WEDI hired executive director's nanny, then awarded Downtown Bazaar bar to ex-boyfriend

WEDI rejected experienced operators from House of Charm, Hombre y Lobo, to pick Carolynn Welch's acquaintance for downtown bar that fizzled

West Side Bazaar, 1432 Niagara St.

As soon as Cameron Airhart noticed the panhandler hassling customers in the West Side Bazaar food court, he stopped selling cookies, and started dialing 911.

That was the security plan at 1432 Niagara St. Despite repeated requests, over two months or more, building managers did not staff the front desk, tenants said. Instead, they were advised to call 911.

Five months after the Westminster Economic Development Initiative debuted its flagship $11.5 million project, tenants at the small business incubator had to fend for themselves. That day in March, the panhandler knocked down an elderly cleaner before Airhart and others got her to leave. 

After the assault, “there were still evenings and Saturdays when no staff was there at all,” said Airhart, a retired Houghton College dean who was a WEDI board member for three years. He said Executive Director Carolynn Welch agreed to talk about the assault, but “that never happened. … The security was fundamentally up to us,” Airhart recalled.

Today, eight months after opening, half of the dozen original businesses have left the West Side Bazaar, or given notice. Closing Downtown Bazaar, WEDI’s other incubator site, is on the agenda for Friday’s WEDI board meeting, as the organization faces a $400,000 deficit in its budget of about $3 million. 

Tenants at both sites are wondering where WEDI’s priorities lie. While monitoring the door was not on West Side Bazaar managers’ to-do lists, they watched tenants closely, issuing $100 fines for violations of kitchen rules instead of coaching fledgling restaurateurs. 

Before the Downtown Bazaar opened last year, WEDI promised tenants the walk-in freezer would be fixed for their use. That never happened, forcing some to buy and install their own equipment. 

After WEDI installed Joe Joy, Welch’s ex-boyfriend, as the bar operator, the other tenants saw WEDI spend thousands of dollars to fix the coolers Joy needed to keep his beer cold. Now Joy’s bar is closed, and the freezer is still broken.

Since WEDI had already hired Welch’s nanny Maggie Rapp as a staffer, some tenants started to wonder how serious WEDI was about its stated guiding values of equity and inclusion.

Welch said she had nothing to do with hiring Rapp. Her board and her staff are responsible, she said. “I’m not the one that hired her.”

Of all the bar operators in Buffalo, Welch was asked, WEDI couldn’t find one you didn’t date? 

“We had four people who made the decision on who to choose,” said Welch. “I had nothing to do with it. They chose Joe because he was a small business owner.” Joy should not be punished by exclusion just because they had a past, Welch added. 

“He was the only qualified respondent,” Welch said. “The committee made the decision.” 

---

Joy had never held a liquor license in New York State, but the committee rejected several experienced bar operators who already had dealt with New York State’s strict licensure process and prepared extensive responses.

Isaac Domingue operates Hombre y Lobo, 149 Swan St., with his husband, Ryan DiFranco. “We were really excited, as a queer-owned business, and we thought that the bazaar would be a really cool opportunity to get involved with a new community,” Domingue said.

“We spent a bunch of time putting together all this stuff for the RFP. We proposed a whole menu with different beers from all over the world, relating to the spaces that were filled in,” said Domingue. “We designed cocktails tailored to different menu items and other concepts that were in the space.”

Domingue and DiFranco have extensive event marketing experience. “We thought it'd be really fun to activate the space in different ways, and get people in there,” said Domingue. “Then we just got an email that was essentially like, ‘Thanks for your interest. We're gonna go with somebody else.’”

Hombre y Lobo asked for feedback to help improve their concept. “It was just kind of radio silence after that,” Domingue said. “We were bummed out when we kind of got stonewalled there, without reason. But we figured there was probably someone better aligned with the diversity that they were hoping to have.”

Another rejected applicant was Sam Marabella, who has operated bars and booked musical groups in Buffalo since the late 1990s, and is an owner of House of Charm, 517 Washington St.

“I was really gung-ho to do it,” said Marabella. “Because I worked on the street, and because I would actually promote the hell out of the place and put people in there. I gave them a good proposal, and I gave them 24 years of experience in a bar.” Marabella has also run musical schools, and wanted to fold that into his people-magnet offerings.

What he got back was an email rejection.

“It's a not-for-profit, I wasn't gonna go there and get rich, but it made sense to me because I'm in the same neighborhood,” said Marabella. “I'm two blocks away. It's affordable for me to handle my ordering and to handle everything.”

“I knew I could promote that space and pull people in,” Marabella said. “Also, I figured it was a great idea because my daughter, she’s 10 now, it would be good for her to be mixing it up with people from around the world. That was my thinking, that it would be good for us.”

After struggling to draw customers with a temporary beer and wine license, Joy closed Lulu’s Pub, citing licensing issues. Today, it is not clear whether the Downtown Bazaar itself will follow suit.

At WEDI’s flagship project, the West Side Bazaar, tenants say WEDI hasn’t delivered promised support as they struggle to keep their businesses open without enough customers. 

WEDI set its West Side Bazaar attendance goal at 250,000 visits per year. Many days they see fewer than 100 visitors, tenants said. Welch said that her latest information on West Side Bazaar attendance was more like 400 visitors daily.

WEDI told tenants it would not market the facility after Jan. 1, which could contribute to the shortfall. Its marketing efforts were further hindered when WEDI fired its communications director without obtaining the passwords to WEDI social media accounts, Welch said.

Inside the building, tenants say, WEDI managers have rankled renters by issuing contradictory orders, fining tenants $100 for sanitation errors instead of warning or counseling, and not answering questions tenants want landlords to answer.

Welch said that no restaurant tenants were fined without first being counseled.

“Basically, it was a free-for-all that's now being railed in, because Kat (Carter) is just a much more effective supervisor for the space,” Welch said. “People are pissed because they were getting away with, basically, murder. And now they have to follow the rules. And there's some people that are really pissed about it.”

Following the rules at West Side Bazaar was often challenging because of frequent changes, tenants said, and WEDI staffers issuing contradictory directives.

“I feel gaslit all the time here,” said Kimberly Behzadi, who is trying to move Read It & Eat, her culinary bookstore, to another location. 

“I put a little sign on the front counter with the store's hours to encourage people to come upstairs when I'm open, because I'm not open 40 hours a week, because I still have a full time job,” Behzadi said. “And they often take that little sign down and bring it all the way back upstairs. Then someone else will tell me, ‘Oh, you should put the sign downstairs.’ ”

On June 11, Behzadi got an email from WEDI staff ordering her to expand business hours. Once again, she said, one part of WEDI didn’t know what another part had already decided. 

Behzadi rolled her eyes, and emailed back her original contract.

Listing the hours Behzadi agreed to keep.

Signed by Carolynn Welch.  

Kate Knowles brought her Manchester Place Baking Co. to the West Side Bazaar at the suggestion of her father, former WEDI board member Airhart. Now she’s leaving too.

“In May, we had a few 80 degree days, and the air conditioning wasn’t on, so my baked goods were melting,” Knowles said. “I went upstairs and said, ‘Hey, my stuff is melting. Can y'all turn the AC on?’ ”

Echoing WEDI’s tenant cooling solution at the Downtown Bazaar, WEDI staff told her to buy a refrigerated unit, bring it into the building, and plug it in, if it was a problem. “That was the answer,” Knowles said. “Any time I asked for help, it was gaslighting and ‘Sorry, it is what it is.’”

For a decade, her father, Cameron Airhart, ran Houghton College’s associate’s degree programs for immigrants, inmates returning to the community, and African American youth. He flinched when he saw WEDI staffers talking to immigrants in a patronizing tone.

“They don't understand things like English, so you don't talk at 50 miles an hour when you're talking to them,” Airhart said. “You don't just give them pieces of paper and expect them to get through it and understand the reward of it. You just don't. 

“There's lots of things you don't do,” said the former dean. “Not because they have any impediments in their intellectual capacities, but because they are struggling with language, and with the rules of the game. These are people who don't know exactly how society operates, and they're always nervous and worried, because they're taking big risks. They always have to be aware that they're truly vulnerable.”

At the West Side Bazaar, he found “there's just nobody, nobody there running this. There's nobody walking around. There's nobody sitting up front.” That did improve in April, he said, with staffers at the front desk more often, more managers visible on the floor, and a staffer around until the building closed. He also noticed more appropriate interactions with immigrant restaurateurs, he said.

The reason Airhart dialed 911 without hesitating that March night was because he knew he needed to fill the void.

“I had deliberately put my desk in the middle of the action so I always knew what was going on around me,” he said. “They didn't care about what was going on. So I found it all very strange from a management point of view. Who are these people? And why are they in charge?”

EDITOR’S NOTE

In ENG 213, my journalism class in the University of Buffalo’s English Department, I tell students that when journalists do something that makes their audience say, “What the heck?” they ought to explain what they’re doing.

Two weeks ago, I asked a West Side Bazaar tenant how things were going at the $11.5 million economic incubator and community space.

Out of habit. For 12 years, as The Buffalo News’ food editor and in my solo career at Four Bites, I have done everything I could to help shine light on the West Side Bazaar, the cooks it helped, the communities it fed, and the families it supported. On the job, or on my own time.

What that tenant told me was so jarringly different from my mental picture of the West Side Bazaar that I did what journalists do in baffling times: find another source.

Before I was food editor, I was an investigative reporter for a decade. If what that person told me was even half true, other people must have experienced it too. So I picked another person and called them, being careful to avoid any leading questions. Asked “How’s it going?” and shut up to listen.

The second person had so much to say that tracked with the first account that I put on my investigative reporter hat. I made a list of current and former tenants, employees, and contacts who had business with the Westminster Economic Development Initiative. I called them, asking “How’s it going?”

After interviewing 18 people, I called Carolynn Welch and asked her about specific things that three or four people told me. She denied any responsibility for the matters I raised, pointing to tenants, staff, and WEDI board members as the responsible parties.

When Westminster Economic Development Initiative, its non-profit parent, opened Downtown Bazaar after the original was closed by fire, I added it to my coverage routine. As a community journalist, I felt a responsibility to let the community know about all the work happening, lives being built, and delicious food available down the street.

Every time I was contacted by a WEDI representative to add their information to my report, I did my best to give it room. When Carolynn Welch asked me to guest bartend at Lulu’s Pub, run by her ex-boyfriend Joe Joy in the Downtown Bazaar, I said yes. Then I spent another night trying to help the Downtown Bazaar.

This spring, when Welch asked me if there was anything more I could do to draw attention to the Downtown Bazaar, I developed the idea of a class-with-food event showcasing each of the Downtown Bazaar chefs and their cuisines. I committed to doing a monthly event, “Tuesdays with Andrew.”

I have led three such events so far, the most recent drawing 29 guests, the largest crowd yet. It is not clear whether the South Sudanese 101 with Akec Aguer Tuesdays with Andrew event, set for June 18, will occur as planned.

I agreed to a $5 per person share of the proceeds as my pay from WEDI. That money hasn’t shown up in my bank account yet. If it does, I will give it to the Downtown Bazaar restaurateurs, who might be looking for new kitchens by then.

Tomorrow, WEDI has a scheduled board meeting. My goal in researching, verifying, and producing this report is to give board members as much relevant information as possible, so they can make responsible decisions for an organization that has done so much good for so many people. I have done this work as part of my continuing support for WEDI and all the lives it touches.

Closing Downtown Bazaar might well be the responsible thing for WEDI to do, if its financial situation is perilous. Without seeing the financial breakdown, I don’t have an opinion. Board members have access to detailed financial information, and should have the ability to get detailed answers to specific questions.

If they ask.

This story is the first WEDI article since I revised my information gathering parameters. It will not be the last.

There are many questions, and relatively few answers, yet, on how WEDI and its community got here. If you would like to add to my knowledge and tell me what your experience with WEDI has been - good, ill, or mixed - drop me a line at andrew@fourbites.net.

#30#