In the late 1970s, when Roanoke was starting to salvage its downtown, the city hoped to get a big federal grant for a new bus station but wondered how it could get Washington’s attention.
That’s when Brian Wishneff, the city official in charge of landing the grant, discovered something propitious: One of President Jimmy Carter’s Cabinet secretaries was coming to Roanoke for a political trip.
Unfortunately, it was the wrong Cabinet secretary. The commerce secretary was set to come to Roanoke. For this project, though, Roanoke needed the transportation secretary, who was scheduled to go to Norfolk at the same time.
Wishneff made some calls. Time has erased the memory of who. What matters, though, is the result: The Carter administration switched the two secretaries and sent Transportation Secretary Neil Goldschmidt to Roanoke instead.
“We drove him up and down Campbell Avenue,” recalls Bev Fitzpatrick Jr., then a vice president for a Roanoke bank.
Roanoke got the grant and its project of redeveloping downtown advanced a little more. That new bus station is now gone, swept away by a later tide of development. However, almost a half century later, that initial resuscitation of downtown in the late ’70s and early ’80s remains a defining chapter of the city’s history — and one of its primary authors was Brian Wishneff.
Wishneff, who later became the city’s first economic development director, died Saturday at age 73 after a long battle with Huntington’s disease, the degenerative neurological condition that once killed the singer Woody Guthrie. Fitzpatrick remembered Wishneff as “a giant in the industry” who left his mark on Roanoke in ways the general public feels but may not often recognize. He was instrumental in the revival of downtown and the creation of Roanoke’s first industrial park. “He helped make Roanoke a healthier community — tax revenue, quality of life,” Fitzpatrick said.
Downtown Roanoke hit bottom in the mid-1970s. The big department stores had fled for malls. Much of the city’s core stood hollow. The city market was considered a disreputable place to be, beset with crime and X-rated “adult” bookstores. Prominent business leaders warned of a “downtown cancer” consuming the city’s core. They organized a business-oriented ticket that swept the city council elections in 1976. That council hired a new city manager, the young and energetic Bern Ewert, and Ewert, in turn, hired the son of a Norfolk truck driver who had just earned a master’s degree in urban planning from Virginia Tech. His name was Brian Wishneff.
With that, the redevelopment of downtown Roanoke began.
Fitzpatrick, who later went on to serve several stints on the city council, remembers Wishneff as a master of securing the grants that were key to financing downtown’s rebirth. Grants are typically not colorful things but the stories about how Wishneff secured them often are.
Consider how Roanoke got the financing to pay for parking garages, then an innovation and a key to bringing people back downtown for cultural events.. The federal grant to pay for those garages was based on the premise — and the promise — that local private investment would follow. Fitzpatrick said one bank (not his) promised to put up the match but Wishneff was always skeptical that the bank would come through. “He had a sixth sense,” Fitzpatrick says. Just before the application was to be filed, the bank pulled out. Wishneff went door to door to businesses downtown to secure lots of small investments that added up to the single big one that the bank had fudged on. That’s why downtown Roanoke has the parking garages it does today.
As city economic development director, Wishneff was instrumental in creating space in a landlocked city for an industrial park. “We didn’t have one,” Fitzpatrick says. “We spent thousands of hours on that,” Fitzpatrick said. Today that’s the 440-acre Roanoke Centre for Industry and Technology, which is home to multiple businesses, including an Advance Auto distribution center, Revlon/Elizabeth Arden and Orvis. Twelve of the 15 sites are now occupied, according to the city’s website.
In the 1980s, Roanoke was competing with Pulaski County to land a major Coca-Cola bottling plant. This involved a plane trip to Miami to meet the developer. On the flight there, Wishneff had everyone in the Roanoke delegation get a can of Coke from the flight attendants. “We got off the plane each holding a can of Coke,” Fitzpatrick said. “It was kind of corny, but it worked.” Roanoke got the plant.
Fitzpatrick called Wishneff “one of the smartest people to come to Roanoke. It was fun to watch that boy’s mind and see how he could put things together.” Wishneff had a knack for seeing possibilities where others couldn’t — and pushing them harder than people in Roanoke had previously been accustomed to, Fitzpatrick said. “Brian was always thinking — how can we make this work? Even if it was impossible.” A 2017 story in The Roanoke Times said Wishneff preferred working out math problems by hand rather than using a calculator. “I use my brain as much as I can,” he said. “I love being challenged.”
Over the years Wishneff was involved in some way in every major development in Roanoke and a little beyond: the reopening of the Hotel Roanoke, the creation of the Higher Education Center in the former Norfolk & Western Railway headquarters, the transformation of the former Jefferson High School into the Jefferson Center and the Smart Road high-tech transportation research road in Montgomery County. A 1995 story in The Roanoke Times credited Wishneff with talking the insurance company now known as Anthem into staying in downtown Roanoke rather than moving to Richmond. “I don’t think we’d have ever seen the resurgence in the market downtown and economic development without Brian’s leadership,” Fitzpatrick said.
In time, Wishneff left city government and founded his own consulting company. His first client was a high-profile one: the Virginia Baseball Club, a group that was then trying to bring a Major League Baseball team to Northern Virginia in the 1990s. Wishneff’s role was to help put together the public-private financing for a stadium, likely in Arlington County, according to a 1995 story in The Roanoke Times. That investment group seemed a front-runner for either an expansion team or a relocation until the politics in Northern Virginia shifted; ultimately the Montreal Expos were sold to a different group that turned the team into the D.C.-based Washington Nationals.
Most of Wishneff’s later work was more low-profile and behind-the-scenes but quite extensive; his obituary says the firm did work in more than 40 states. Nonetheless, Wishneff stayed in Roanoke and went on to serve on both the Roanoke School Board and the Roanoke City Council.
After he was diagnosed with Huntington’s, Wishneff had a rare opportunity: In 2017, Pope Francis held an event in Rome to call attention to the disease. Wishneff attended as part of a delegation from the Huntington’s Disease Society of America. He didn’t just get to attend the event with the pope, he got a hug from the pontiff himself. Wishneff, a longtime leader in one of Roanoke’s Jewish congregations, called Pope Francis “my favorite politician.”
A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at the Temple Emanuel Cemetery with a gathering following the service at Temple Emanuel. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the Huntington’s Disease Society of America.
