By Bill McGraw, Special to the Free Press

BUFFALO, N.Y. – With the Detroit Red Wings' storied history, two NHL owners, some of the world's top amateur teams, a few dozen indoor rinks and legions of avid fans, metro Detroit easily can back up its self-anointed nickname of Hockeytown.

But at the other end of Lake Erie, Buffalo has done something that will make any Hockeytown resident envious: It just opened a 19-story building that is devoted to amateur hockey. Experts say it's unique in North America.

It's called HarborCenter, a nearly $200-million waterfront edifice with 650,000 square feet of space that includes two rinks — on the building's sixth floor — a hockey academy, training center and parking garage.

On the first floor is an elaborate Tim Hortons that is partly a memorial to the famous Horton himself, the coffee shop chain co-founder who died in an automobile accident in 1974 while playing for the Buffalo Sabres.

HarborCenter also houses a two-story restaurant named (716) Food & Sports — Buffalo's area code — that features three bars and more than 60 TVs, including one 38 feet wide that makes the scowling face of ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith as big as a garage. Patrons can sit in booths and select their own TV game or at glass countertops that look like ice — complete with imitation skate grooves.

The 12-story Marriott hotel is under construction; retail outlets are planned for the first floor.

"To my knowledge, there is nothing like this anywhere," said Jack Vivian, an ice-surface consultant who has helped build rinks from Michigan to China. "Not with the kind of amenities they've included in the venue."

John Castine, the longtime publisher of the Farmington-based Hockey Weekly that covers amateur leagues across the Midwest, said: "It sounds like something the Red Wings should add to their District Detroit project. Otherwise, Buffalo could become the new Hockeytown."

Castine, a Buffalo native who once worked for the Free Press, was being facetious, but Buffalo officials are serious when they brag about how HarborCenter will draw thousands of young hockey players, their families and fans each year to the downtown area, spending money with local merchants, generating tax revenue and boosting redevelopment along the city's rebounding waterfront.

"It's further proof of the transformation of Buffalo," said the city's mayor, Byron Brown. "This will be one of the top hockey tourism destinations in the entire world."

HarborCenter opened Oct. 31 with a tie game between Ohio State and Buffalo's Canisius College in the 1,800-seat main rink; the restaurant opened Friday.

"It's quite a unique deal," said Ohio State coach Steve Rohlik. "I never took an elevator to the sixth floor to play hockey. With the academy and all, there's certainly a lot going on there."

HarborCenter is the brainchild of Terrance Pegula, the 63-year-old natural gas and real estate magnate who owns the Sabres and who purchased the NFL's Buffalo Bills earlier this year for a reported $1.4 billion. The Sabres play in the First Niagara Center, across the street from HarborCenter.

The 1.7-acre site was a parking lot when Pegula bought the Sabres in 2011.

Sabres President Theodore Black said after the city put the site up for bid, Pegula realized someone was going to build something in front of his hockey arena if he didn't get the land, so he got it — for $2.2 million.

Pegula, who was born in Pennsylvania and lives in Florida, is financing HarborCenter with the help of about $37 million in tax breaks.

"He wanted to do something significant for Buffalo," Black said.

With about 260,000 residents and a glorious past, Buffalo is an old Rust Belt town — like Detroit — that has lost half of its population since 1950 and many of the railroads, shipping, steel mills and grain processing facilities that made it the nation's eight-largest city in 1900. It ranks 73rd today.

Yet many Buffalo neighborhoods remain vibrant, and the city experienced much less white flight than Detroit. Such newer industries as education, financial services, health care and high tech have helped attract well-educated young adults, and there's the buzz of innovation in the air: The night before HarborCenter opened, a metal-forming company received $1 million in a competition for Buffalo entrepreneurs that awarded a total of $5 million.

The waterfront around the HarborCenter, moribund for decades, has come alive in recent years with parkland, planned events and development. A canal outside HarborCenter, enhanced with refrigerated pipes, is to open soon to skaters on a surface three times that of the rink at Rockefeller Center.

On the sixth floor of HarborCenter one day recently, the milky white ice surface in the main rink gleamed in sunlight that poured through large windows — unusual in arenas — high above the players' benches.

Cameras above the ice allow for the live-streaming of games and the accumulation of footage that can be used by coaches and scouts. TVs near benches will be used for mid-game tutoring.

In addition to the main rink, on which Canisius and the Junior Sabres will play their home games, the other sixth-floor ice surface has room for 135 spectators.

Officials say they have scheduled youth tournaments for every weekend through hockey season, and the rinks will run 5 a.m.-1 a.m. Public skating starts two hours before each Sabres game.

Nearby on the sixth floor are the Academy of Hockey and the 5,000-square-foot training center.

The academy has a classroom, theater and high-tech gizmos like a rapid-shot machine that ejects pucks at adjustable speeds so players can work on their skills.

Academy Director Kevyn Adams, a former NHL player and coach, said teaching through TV in classes was "a big part of what goes on in player development at the highest level, and we're going to bring it down to the younger players."

The training center — don't call it a "gym" — has a dizzying array of high-end equipment and a professional staff that is designed to provide athletes from the NHL to youth hockey scientific-based training that emphasizes power, speed, explosiveness and injury prevention.

"We're inclusive, but elite," said John Koelmel, a former banker who is HarborCenter's president. "Elite, but not elitist. We train some of the best of the best, while at the same time, we widen the base of hockey players."

Greater Buffalo, like metro Detroit, is filled with youth leagues. Buffalo also sits less than two hours from hockey-mad Toronto. In Detroit itself, however, the City Sports Center and Jack Adams Arena both closed recently, leaving the outdoor rink at Clark Park the only facility for young city hockey players. (The suburbs, of course, have dozens of indoor arenas.)

Is Buffalo the new Hockeytown?

"I'm not one to self-anoint," Koelmel said. "We need to make sure as many hockey roads as possible pass through Buffalo. The passion that this community has, the geographic centricity, the number of high-end players who live or have grown up within 150-mile radius — we've got a lot going for us."

He added: "Our job is to dazzle."