The Ten-Acre Battlefield
This is a story about ten acres in Niagara Falls, New York. Ten acres of grass and trees called Parcel 0.
Niagara Falls Redevelopment LLC—NFR for short—owns Parcel 0, along with 130 other acres it bought over 25 years. Billionaire brothers, Howard and Edward Milstein, own NFR.
NFR has a plan. A $1.5 billion data center called the Niagara Digital Campus. Nine buildings. All steel and fiberboard. No windows. And inside machines. Not machines like the old days — wheels, levers, and pulleys. These were new machines to store the memory of other machines.
Why would anybody want to put a data center in Niagara Falls? Because it had power from the river. Cold air for the machines. Land nobody was using. But there was a problem.
Parcel 0 was the entrance to the data center. It wasn’t the whole project. It was just the mouth. But without it, the data center would not be built.
Enter: The Mayor
Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino had a dream, too. Of course he did. Every mayor does, sooner or later. It’s in the handbook. Page 1: Think of something big and shiny. Put your name on it. Mayor Restaino’s dream was a 7,000-seat arena. Ice rink. Splash pad. Parking ramp. Mayor Restaino wanted Parcel 0 too. But he didn’t own Parcel 0.
He Didn’t Own It. Minor Detail.
So he went to court.
Mayor Restaino went to court to take Parcel 0 from NFR through eminent domain.
Two dreams. One patch of grass. One side said: The future. The other side said: a monument to me.
And in between sat ten acres.
The Machines Pay Taxes Too
$414 million over 20 years.
They called it an Economic Impact Study. It was twenty-four pages long. It came from the MRB Group and the report said that if NFR built their Niagara Digital Campus —the machines will use 140 megawatts of power. But the city will get $3 to $5 million a year in sales tax from electricity alone.
That’s right. Machines paying taxes. Like people. And property taxes too. Over twenty years: $298 million to the city and school district. $54 million to the county. $63 million to the state. Add it up: $414 million.
Maybe a city like Niagara Falls — a city of shuttered factories and empty storefronts and good people doing the best they could — deserved a break.
Jobs People Keep
Engineers. Electricians. Tech workers. 550 full-time.
Jobs like electricians, engineers, IT techs, analysts. People with skills. People who would wake up in the morning and know where they were going, not just for a season, but for a career.
And They Stay
People with careers. People buying houses.
Steady, constant. Jobs every year. People buying houses. People staying. People building a life. People with healthcare. People with paychecks. People with weekends. The kind of jobs that don’t get tipped. The kind of jobs that pay rent. People with tool belts and clipboards. People with names on their shirts instead of the name of a company. 550 of them, full-time. 19,000 job-years over twenty years.
5,600 more during construction. 1,700 more from the businesses that feed the machine — folks who clean up, haul trash, fix the plumbing, guard the doors. cleaning crews, repairmen, food trucks, snowplow drivers. And wages. They said $1.6 billion in wages over twenty years.
And old, tired Niagara Falls — called a Disadvantaged Community – might get $9 million a year more from Albany for new wires. Substations. Transmission lines.
They said it could mean $250 million a year in economic activity. And that was the future.
The Lights Get Cheaper; The Internet Won’t Stutter
The machines might lower electric rates. And bring faster. Clearer Internet
The data center was going to use more electricity than the whole city of Niagara Falls. And there was plenty of power. 2,600 megawatts from the Robert Moses Power Plant, day after day. The data center wanted 140 megawatts. Niagara Falls, the whole city, used maybe 50.
All that power? All those machines might lower electric rates. More ratepayers, they said.
And the internet — faster. Clearer. Less waiting.
Will It Be Loud?
Not unless you sleep inside a server.
People worry, of course. If something new comes to the neighborhood — a store, a factory, a place where the future hums quietly to itself — the first thing people wonder is: Will it keep me up at night?
The men with the plans and the charts and the reports said most of the noise would come from the machines that kept the machines alive — coolers, fans. Yes, inside the buildings it was eighty, ninety decibels. The sound of a vacuum cleaner.
But you won’t hear it from outside – certainly not from the boundary lines. At the boundary it would be quieter than a dishwasher behind a kitchen door. Quieter than traffic down the road.
His Dream Was Loud
A 7,000-seat arena with popcorn and parking.
And Then, Silence
320 empty nights a year.
Robert Restaino was the mayor of Niagara Falls. And he had a better dream, he said. A $165 million arena called Centennial Park. It would be a place for hockey. For music. For noise and lights and the smell of popcorn in the air. Maybe a teenage hockey league. Maybe concerts.
An arena is a great place — when there’s a game. Hot dogs. Beer. People screaming their lungs out over a minor-league hockey team. But there was no tenant. No team. No star to come and stay awhile.
Saturday Night Jobs
Ushers. Cleaners. Minimum wage. Polyester vests.
The jobs? Part-time. Security guards standing in the cold. Maybe a food vendor selling popcorn for six dollars a bag. Ushers. Cleaners. People with mops and keys. Minimum wage. People with flashlights and polyester vests. Ushers and ticket-takers. People who clean the aisles after the lights go down. Clean the popcorn off the floor
And The City Had No Money
Not for the land. Not for the dream.
The future will be quiet most nights. Dark most nights. Three hundred and twenty nights a year with the doors locked and the lights out. Waiting for the next show. Waiting for the next busload of tourists that might not come. That’s what arenas do. They sit. With chairs nobody’s sitting in. It’s just a big empty room that costs money to heat.
But He Believed
And that’s the dangerous part.
Still, the mayor believed. He would borrow. He would bond. He would beg, if he had to. State money. Federal money. Any money. The future was coming, the mayor said. And it looked very much like 1963.
Courtroom Economics
Is Land Just Dirt — Or Is It Destiny?
Restaino was serious. In 2022, he cause the city to sue NFR. Eminent domain. He wanted a stadium. NFR wanted the future. Parcel 0 was not just ten acres to NFR. It was the beginning of everything. Without it — no data center.
The Bill Could Be $20 Million.
Or Ten Times That.
The court would decide the price. Was land just land? Or was land the road to something bigger. If the court said Parcel 0 was just land, maybe it would the city taxpayers $20 million. But if it was the door to a billion-dollar project? If taking it killed a future of $414 million in taxes? To NFR Parcel 0 wasn’t just land. It was the first domino in a $1.5 billion line of dreams.
Take it away — and everything else falls. Take it away — and you don’t just owe for dirt.
The city taxpayers owe for the death of a project. The death of $414 million in tax revenue. The fair price the city’s taxpayers might have to pay may be ten times as high.
So now they were in court. And the city didn’t have the money for the land or the dream. Mayor Restaino talked about cutting street repairs. Demolitions. Twenty years of duct tape and wishful thinking. All to build an arena that might sit empty 320 nights a year.
There Was A Way Out
Let The Machines Pay for The Arena.
There was a way out. Let the machines come. Let the tax dollars grow. Let the future pay for the past. Let the data center fund the arena.
Let NFR build. Let the taxes roll in — $400 million over 20 years. Let those dollars build Centennial Park — not on Parcel 0, but somewhere else. Do a study. Find the right place.
Let NFR build. Take the taxes. Build the arena somewhere else. Let the future pay for the past.
Mayor Restaino could float a bond on the future taxes of the data center and have his arena. NFR could have its data center.
The people could have their jobs, their tax relief, their better streets, their cleaner parks, their bit of hope.
Niagara Falls had everything. The power of the river. The cold that servers need. The land waiting quietly. All the things a city needs to dream new dreams.
Build The Future. Then Build Saturday Night.
Let NFR build. Use the taxes. Build the arena somewhere else.
Two dreams.
One built for Saturday night.
One built for Monday morning.
And maybe the Falls — tired old Niagara Falls — needs both.
But if you could only have one? Maybe it’s time to build for Monday.
And the future? One looks like 1975. One looks like tomorrow. Choose wisely.
