[CPEO-BIF] Riviera Theater, North Tonawanda, New York

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Riviera Theatre area gets help from National Grid

By Nancy Fischer
Buffalo News (NY)
October 9, 2014

NORTH TONAWANDA – Outside the Riviera Theatre on Thursday, large excavators were removing tons of contaminated waste that had been left behind from decades-long careless dumping of gasoline and other waste.

The smell wasn’t pleasant.

But inside the Riviera, the air was full of music from the Mighty Wurlitzer organ and promise as National Grid announced an $89,000 grant from its Brownfield Redevelopment Program. The grant provides money for utility-related infrastructure improvements that are necessary to redevelop brownfield sites or vacant buildings.

The grant includes an additional $350,000 from the Niagara County Brownfield Cleanup Program, which kicked off the demolition and cleanup plan in 2013. Clearing and remediating the site is the first step in a planned 23,000-square-foot, two-story, $6 million expansion and renovation plan for the theater.

James Pritchard, Riviera director of operations, said the theater bought the Main Street site behind the Riviera in 2006. At the time, it was a crumbling building that had been a former transmission shop and before that a gas station and car dealership. “Even if our expansion site never came to fruition, the fact that we got all that junk out of the ground – so close to the Erie Canal, so close to the Niagara River – that excites me a lot. To get this brownfield cleaned up is a wonderful, wonderful thing,” he said.

…

For the entire article, see
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/north-tonawanda/riviera-theatre-area-gets-help-from-national-grid-20141009

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Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope Street
Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650-961-8918 or 650-969-1545
Fax: 650-961-8918
LSiegel@cpeo.org
http://www.cpeo.org




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