How fortune left by late Bills owner Ralph Wilson is benefiting Detroit and Buffalo

Erik Brady | USA TODAY

Ralph Wilson would have been 100 today. And somehow it’s as if he’s the one handing out birthday gifts.

Today the foundation named for the late owner of the Buffalo Bills will announce bequests of $100 million each for Southeast Michigan, where he made a home, and Western New York, where he made home games. The combined $200 million will go to improving signature waterfront parks and related regional trail systems.

The parks, in some respects, are mirror images. Each faces Canada across the water. West Riverfront Park is within sight of the Ambassador Bridge, connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. La Salle Park is within sight of the Peace Bridge, connecting Buffalo and Fort Erie, Ontario. And plans are in the works for each to be renamed Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Centennial Park, as in the centennial of his birth.

“It’s a total fit,” Mary Wilson, his widow, tells USA TODAY. “Ralph loved being on the water.”

He lived in a waterfront home on Lake St. Clair in Grosse Pointe Shores, Mich. He was a Navy veteran. And he collected art with water scenes, including Monet’s La Seine a Argenteuil, since sold to benefit the foundation.

Wilson was a Detroit businessman when he founded the Bills as an original American Football League franchise in 1959 for $25,000 (or roughly $217,000 in today’s dollars). His estate sold the team for $1.4 billion in 2014, six months after Wilson died at age 95.

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The Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation was formed in 2015 with about $1.2 billion and a mandate to give it away over 20 years. The foundation’s handpicked life trustees, including Mary, determined the money would go to Southeast Michigan and Western New York. The foundation has made grants of roughly $250 million before today’s announcements, even as investments increased the worth of the portfolio to about $1.3 billion.

“We’ve got 16 years, two months and 21 days,” foundation president and CEO David Egner says. “We’re a unique animal, with a spend-down of this size in only 16 counties. How many foundations of any size get to do $200 million in one day?”

Half of the $100 million in each region will support community vision for the parks, with $40 million toward capital construction and $10 million for endowment. And half of the money in each region will go toward a connected trail system, with $40 million to help close gaps in regional trails and $10 million toward maintaining them far into the future.

The foundation is working with the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy and the University at Buffalo Regional Institute to discover what these local communities want for their waterfronts.

“Foundations don’t build parks — communities build parks,” Egner says. “And we’ve embraced that concept.”

Transformative is the word Detroit mayor Mike Duggan chooses to describe today’s gift.

“The city of Detroit I grew up in, there was no riverfront,” he says. “It was industrial, it was covered in cement silos. Nobody went to the riverfront. What’s happened in the last 10 years, the riverfront started to become a gathering place for Detroiters. The plan for Ralph Wilson Centennial Park is going to be spectacular.”

The firm of landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh — Egner calls him “a modern-day Olmsted” — won an international design competition for the Detroit park. Egner says design competition for the Buffalo park will come later because community engagement there is behind Detroit by about a year.

Buffalo mayor Byron Brown says he appreciates the foundation’s emphasis on equity and inclusion as it seeks community views. The park, he says, “is a wonderful example of bringing people of different cultural, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds together in one place. So this is a perfect location for this major investment.”

Duggan figures park-goers in Detroit will come to call it Wilson Park. Perhaps the one in Buffalo will come to be called The Ralph, as that’s what fans called the Bills’ stadium when it was named for Wilson. And La Salle Park is going back to its roots in one sense; it was named Centennial Park when it opened in 1932, when Buffalo was celebrating its centennial as a city.

Mary Wilson plans to be at today’s news conferences — Detroit in the morning and Buffalo in the afternoon — and she says she’ll wear her late husband’s 1964 American Football League championship ring.

“I love Buffalo,” she says, “because Ralph was a champion there.”

She lives in the home they shared on Lake St. Clair and often travels back to Buffalo for Bills’ games. Recently she was approached by a Bills fan in a Best Buy store who asked if she still misses him.

“I said, ‘I miss him every day,’ ” she says. “I’ll miss him a lot on (his birthday), but I’ll feel like he’s there with us. And I feel like he’ll be celebrating that we’re doing so much for the great people of two great communities.”