By Frank Parlato
Niagara Falls, New York, population: 48,000 and falling. The name is still big.
Niagara Falls was not merely a city. In its prime, the air itself had a kind of glamour. It was the kind of place where men wore hats to dinner. Where bellboys ran down hallways with telegrams and girls giggled in long coats by the observation deck. There were lights in every window, humming with the promise of something earned.
People came from everywhere. Some to marry. Some to work. All to believe in something bigger than themselves.
You could feel the heartbeat of the city. It beat in the steel mills. In the paper plants. The people had broad shoulders and calloused hands, but their laughter came easy.
And the falls poured day and night. They gave power. Tourists came with wide eyes and rolled-down windows. They parked. They watched. They bought postcards and silver spoons with the skyline etched on the handle.
This was a place that worked. You could practically feel the current under your feet. Steel crashing, turbines spinning, weddings every weekend. It was called the Honeymoon Capital of the World.
Everything buzzed.
Tesla showed up and decided to plug the future into this river. It worked. Power from the water. It was called the Power City. The men worked. They made things. There was a hum in the street. From the mills. From the turbines. From the breath of the city. You could see the falls. You could hear them. You could feel them in your chest. That was Niagara Falls, then.
The Fall
It didn’t happen all at once. Cities don’t fall like buildings. The town didn’t mean to stop. The young folks left. Storefronts emptied. The movie houses closed. The corner bars got quiet. The mills closed. The jobs went away and didn’t come back.
It was Robert Moses who did the deed. He came and took the power. He rerouted the water. And with the quiet flick of a pen, the current was no longer Niagara’s. It belonged to Albany. To the state. To somewhere else. Robert Moses moved the power—not just the electricity, but the right to own light, the ability to say, this belongs to us.
Then came the parks. Albany took its direction to compete with the city for tourists’ dollars, and Albany won. The shops closed. The diners emptied. They made it easier for people to see the Falls and harder for them to stay. You could walk straight from your car to the Falls without spending a single dime in Niagara Falls, NY.
Albany took the tourists. Not all at once. A little at a time. First the parking lots. Then, the competing stores inside the state park.
They watched the lights dim and the city storefronts empty. The music stopped playing in the old dance halls. The chairs in the barbershop stayed empty for too many days.
There were cracks in the streets. Empty hotels. Shuttered stores. Some people stayed. Some couldn’t leave. The bars stayed open for a while.
The city didn’t fall all at once. It fell over decades.
A City in Waiting
Now, the streets are cracked. Buildings stand empty. And houses are waiting for demolition as soon as the mayor finds the money in the deficit budget.
Poverty and crime are rising. People lock their doors and don’t look out the windows. Nearly half the city’s children grow up in poverty.
A mix of rust and despair, this is no longer a city.
It is a place that remembers what it was but does not know what to become. It once had the sheen of myth. Now, it seems like a hallucination—that a city could have fallen so far.
The Arrival of a New Hope
And to this city——came not some desperate public works scheme but a proposed private ambition and billion-dollar confidence.
They called it the Niagara Digital Campus—a $1.5 billion data center.
Nine buildings. Inside, 1.2 million square feet. 140 megawatts of computing power. Servers humming with artificial intelligence, cloud services, encrypted data from governments and Google. Fiber optics will stretch under broken roads, promising a new internet speed. And no taxpayer pays a cent.
The project would bring money. Four hundred fourteen million dollars in taxes over twenty years. $298 million for Niagara Falls and its schools—$54 million to the county. $63 million to the state. It’s books for the schools. It’s patched roads. It’s winter coats for kids.
Its sums so large it whispered of rescue.
Then there were jobs. Not theoretical. Not seasonal. Nearly a thousand jobs a year. The kind with pay and health care. Not gift shop jobs. Not summer jobs with desks that fold up when the tourists go home.
Built with private money.
NFR owned the land. Urbacon would build it. The developers have done this in Toronto, Montreal, and Richmond Hill. They were ready. There was only one obstacle.
And it wore a suit.
The Mayor’s Lawsuit and the Land
It was a choice. Mayor Robert Restaino stood before his city and selected ten acres.
The mayor wanted these ten acres. He picked them himself. Of all the acres in the city that lie fallow and could be developed, he selected the front gate to the proposed data center—the place where everything would go in and come out. The project could not go forward without the 10 acres that front the main street.
Mayor Restaino wanted the 10 acres for Centennial Park. A name that echoed with civic ambition and sentimental hope. There would be a 7,000-seat arena. A splash pad, that, in winter, would harden into a skating rink. A parking ramp for 500 cars. A beer garden on the roof. Maybe a rock-climbing wall. Maybe zip lines. It was grand.
But there were problems. He had no team. No concerts. No deals. No tenants. No studies have been conducted on feasibility, impact, or site selection. No proof that this was the right place. There is no certainty it would not destroy something greater.
He wants ice and music, a little water park for the children, and a great arena for the crowds that haven’t arrived.
The cost? Unknown. Perhaps $200 million. Perhaps $300 million. Perhaps more. Nobody knew. No one has done the math. The funding is unknown, except the taxpayers will pay it.
The mayor filed for eminent domain. He filed to seize the land. The lawsuits could take years. And the data center may die while waiting.
Maybe the city will wake up in a few years – after Restaino is no longer mayor – and find it stopped its own future in the name of an idea that never came true.
Fantasy vs. Future
Unlike the data center—the mayor’s arena would be built with public money—the money the city does not have now but plans to borrow from the children.
Certainly, the arena would offer jobs. Ushers. Janitors. Vendors with soft pretzels. People sweeping the aisles, taking the tickets, and filling the popcorn bags.
But most nights, the seats would sit empty.
The mayor envisioned crowds—tourists, fans, strangers with tickets—coming to see concerts not booked, teams not named, seasons not scheduled.
An arena, if built, would need subsidies. Most arenas of its size are empty three hundred twenty nights a year. Still, the mayor sees hockey games. Maybe music. Maybe magic. He calls it transformational. That’s the word they use when selling you something shiny and useless.
There is no team. There are no concerts. The city has lost half its people since the sixties. The ones left are poor. The stores are closed. The roads are bad. Mayor Robert Restaino is halting a project that could modernize the grid, reduce latency, create jobs, and carve Niagara Falls a place on the map of the global artificial brain.
Because of a splash pad.
The data center would have made Niagara Falls faster, sharper, brighter. It would have given people work. It would have made the lights flicker with purpose again.
It wanted to put this little city on the big map with wires, signals, and cloud servers floating above. But the mayor is willing—no, eager—to block a billion-dollar data center.
A Way Back
There are old men who remember when the factories hummed, and the tourists came in lines, when union wages could support a family. And diners full of working people and shop windows dressed on Main Street.
And still, there may be a way back. A data center. Not flashy. Not sentimental. A building filled with blinking lights. Wires under the ground. People walking in with lunchboxes and walking out with paychecks. A center for thinking machines. But the mayor is on YouTube, talking about a stadium.
But just off camera, in the wings of history, something is knocking. It hums.
