ECC's big move: College scrambles to relocate after blizzard damage to City Campus

The new partnership with the Bisons is among many quick pivots that ECC has pulled off over the past two weeks on learning that its main City Campus building, the historic former post office on Ellicott Street, will be closed for the entire semester due to blizzard damage.

The building housed classrooms, office space and computer labs for programs serving some 1,200 students taught by 51 faculty and supported by 40 to 50 staff – as well as the campus library, bookstore and cafeteria, said ECC Provost and Officer-in-Charge Adiam Tsegai. All had to be relocated to nearby space at ECC’s Student Support Center at 45 Oak St., and the Burt Flickinger Athletic Center at 21 Oak St., in a matter of days.

The deadly blizzard that struck Buffalo over Christmas weekend blew open louvers on a ventilation system. That caused pipes in a fifth-floor penthouse to freeze and burst, destroying the ceilings and flooding the floors below, said Rich Rojek, ECC buildings and grounds custodian.

Contractors are still drying out the marble-walled building and doing asbestos and mold abatement work, Rojek said. Further repairs have not been completely assessed, but will cost “millions of dollars” and take months to perform, he said. The college anticipates that insurance will cover the cost and hopes U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency aid will reimburse the $25,000 deductible.

Tsegai learned the damage would close the entire building for the spring semester that started Jan. 17 a week beforehand and put out the call to mobilize.

A team of 30 to 40 people spent the week scrambling to reimagine, reconfigure and relocate some 30 classrooms to Oak Street and Flickinger, as well as creating shared office spaces and asking the college's technology staff to outfit and rewire several new computer labs, she said.

The team also created spaces to “mimic” a library, a tutoring center and an art studio. They opened a closed concessions stand in the athletics center, surrounded it with café tables and seating and arranged for food to be delivered daily from ECC’s North Campus.

The school's bookstore shifted to a corner of the security office at Oak Street, allowing students to pick up books ordered online and sent from the North Campus bookstore. Tsegai even created a new prayer room for Muslim students, including buying new prayer rugs to replace those damaged in the old post office.

Tsegai and ECC Board of Trustees Chair Jeffrey Stone said having to mobilize as a team to take care of their students was a positive, if stressful, experience after a difficult year that ended with the resignation of ECC’s previous president, David Balkin, on Dec. 19 after only 10 months in the job.

Balkin had implemented early retirements and layoffs totaling about 150 people, discontinued lower-performing programs and moved to downsize ECC’s three-campus model to stave off a $9 million deficit, but the moves also caused strife and impacted morale in the process, union leaders have said.

ECC Provost Tsegai took over as officer in charge the week before the blizzard and led the college through a crisis with the City Campus relocation, Stone said. 

Tsegai said some of the changes her team implemented will probably become permanent even after the post office building reopens.

“This has been an opportunity for us to redesign our college space efficiently and give us the ability to bring in new programs," she said. "Last year we deactivated some programs at our South Campus, but we didn’t talk about where they would go or what might replace them.

“We can learn a lot and reimagine the campus programs we can offer here,” she added. Just like during the pandemic, “learning how to pivot in an effective manner is going to be more and more important in higher education, and it has to be student-centered, because it’s about them.”

ECC wasn’t the only local campus affected by storm damage from the blizzard that killed 45 people in Erie and Niagara counties. Canisius College sustained severe water damage to Lyons Hall and a few other buildings, while the University at Buffalo is dealing with damage to its Biomedical Research Building and Cary Hall on its South Campus.

But ECC had to relocate an entire campus, Stone said. “I am in awe of the transformation of our City Campus seemingly overnight,” he said.

Tsegai credited ECC faculty and their leaders for quickly adapting to the situation. Stephanie Scharmack, a new chemistry teacher, said she fortunately had all her class materials packed in totes in the damaged building and was able to easily move them down the street.

However, her new classroom space on Oak Street isn’t equipped as a chem lab.

“There are some experiments we can’t do here,” she said. “We don’t have Bunsen burners, for instance. So I’m inventing a new experiment where we will measure the concentration of Red Dye No. 40 in red Gatorade that I’ll get out of the vending machine.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge was finding a place for the culinary arts program, which requires an actual kitchen. Kristin Goss, chair of ECC’s hospitality management program, said she learned she needed to find a new kitchen the Friday before Martin Luther King Day. Classes started the day after.

She called a friend in the New York State Restaurant Association, Bisons Vice President of Food and Beverage Rob Free, “and put out an SOS,” she said. “He said, ‘No problem.’ So we moved 30 years’ worth of cooking equipment from City Campus to their facilities the first week of classes.”

On Tuesday, culinary arts professor Heidi Knight led five students through the steps of making fettucine carbonara in their new digs. She said the new partnership with the Bisons will likely result in ECC culinary students being able to work at the Bisons’ Consumer’s Pub in the Park, which opens two hours before home baseball games during the season and also hosts special events.

“Once they get up and running for the season, there’s a chance they may hire our students to come in and work events here, so they will have potential workers who are already familiar with their kitchen,” Knight said.

“I am so grateful to the Bisons for this opportunity, because teaching from home and cooking from home is not a great experience for our students,” she added. “This has made all the difference.”

Shee, the culinary arts student, has no complaints.

“It’s really nice,” she said of the ballpark kitchen. “It’s more like a restaurant kitchen, so it will get us ready for our future of cooking in restaurants.”