By Dave Seminara
I’m a mad traveler who has visited 85 countries and is never happier than when I’m in an unfamiliar place. My travel addiction was born in Niagara Falls in the 1980s. As a kid growing up in nearby Williamsville, my mom — a fellow compulsive traveler — would take me to both sides of the Falls often. I loved the waterfalls, of course, but what fascinated me even more was hearing foreign languages and feeling like I was on an exotic vacation so close to home. Now I live in Florida but come back to Western New York often to visit my mom and document life in Niagara Falls for my YouTube channel, @madtraveler.
Each time I visit, I walk around the city with my video camera and ask people if things are getting better or worse. The answer is almost always “worse.” On the rare occasions when someone says “better,” it’s usually someone with a good job who lives in one of the city’s safer neighborhoods. My father grew up on 15th Street in the Little Italy neighborhood, and his childhood home is now boarded up and vacant like so many others in the city. The glass panes on the front door are smashed out, and I often peek inside and look around the overgrown backyard, trying to imagine what my dad’s life was like back then — when the city and this neighborhood were thriving.
My father left the Falls in the early ’60s for New York City and later Buffalo. He died last October at age 92. Carmen didn’t like to visit his old neighborhood often in his later years. Instead, he preferred to remember it as it was — waxing poetic about the smell of freshly baked DiCamillo bread — rather than reckon with the grim reality of what it’s become. I can understand why. His old block is now a peculiar mix of rehabbed Airbnb homes and neglected, vacant ones.
Last year, while filming part two of my series, I met a woman named Monica, a single mom who lives across the street from my dad’s old home. Monica told me that it’s unsettling to have a rotating cast of tourists — many from abroad — living on her block. She doesn’t feel safe. She checks her police scanner multiple times per day and never lets her children out of her sight.
In part three, I met residents who told me the city just isn’t safe anymore. Bob and Kathy, a pair of disabled seniors riding mobility scooters, said the Falls is getting worse. “A lot of abandoned buildings, shootings, stabbings,” Kathy told me. Another resident, George, said his house had recently been broken into. The assailants took not only their valuables but also the meat out of their freezer. “And they stole our wagon to take it away,” he added. When I asked Cynthia, a woman who slept outside Tops for more than a year, if things were getting better, she said, “Worse — too many homeless, and I was one of them.” “They’ll steal cancer from you,” said Don Reed, who moved to the Falls from Alabama five years ago for a stump-grinding job.
On my most recent visit, while filming part four just before Halloween, I heard even more sad stories. I met a woman named Brittany who told me she lost her job at a local 7-Eleven and was briefly jailed after she fought off an assailant trying to rob the store with a knife. Next door to my father’s now-boarded-up home on 15th Street, I met a Bangladeshi immigrant rehabbing an abandoned house to turn into an Airbnb.
There are about 300 other Airbnbs already operating in the city — homes that could be rented by some of the people I met living in transient hotels along Niagara Falls Boulevard. Teenagers living at the decrepit Pelican Motel told me they had no reliable internet and that their rooms were full of bugs. They can’t eat well because their parents have only microwaves in their rooms. None of them had any idea how much longer they’d have to live in such conditions. Two other families I met, this time at the Niagara Falls Motel, were just happy to have a roof over their heads after being homeless following evictions in Buffalo.
Brittany and others told me to visit the open-air drug market near the intersection of 19th and Niagara Street. There I saw dozens of people buying, selling, and using drugs under a large blue tent. Others were passed out on the street. One man, high as a kite and slumped over on a stool, barely seemed to notice me standing a few feet away. But when I asked if things were getting better or worse in the Falls, he stirred long enough to say “WORSE” before drifting back into his drug-induced stupor.
I don’t pretend that there are easy solutions to fix the Falls’ problems. But I’m certain the status quo — and the mayor’s $200 million hockey arena proposal — won’t work. The global tourism industry is thriving, yet the city isn’t capitalizing as much as it should because Niagara Falls has an image problem and not enough for tourists to do once they’ve seen the waterfalls.
If it were up to me, I’d give homes away for $1 to anyone under 40 who agrees to renovate and live in them full-time. Tax-and-spend politicians in Albany will never do it, but I’d also love to see them stimulate investment by reducing the tax burden. Why not make Niagara Falls a special enterprise zone with no sales tax, for example? Just as important, the city needs a facelift — because tourists don’t want to linger in a place full of boarded-up buildings.
Some people have told me my YouTube series gives the city bad PR. But I think city and state leaders need to be shamed into action and my series gives voiceless residents an opportunity to air their grievances. The status quo is unacceptable, and Niagara Falls deserves
better.
Dave Seminara is a journalist and vlogger. You can find his series about the Falls here.
