore and so forth. That was a 20-year effort, okay? It’s not overnight. And moreover, that period of time may be longer than the reprieve that’s available by attaching your wagon to either the state or the federal heritage program horse.

Think about this one too: That the more interpretative activities that are on-site, the less space that is available for any kind of large scale commercial enterprise that could offset its operating deficit, even if you ran them all at a zero basis. So, finally, in general, how does this fit into Buffalo’s larger economic objectives? Because if Buffalo wants to, as I think it does, create an environment that induces private sector investment, how does this fit into that?

And you know what? There may be some fences to mend with the investor community. I think there is a lot of other positive stuff that has gone on. But one of the things that happened in the whole process of rediscovering the Canal, and of people recognizing that it was important enough to them that they were going to take a stand, was that a lot of other folks got lost along the way and their goals were being side-stepped for the moment while everybody figured this out. If it’s that important, and if finding the remnants of the Commercial Slip motivated that in people, great. That’s okay. But you have to recognize that there’s an ongoing fallout from that too.

So in closing, I want to thank you for the opportunity to talk to you about all this. I’m really psyched to be here and I’m eagerly looking forward to how you all come around to balancing the many issues that we spoke about, ranging from tourism development, to downtown revitalization, to economic development, to celebrating heritage and cultural assets, to working towards creating a vibrant site that will be the pride and pleasure of Buffalo residents and visitors for decades to come. Thank you very much. (applause)

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