Can Niagara Falls Pull Off A Vegas?

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ 1 billion % agreed.

Niagara should have been preserved in its natural state as the wonder of the world that it is.

Sadly, that ship sailed ages ago.

this. i would have already visited.

[Wigs]

NF NY focused on industry and boomed for quite a while. The decline started in ~1960 when industry downsized or closed up entirely, and the population went from 102k to only 48k today (half size of NF Ontario). During the past couple of decades it has tried to focus on tourism, with less success than its Canadian sister city across the river.

NF, Ontario focused on tourism and while that's a seasonal industry, it's transformed the city into sort of a playground for the ~7 million folks of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and weekend getaway for anyone within an 8 hour drive of the Falls (Quebec, NY, NJ, PA, Ohio, Massachusetts license plates common sight).

I know the OP says most go once and then that's it, but the constant flow of traffic down the QEW/420 from the GTA to the casinos means people treat NF kind of like Atlantic City.

There's 2 casinos, waterparks, the tacky Clifton Hill attractions, practically every American chain restaurant imaginable , a fairly new (built 2011, renovated 2018) 300k sq ft convention centre, and a new (2020) 5,000 seat theatre run by the Fallsview Casino for Vegas style shows.

When Covid shut the border down, people from the GTA and Quebec kept restaurants and hotels going, albeit at much reduced capacity.

NF Ontario is not lacking in the hotel department. There's currently over 16,000 "guestrooms" (including B&B's & campgrounds) in the city according to Niagara Falls Tourism, roughly 14,000 hotel rooms according to a 2019 article I found.
If tourism bounces back fully expect more highrise hotels to come. Currently the 58 storey addition tower to the Hilton (2009) is the tallest at 581ft.

TL;DR: Niagara Falls will never be a Vegas. but it is kind of like a Reno and if tourism bounces back more hotels and attractions will be built.
Also the city is undergoing a residential building boom and is rapidly approaching 100k residents.


citypopulation.de (click image to be taken to website)

[Wigs]

.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

this. i would have already visited.

even in the current state of their schlock-tacular surroundings, the falls themselves are still ridiculously cool to see, and are 100% worth a side trip if you're ever in the toronto/buffalo region.

by some measures, its the most powerful big drop vertical waterfall on the planet (there are other contenders depending on different variables/definitions).

but yeah, it would've been even better had the whole area been preserved as an (inter)national park.

[Nite]

Originally Posted by Wigs

NF NY focused on industry and boomed for quite a while. The decline started in ~1960 when industry downsized or closed up entirely, and the population went from 102k to only 48k today (half size of NF Ontario). During the past couple of decades it has tried to focus on tourism, with less success than its Canadian sister city across the river.

NF, Ontario focused on tourism and while that's a seasonal industry, it's transformed the city into sort of a playground for the ~7 million folks of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and weekend getaway for anyone within an 8 hour drive of the Falls (Quebec, NY, NJ, PA, Ohio, Massachusetts license plates common sight).

I know the OP says most go once and then that's it, but the constant flow of traffic down the QEW/420 from the GTA to the casinos means people treat NF kind of like Atlantic City.

There's 2 casinos, waterparks, the tacky Clifton Hill attractions, practically every American chain restaurant imaginable , a fairly new (built 2011, renovated 2018) 300k sq ft convention centre, and a new (2020) 5,000 seat theatre run by the Fallsview Casino for Vegas style shows.

When Covid shut the border down, people from the GTA and Quebec kept restaurants and hotels going, albeit at much reduced capacity.

NF Ontario is not lacking in the hotel department. There's currently over 16,000 "guestrooms" (including B&B's & campgrounds) in the city according to Niagara Falls Tourism, roughly 14,000 hotel rooms according to a 2019 article I found.
If tourism bounces back fully expect more highrise hotels to come. Currently the 58 storey addition tower to the Hilton (2009) is the tallest at 581ft.

TL;DR: Niagara Falls will never be a Vegas. but it is kind of like a Reno and if tourism bounces back more hotels and attractions will be built.
Also the city is undergoing a residential building boom and is rapidly approaching 100k residents.


citypopulation.de (click image to be taken to website)

NF NY also bulldozed it's thriving tourist industry in the 60's because the experts thought it was tacky, This is what killed downtown NF NY.
At the time both sides of the falls had the same tourist infrastructure and then the NY side decided they didn't want it anymore.

https://www.niagarafallsreporter.com...-falls-street/

[Nite]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

even in the current state of their schlock-tacular surroundings, the falls themselves are still ridiculously cool to see, and are 100% worth a side trip if you're ever in the toronto/buffalo region.

by some measures, its the most powerful big drop vertical waterfall on the planet (there are other contenders depending on different variables/definitions).

but yeah, it would've been even better had the whole area been preserved as an (inter)national park.

how would it have been better if the area was preserved?

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by Nite

NF NY also bulldozed it's thriving tourist industry in the 60's because the experts thought it was tacky, This is what killed downtown NF NY.
At the time both sides of the falls had the same tourist infrastructure and then the NY side decided they didn't want it anymore.

https://www.niagarafallsreporter.com...-falls-street/

Thanks for sharing that article, Nite!

No doubt the bulldozing for "urban renewal" ruined the downtown. Expensive "silver bullet" type projects that did more harm than good.

Coupled with tons of job losses in the industrial sector causing residents to flee, blight to expand, and reducing the city to less than half it's peak population, and you have the "mini Detroit" look of Niagara Falls, NY today.

[Crawford]

I'm pretty familiar with NF and Detroit and I wouldn't call them similar-looking, outside of the fact that they're both declined Rust Belt cities. They have pretty different vibes and street-level appearances.

Niagara Falls is really white, mostly intact (the population loss is more from widescale flattening of neighborhoods rather than white flight abandonment radiating out from the core), feels much older and has much more visible industry, none of it auto-related. It's more like the standard Western NY/Western PA working class typology.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Wigs

Thanks for sharing that article, Nite!

No doubt the bulldozing for "urban renewal" ruined the downtown. Expensive "silver bullet" type projects that did more harm than good.

Coupled with tons of job losses in the industrial sector causing residents to flee, blight to expand, and reducing the city to less than half it's peak population, and you have the "mini Detroit" look of Niagara Falls, NY today.

I believe Niagara Falls bulldozed itself before Detroit did. I recall Niagara Falls being shorthand for that before Detroit was really known for it.

[lrt's friend]

I have gone to NF many times. I just like the falls, the parks and the general vibe. For a Canadian, it has a really mild climate compared to the rest of Eastern Canada. The nearby vineyards demonstrate this. Those vineyards are also relatively recent industry that followed the Free Trade Agreement of the late 1980s when the agreement made them rethink the industry and bring in European knowhow that greatly improved the quality of the wines.

I once did the south side of Lake Ontario and came through NF NY and I found it so depressing, so much rot. I knew it related to the decline of industry but others here have pointed out how the city damaged its tourism industry through poorly designed 1960s era urban renewal, which was so typical of that era. My own city has an area that has never recovered from 1960s urban renewal, thankfully not right in the centre of the city, although close enough to leave a very noticeable blank area.

That era of mega projects that did not understand the needs of pedestrian traffic was so typical. Blank walls, interior malls with little street presence and blocking through streets making traffic and pedestrian movement more difficult. It is too bad how NF NY has suffered from well-intentioned but bad urban design. I wish them luck in trying to correct past mistakes. As can be seen, correcting those mistakes can take decades.

NF ON did not embark on this urban renewal process to their advantage even though, NF ON is not the poster child of urban design. Parts of the city have seen some blight but the tourism boom brought about by the casinos and other newer attractions have helped to remove much of the blight and with a hopeful future. This has given NF ON a great advantage over NF NY and why so many Americans (in non-Covid times) cross the border to visit the Canadian side. There is much to be said about organic improvements in urban design, one building at a time, over past sins of bulldozing several blocks.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I'm pretty familiar with NF and Detroit and I wouldn't call them similar-looking...

I meant the look of abandonment and neglect, extreme de-industrialization. that's all

I'm glad that Detroit is doing much better these days!

[MolsonExport]

The real downtown of NF Canada is pretty decrepit.



flicker

More here (thread): https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...d.php?t=146238

[Northern Light]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

The real downtown of NF Canada is pretty decrepit.

It certainly needs some TLC........though I would not say the pics you chose are entirely representative.

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1066...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1066...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1066...7i16384!8i8192


I'd hasten to add, there's a also a plan for large-scale intensification around the train station:

This is the new Secondary Plan. While obviously that's mostly high level 'vision' stuff, and not actual projects, I can confirm a few actual projects are in the works.

https://www.niagararegion.ca/project...esentation.pdf

[Wigs]

Molson, while it does need rejuvenation, it's not bad at all in comparison to the shit state of Niagara Falls, NY. Trust me.

Queen St. has a craft brewery for example.

[benp]

Interestingly, in the early 1990s a proposal for the largest collection of Outlet stores in North America was presented by a national developer for downtown Niagara Falls NY. It was to be privately funded, and included commitments from multiple big box stores as anchors, along with high end shopping. A Japanese developer also included a monorail system connecting to the Rainbow Bridge to carry Canadian visitors to the stores. In return for the development, the City was to be responsible for making the land available by displacing homes and businesses in a 110 acre tract.

However, distrust as a result of a history of developers screwing over the city, especially distrust of what was felt as rosy tax revenue predictions, ended with the election of a new Mayor who opposed the development and ended the city's work with the development team.

Instead, the developer ended up expanding an Outlet Mall literally just outside the Niagara Falls city limit, in the Town of Niagara. Although the outlet was less than half the size of the projected Niagara Falls plan, business was better than expected and generated tax revenues 50% higher than what had been expected by the larger mall. Since it was built, the mall area has added many dozens of additional businesses, the mall has expanded several times, and draws hordes of tourists and busses of shoppers from Canada.

So, instead of bringing people downtown, and generating business and taxes for the City of Niagara Falls, all of the business and tax revenue go to the County and Town of Niagara along a busy section of suburban highways and strip malls.

Meanwhile, Niagara Falls later went ahead and worked a deal to give up its convention center to the Seneca Indians, who then built a casino and large hotel with the agreement to provide a level of compensation from casino revenue back to the State and City, along with the hope of spurring additional development near the casino. However, no new development has occurred, and since 2017 the Senecas have stopped making payments stating that the State was in violation of the Seneca's exclusivity agreement, and that the original pact was no longer valid as it should not automatically renew without all sides agreeing (the Senecas do not). So, the city has been starved of tens of millions in revenue for several years, which certainly has affected city services.

Bad decisions and outcomes arrive in many flavors in NFNY. There are many, many more bad plans, decisions, and outcomes that have occurred for decades.

Like many countries, Niagara Falls NY seems to have its own Curse of Natural Resources, also know as the Poverty Paradox. Those places blessed with the greatest natural resources (in NF case tourists and hydro generated electricity) have less growth, worse development, and worse government than places less blessed with resources.

[SFBruin]

Knowing really nothing about the situation, I feel that Niagara Falls suffers from having terrible weather, and being generally hard to get to from the West Coast.

Las Vegas isn't exactly Brooklyn in terms of accessibility, but it is right across the state line from California, has a major airport, a major interstate, and is sunny basically year-round.

I mean, obviously there are other factors that make somewhere successful, but it seems like there are several geographic reasons as to why a city like Las Vegas would be more of a year-round entertainment destination than one like Niagara Falls.

[Nite]

Originally Posted by Wigs

Thanks for sharing that article, Nite!

No doubt the bulldozing for "urban renewal" ruined the downtown. Expensive "silver bullet" type projects that did more harm than good.

Coupled with tons of job losses in the industrial sector causing residents to flee, blight to expand, and reducing the city to less than half it's peak population, and you have the "mini Detroit" look of Niagara Falls, NY today.

The funny thing is a lot of people in this thread want NF Ontario to do the same thing for the same reason "tackyness"

[Nite]

Originally Posted by benp

Interestingly, in the early 1990s a proposal for the largest collection of Outlet stores in North America was presented by a national developer for downtown Niagara Falls NY. It was to be privately funded, and included commitments from multiple big box stores as anchors, along with high end shopping. A Japanese developer also included a monorail system connecting to the Rainbow Bridge to carry Canadian visitors to the stores. In return for the development, the City was to be responsible for making the land available by displacing homes and businesses in a 110 acre tract.

However, distrust as a result of a history of developers screwing over the city, especially distrust of what was felt as rosy tax revenue predictions, ended with the election of a new Mayor who opposed the development and ended the city's work with the development team.

Instead, the developer ended up expanding an Outlet Mall literally just outside the Niagara Falls city limit, in the Town of Niagara. Although the outlet was less than half the size of the projected Niagara Falls plan, business was better than expected and generated tax revenues 50% higher than what had been expected by the larger mall. Since it was built, the mall area has added many dozens of additional businesses, the mall has expanded several times, and draws hordes of tourists and busses of shoppers from Canada.

So, instead of bringing people downtown, and generating business and taxes for the City of Niagara Falls, all of the business and tax revenue go to the County and Town of Niagara along a busy section of suburban highways and strip malls.

Meanwhile, Niagara Falls later went ahead and worked a deal to give up its convention center to the Seneca Indians, who then built a casino and large hotel with the agreement to provide a level of compensation from casino revenue back to the State and City, along with the hope of spurring additional development near the casino. However, no new development has occurred, and since 2017 the Senecas have stopped making payments stating that the State was in violation of the Seneca's exclusivity agreement, and that the original pact was no longer valid as it should not automatically renew without all sides agreeing (the Senecas do not). So, the city has been starved of tens of millions in revenue for several years, which certainly has affected city services.

Bad decisions and outcomes arrive in many flavors in NFNY. There are many, many more bad plans, decisions, and outcomes that have occurred for decades.

Like many countries, Niagara Falls NY seems to have its own Curse of Natural Resources, also know as the Poverty Paradox. Those places blessed with the greatest natural resources (in NF case tourists and hydro generated electricity) have less growth, worse development, and worse government than places less blessed with resources.

NF NY already bulldozered downtown businesses for a giant mall and it made the place into a wasteland.
https://www.niagarafallsreporter.com...-falls-street/

Knowing how these deals are worked out, i would guess NF NY is making more tax revenue from these 110 acre tract than if they had gone with the outlet mall.
See explanation video below starting at 2:48

• Video Link

IMHO NF NY needs to bring back all the "tacky" tourist stuff if it want to thrive again

[C.]

Originally Posted by Nite

Knowing how these deals are worked out, i would guess NF NY is making more tax revenue from these 110 acre tract than the if they had gone with the outlet mall.
See explanation video below starting at 2:36

• Video Link

That's a great video! Thanks for posting.

[MolsonExport]

Absolutely great video. I spotted at least one shot of London (Ontario).