Harry Stinson, owner of the Buffalo Grand Hotel, talks to members of the media outside his hotel after a three-alarm fire on Thursday, Dec. 30, 2021.
The owner of the former Buffalo Grand Hotel claims that the arson fire that swept through its newly renovated banquet center late last December caused more than $50.1 million in damages – which he said he is trying to recoup from his insurer.
That tally reported by owner Harry Stinson far exceeds the initial fire department estimate of about $3 million – by more than 16-fold – because of the extent of collateral damage caused not only by the flames, but also by the water used to put out the blaze and the subsequent freeze-and-thaw cycle of the winter months.
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Meanwhile, the hotel still has not reopened for business, leaving Stinson without any revenues. So he is eager to get a settlement with his insurer, Travelers, and he’s hired a New York City law firm that specializes in large insurance claims. More than 10,000 pages of documents are involved so far, he said, although he hopes to avoid a court fight.
But the Canadian developer, who bought and rebranded the former Adam’s Mark Hotel into the Buffalo Grand and now the Ramada by Wyndham Buffalo Downtown, says he is not abandoning the project that has already cost him tens of millions of dollars in investment, including the $17 million purchase price. The building was insured for $100 million for replacement, plus $10 million for business interruption coverage.
“I have no intention of walking away from it, but the odds are so large,” he said Thursday. “This is not something where you throw it together and worry about the insurance later.”
The three-alarm blaze on Dec. 30 ripped through the large ballroom and nearby areas above the parking ramp of the hotel complex on Church Street. Investigators at the time said the early morning fire started in either the commercial kitchen or ballroom, but Stinson said that it was primarily concentrated in the center section of the third-floor event space, between the two rooms.
That’s where rolls upon rolls of new new hotel carpeting were being stored, still wrapped in plastic and destined for use in the main ballroom downstairs. Stinson said that’s where evidence shows the perpetrator intentionally tried multiple times to start the fire before finally succeeding in lighting the carpets, possibly with an accelerant.
“This wasn’t a spark that happened to blow in the wind. This was a fire that was deliberately set, because it was set in multiple places,” he said. “The conflagration was heavily in one large pile, and these are all fire-treated hotel carpets. It took a little extra work to get them to go, but once they started, it was an inferno.”
Fire investigators previously estimated that temperatures may have hit 2,000 degrees in one area. “You could see the melting on the steel beams,” Stinson said. “It couldn’t have been in a worse location. Everything above that and around it melted.”
But the effort to contain and extinguish the blaze also contributed to the resulting damage, as firefighters poured water into a room on the third floor, which is 42,000 square feet , so you have a large wading pool, and that wading pool then freezes and then it thaws, Stinson said.
“The rest of the building suffered massively,” Stinson said. “The collateral damage is phenomenal.”
Now the focus is on bringing the building back online, which has been much slower and more tedious than expected.
While the guest rooms are intact and could reopen within 60 days, the fire system and other functions in the events area of the building still have to be repaired before guests can return.
The developer said he anticipates being able to fully reopen by year-end.
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I’ve been a business reporter at The Buffalo News since 2004, now covering residential and commercial real estate and development amid WNY’s resurgence. I’m an upstate native, proud to call Buffalo my home, and committed to covering it thoroughly.
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Harry Stinson, owner of the Buffalo Grand Hotel, talks to members of the media outside his hotel after a three-alarm fire on Thursday, Dec. 30, 2021.
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