Paulette Harris looked approvingly Tuesday evening at the freshly painted and stenciled walls inside the Richardson Hotel, before launching into a memory of the Richardson Olmsted Campus and its former persona as the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.
“We went to Buffalo State College, and we would run through there at night scaring each other because it had that creepiness to it,” said Harris, former artistic director of the African American Cultural Center’s Paul Robeson Theatre. “It’s so great to see it revived.”
Harris was among hundreds who attended the grand opening of the 88-room hotel, leased and renovated by developer Douglas Jemal after the Hotel Henry Urban Resort Conference Center, which opened with great fanfare in April 2017, closed four years later during the pandemic.
Jemal has given new life to the hotel, which occupies four floors and culminates in a ballroom at the top. He added historical flourishes, changed some settings and introduced signage that makes the cavernous structure easier to navigate.
Public reaction was effusive for the hotel, whose twin Medina sandstone towers loom between the Elmwood Village and the West Side at 400 Forest Ave., on the southern edge of the SUNY Buffalo State University campus.
“The architecture is very striking from the outside, and what they’ve done with the inside is beautiful,” said Christine Eaton of Amherst.
“It’s absolutely gorgeous,” added her friend Jen Hardy, also of Amherst.
Accolades for the 80-year-old Jemal, who has taken on several large-scale development projects in Buffalo in recent years, went hand in hand.
“Douglas Jemal has taken buildings such as this and literally showed the beauty and the essence of the space,” Harris said. “He did a great homage to Buffalo by exhibiting and highlighting a lot of the history of Buffalo.”
Focus on history
The hotel opened March 3 intentionally with little attention. The café and bar opened in April and the Cucina…
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