Niagara ReporterLest anyone think the Niagara Falls Reporter prefers to dwell on the negative, concentrating on the city’s dire circumstances and cornering the local newspaper market on pessimism, try this article from major business network Bloomberg News, which ran a couple of years ago, on for size.
“Niagara Falls’ descent into blight — in spite of its proximity to an attraction that draws at least 8 million tourists each year…encompasses just about every mistake a city could make… a 1960’s mayor’s decision to bulldoze his quaint downtown and replace it with a bunch of modernist follies… Once a hydropowered center of industry, Niagara Falls is now one of America’s most infamous victims of urban decay, hollowed out by four decades of job loss, mafia infiltration, political corruption, and failed get-fixed-quick schemes.”
And those were among the nice things that Bloomberg News had to say about the city of Niagara Falls.
We’ve repeatedly made the case that this city’s plight, rather than it being somehow our fault, is the direct result of Albany policies that robbed us of our hydropower and tourism resources. State government over the decades has implemented a four-pronged strategic plan with respect to waterfront resources like the Niagara Power Project and Niagara Falls State Park. This four point program is as follows: shut down dialogue, shut off access, shut us out from cash flows and, well, just plain shut up.
The bulk of hydropower generated by the massive New York Power Authority (NYPA) facility on the Niagara River is sent all over the Eastern seaboard, while residents here pay some of the highest electric bills in the country. Eight million tourists a year enter Niagara Falls State Park on the dedicated Robert Moses Parkway, where they park, dine, sightsee, purchase gifts and souvenirs and then leave without spending money in the city, one of the per capita poorest in the state that is presently in the process of instituting property reassessments in order to raise taxes.
While wresting money and power from the quasi-governmental, “public benefit” corporation NYPA presents a daunting challenge, opportunities may exist for getting a better deal from Albany with regards to its monopoly over tourism in Niagara Falls State Park.
For one, multinational food service conglomerate Delaware North Companies, Inc., which operates a restaurant, several food booths, ice cream stands, and a large snack bar practically at the brink of the falls, in competition with and to the great detriment of the restaurants and eateries of downtown Niagara Falls, has a contract end date for Niagara Falls State Park of 2121, five years from now.
Will it be possible to evict the fast food behemoth, solely owned by Buffalo billionaire and exemplar of the 1% Jeremy Jacobs, from Niagara Falls State Park, like folks did out west at Yosemite? Only if the people, through our local elected officials, demand it.
A second approach to reclaiming the eight million tourists who visit Niagara Falls State Park every year for small, local business, and helping to restore something resembling the Frederick Law Olmsted plan, who decreed that vehicular traffic and food service should not be allowed in the park but should take place in and benefit the adjoining downtown, was recently validated by a tourist bureaucracy we derogated in last week’s issue, the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area.
We have been critical of their new “Discover Niagara” shuttle, which conveys some of the few tourists escaping the state park into the city, away to out-of-town destinations for the day.
There was pushback last friday in the form of an emailed newsletter from National Heritage that inadvertently may have laid out the scenario for a Niagara Falls renaissance, charting a course for an exciting renewal of the economic prosperity of the city.
“We’re also quite surprised by the popularity of (the shuttle with) visitors from 4 Mile Creek State Park – located on the southern shores of Lake Ontario, just 4 miles east of the Niagara River,” the newsletter’s lead story reads, “…as they hop on and off on the way to Niagara Falls State Park to ultimately visit the Falls. There are also plenty of local families who have taken the shuttle from the Villages (of Lewiston and Youngstown) for day trips to the Power Vista, Aquarium of Niagara and Niagara Falls, some of whom hadn’t been to the Falls for years. Along with our regular visitors, the response has been great with locals utilizing the shuttles while doing weekend and day long “staycations’, keeping money local…”
We’ve been proposing for years that the 1500 paid parking spaces in the Niagara Falls State Park, asphalt abominations marring Olmsted’s masterpiece that was supposed to be a natural landscape free of vehicular traffic, should be removed so that people have to park in the city, with the added benefit of making it more likely they’ll spend time and money there.
Now National Heritage is, in its way, not only advocating for exactly that kind of approach, they’re putting it into practice, proving the viability of just such a model: tourists parking at locations removed from Niagara Falls State Park, and transported there by means of a shuttle.
Countless tourists park on one of several paid parking lots in Niagara Falls State Park. After staying for a couple of hours, they leave on the Robert Moses Parkway with little reason to enter or spend money in downtown Niagara Falls.
We’ve been proposing for years that the 1500 paid parking spaces in the Niagara Falls State Park, asphalt abominations marring Olmsted’s masterpiece that was supposed to be a natural landscape free of vehicular traffic, should be removed so that people have to park in the city, with the added benefit of making it more likely they’ll spend time and money there.
Now National Heritage is, in its way, not only advocating for exactly that kind of approach, they’re putting it into practice, proving the viability of just such a model: tourists parking at locations removed from Niagara Falls State Park, and transported there by means of a shuttle.
Imagine parking lots on the vast expanse of vacant land that is presently owned by Niagara Falls Redevelopment, where tourists could park and then take a shuttle which, based on National Heritage’s “Discover Niagara” shuttle, makes stops all over downtown Niagara Falls and delivers them right to the entrance of Niagara Falls State Park. Imagine the parking lots on Goat Island and Prospect Point removed and the land converted to green forest crisscrossed by trails, providing the falls with appropriate surroundings and invoking in tourists true feelings of awe and reverential respect for the natural wonder. Imagine all the parking and food service revenues going to downtown businesses instead of Albany and Delaware North. This is what our elected leaders should be working for, not building more subsidized box hotels.
