Mary has lived in the Elmwood Village for 45 years, and she walks past the construction site at Elmwood and Bidwell most days. When a reporter asked her about it earlier this year, she kept it simple: "I walk by this every day." She likes that the developer kept the old facade standing. She just wants to know when the rest of it will be done.
She is not the only one asking. The corner has been under some form of construction, demolition delay, or design revision since Ciminelli Real Estate Corp first unveiled a mixed-use concept called Arbor + Reverie back in 2016, with HHL Architects drawing up plans meant to start construction the following spring. That version never got built the way it was drawn. Washington-based developer Douglas Jemal and his firm, Douglas Development, eventually took over the site, and by the summer of 2021 the project had a new shape: a four-story, then five-story, mixed-use building preserving the original storefronts along Elmwood while adding fifty apartments and roughly 7,275 square feet of retail space behind them.
Five years later, the building still isn't open. What's changed is how often "almost done" has been said out loud, and how little that phrase has mattered to everything else happening a few hundred feet away.
A Decade of Promises, Told Three Times in the Last Two Years Alone
The project's most recent stretch reads like a pattern rather than a series of surprises. In March 2025, Community Beer Works, long assumed to be the building's anchor tenant, confirmed it was walking away, saying it wanted to focus on its Chandler Street facility instead. Douglas Development said construction would resume within 30 days and the building would be finished by the end of that year. It wasn't. By September 2025, the same company was telling a different reporter the same thing: work would restart within two weeks, completion by year's end. Jemal himself described the delays as the result of "unprecedented circumstances," pointing to financing and material costs.
Then, in April 2026, Buffalo Rising's construction watch column reported storefront windows finally going into the frames, with the project "on track to open later this year." No confirmed retail tenant has been named publicly since Community Beer Works exited. Whoever eventually signs a lease there will be doing it after the building has already outlasted three separate completion dates.
Here's what that looks like laid out plainly:
| When the promise was made | What was said | What actually happened |
|---|---|---|
| March 2025 | Work resumes in 30 days, done by end of 2025 | Delayed again |
| September 2025 | Work restarts within two weeks, done by end of 2025 | Delayed into 2026 |
| April 2026 | Storefront windows going in, on track to open "later this year" | Still no confirmed tenant as of this writing |
None of this makes the project a failure. Preserving the original facades instead of demolishing the block, which is what Jemal's plan did differently from Ciminelli's, mattered enough to residents that a 2021 community meeting produced support rather than the opposition the earlier plan drew. It just means the corner has become something residents have learned to stop timing their expectations around.
What Never Stopped While the Corner Waited
Walk half a block down Bidwell Parkway on almost any Saturday morning from May through late November, and you'll find the Elmwood Village Farmers Market running exactly as it has for more than twenty years. It's a producer-only market, meaning every vendor grows or makes what they're selling rather than reselling, and it runs from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the parkway itself, near West Delavan, with a SNAP matching program at the EVA tent for shoppers who want it. None of the corner's construction delays have touched it. The market didn't skip a season waiting on a building permit.
The Bidwell Parkway Concert Series has an even longer streak. It started in 2009 under a different name, Picnic in the Park, before becoming the free Tuesday-night series the Elmwood Village Association still runs today, drawing crowds with lawn chairs and food trucks to hear local acts for two hours at a stretch. This year's lineup ran nine bands from mid-June through mid-August, including Uncle Ben's Remedy, Black Rock Beatles, and the George Caldwell Quintet. The series happens on the same stretch of parkway that Frederick Law Olmsted designed as part of Buffalo's original park system, a detail that matters less for its historical trivia value than for what it says about how long this specific patch of green has been organizing neighborhood life. Olmsted's design predates the current construction saga by more than a century. The market and the concerts have simply been the more recent, more reliable inheritors of that same rhythm.
The point isn't that one project moves slowly and two others move on time. It's that the things residents actually build their year around, the ones with dates you can put on a calendar and trust, were never dependent on the corner in the first place. If you've been waiting for that building to open before the neighborhood "feels finished," you've had the wrong marker the whole time.
The Garden That Disappeared Faster Than the Building Went Up
A different kind of neighborhood story surfaced just this month, and it's worth holding up against the construction timeline above. Gregory Gima, who has lived on the corner of Bidwell and Potomac for seven years, built a hellstrip garden that became well known enough to earn a stop on Garden Walk Buffalo. Earlier this month, city crews cleared part of it. A city engineer said the work was prompted by resident complaints and safety concerns over sight lines at the intersection, where excess plantings in the public right of way were said to be obstructing views for pedestrians and drivers.
Gima was blunt about his reaction. The city's process here, from complaint to clearing, moved in a matter of days. Compare that to a five-story building that has now missed three separate completion promises across two calendar years. Both are real examples of how this neighborhood actually functions: small, resident-scale decisions can move fast when safety is the stated reason, while a large capital project with financing, design review, and shifting tenant plans can stall for years without anyone being able to force it forward.
If you keep a garden on a corner lot here, particularly near an intersection, the Gima situation is a useful data point. The city's stated standard is about sight lines at the corner itself, not garden size generally, which is a distinction worth understanding before you plant anything ambitious near a stop sign.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this changes what your Saturday or your Tuesday looks like. The market runs through late November this year. The concert series will likely return next June, the same way it has every June since 2009. The corner will keep being a landmark people point to when giving directions, "the building that's always under construction," and that's probably still true a year from now given the track record.
What's worth updating in your own head is which of those things you should actually expect to change on a predictable timeline, and which ones have never needed a fixed date to keep functioning. Neighborhoods aren't just the buildings still being argued over. They're also the market vendor you buy from every week without thinking about it, the corner where you know a band will be playing on a July Tuesday, and the garden a few doors down that you've stopped and admired without ever needing it to be finished, either.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Bidwell Parkway is actually worth, factoring in what's stable versus what's still in motion, I'd be glad to walk through it with you. Reach out to Susan Lenahan for a free home valuation and neighborhood strategy built around what's actually happening here, not just what's been promised.
