Plans are in place to revitalize the Falls — it’s time for the hard work to start
'The Big Moves' in Niagara County: Will words turn to actions?
By Bill Michelmore
- NEWS NIAGARA BUREAU
Updated: 06/25/08 12:31 PM
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- “This town desperately needs the Niagara Experience Center,” says James V. Glynn, chairman of the board of the Maid of the Mist Corp.
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NIAGARA FALLS — The city calls them “The Big Moves,” a targeted program of improvements and investments to revitalize the city.
Ten years ago, Niagara Falls looked at the big picture and recognized three big moves. Four years ago, the canvas became more complex and the city focused on seven big moves.
They’ve been on the books ever since, but progress has been slow.
In 1998, the three moves that were seen as critical to the city’s renewal were jump-starting Niagara Falls International Airport, removing the Robert Moses Parkway and building a casino.
“That was the consensus,” Senior City Planner Thomas J. DeSantis said last week. “Then, and now.”
In 2004, Niagara Falls received a Strategic Master Plan that would guide downtown revitalization over the next several decades.
In general, the plan would give the city new life by opening up the waterfront, rebuilding blighted neighborhoods and creating a cultural district.
The 126-page report prepared by Urban Strategies, a Toronto-based international design firm, is replete with words such as vision, strategies and priority initiatives. But they are just words without two crucial ingredients Niagara Falls has lacked for decades: leadership and money.
The leadership gap has been filled, many people believe, by Mayor Paul A. Dyster, an academic and businessman who took office in January. And more money is flowing into the Falls these days in the form of growing casino slots revenue, proceeds from the relicensing of the Niagara Power Project and a recent federal decision to make the city a national heritage area.
“We have leadership and we have the resources,” DeSantis said. “The key ingredients may just be lining up for the perfect storm.”
Patience, persistence and hard work also will need to be part of the recipe of redevelopment, city leaders say.
“I think Dyster can provide leadership,” said James V. Glynn, chairman of the board of the Maid of the Mist Corp. “There’s a good feeling in the community that he can make things happen.”
Some progress made
In his first three months in office, Dyster traveled across New York State seeking to build personal relationships with top state leaders and garnering support to make Niagara Falls a key player in the revitalization of Upstate New York.
Niagara Falls historian Paul Gromosiak has seen many administrations in his six decades in the city and believes Dyster is “the best mayor in my lifetime.”
“He’s the right man at the right time,” Gromosiak said. “We need a mayor who can communicate with Albany and Washington. I can’t think of anyone more qualified to build a better future for Niagara Falls.”
And the money, finally, is begining to filter through, with a commitment of more than $12 million a year in revenue sharing from the Seneca Niagara Casino, more than $500,000 annually from the Power Project relicensing, and up to $1 million a year for the heritage designation.
The city already is on the road to recovery, though the ride has been bumpy.
A decade removed from one strategic plan, DeSantis gives that three-fold vision a score of 1z out of three.
On New Year’s Eve 2002, the Seneca Niagara Casino opened downtown. He scores one for that.
In March of 2007, year-round passenger service between Niagara Falls and Myrtle Beach, N. C., began, with winter service to Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., starting the following December. Just last month, shovels went in the ground to begin construction of a new $20 million passenger terminal at the Niagara Falls airport.
At this point, DeSantis gives that a score of one-half. The second full point will come when the airport terminal is completed next summer.
“In 10 years that’s how far we’ve come,” he said. “One and a half out of three isn’t bad. Arguably, it will two out of three before long.”
Achieving a score of three out of three — the third being the removal of part of the Robert Moses Parkway — will be tougher, DeSantis added.
“Three years ago, we thought we had movement on the parkway,” he said, “but for whatever reason, we lost the momentum.”
At that time, the city, State Parks, USA Niagara and the state Department of Transportation agreed to seriously study removal of the parkway, or at least part of it. State Parks was chosen as the lead agency and the city committed $800,000 as its share toward a scoping study.
The study never began.
“Much, if not all of that big move, is contingent on State Parks,” DeSantis said.
Topping the list of the seven newer big moves is reconnecting the city to its waterfront, which means removing a large chunk of the Robert Moses Parkway.
Except for a two-mile area in Niagara Falls State Park, the city of Niagara Falls is completely cut off from its waterfront, the Niagara River and the gorge by the Robert Moses Parkway.
“It occupies extremely valuable riverfront lands not justifiable from a transportation perspective and represents a significant barrier to safe, easy access to the riverfront corridor,” Urban Strategies reported.
The parkway has also prevented investment and development along the city’s most valuable asset — the waterfront, the report states.
The city wants to remove a two-mile section of the parkway from Main Street to Findlay Drive, just south of Whirlpool State Park. Along that riverfront stretch, the parkway would become Whirlpool Street and accommodate “all forms of movement,” including people, vehicles, cyclists and roller-bladers.
About the same time, USA Niagara, the state’s development arm in Niagara Falls, plans to remove a 1,000-foot section of the parkway and a 20-foot-high overpass at John B. Daly Boulevard, a $12 million project that will provide greater access to the Upper Niagara River.
The partial removals fall way short of what has been called for by groups such as Niagara Heritage Partnership, which wants a six-mile section of the four-lane parkway removed from downtown Niagara Falls to Route 104 in Lewiston, but it will make the escarpment, with its spectacular view of the Niagara Gorge and the lower river, more accessible.
Many cities in North America, including San Francisco, Toronto, Rochester, New York and Boston, Urban Strategies noted, are currently dismantling and reconfiguring expressways that were built in the 1960s and 1970s and reconnecting their waterfronts to downtown areas.
“The redesign of the Robert Moses Parkway is a ‘Big Move’ for the city,” the urban planners said. “It will unlock the potential of land values and encourage waterfront development and reinvestment, which have been held back for a long time.”
Cultural thinking
Second on the list of the newer big moves is creating a cultural district north of Niagara Street, between Whirlpool Street and the Niagara River.
Here again, the state’s cooperation in knocking down part of the Robert Moses Parkway becomes a crucial factor.
“The cultural district only becomes a cultural district if that section of the parkway is removed,” DeSantis said. “This project is also contingent on state parks.”
The proposed cultural district is currently home to the Aquarium of Niagara and the Niagara Gorge Discovery Center, and the 2004 master plan lists it as an ideal location for the proposed Niagara Experience Center.
Glynn and Gromosiak said the interactive museum project would go better on the property currently occupied by One Niagara, the square, glass structure near the Rainbow Bridge that used to be the Occidental Chemical office building.
“Developing the Niagara Experience Center near the Aquarium would have been a very bad idea,” Gromosiak said . “It needs to be closer to the state park so people can easily walk to it and it should be such an impressive building that it will become a destination in itself.”
Glynn would buy a ticket to that.
“This town desperately needs the Niagara Experience Center,” the Maid of the Mist executive said.
Other moves
One of the big moves targets an area east of the casino and Daly Boulevard, more than 100 acres of abandoned and boarded- up property that used to form the heart of the old East Side neighborhood, an ethnic melting pot that flourished in the early 1900s.
The master plan is not specific on what is to be done with the land, but “whatever happens in that area will be big,” DeSantis said.
“As the downtown core gets filled up, new development will move east,” he said.
New development on the long-blighted Main Street is also one of the big moves. A $45 million public safety building which started going late last year and is scheduled to be completed by next spring, is the beginning of new development in the once bustling area, planners hope.
A key to the Main Street revival is renovating the 144-year-old former U. S. Customs House near the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge to house a new Amtrak train station, which will be relocated from Lockport Road in the industrial north end.
Much of the funding is in place and work is already under way on this big move, which incorporates preserving the heritage of the core city.
DeSantis has been a city planner for 15 years and survived several administrations and failed projects. But the big moves get his adrenalin going all over again.
“If we don’t do the big moves, we don’t see a major impact at the end of the day,” he said. “And after all these years, we’re looking for major impact.”
After several unproductive years since Niagara Falls began thinking about rebuilding the downtown core, the city is now vigorously refocused on the big moves.
“Most will require new and innovative partnerships between the municipality, community organizations, other levels of government and the business sector,” the Urban Strategies team noted.
“All,” the report concludes, “will require leadership.”
Most business people, city officials, historians and voters agree Niagara Falls now has the leadership, but the Dyster administration still faces long-standing obstacles.
“Two big problems stand in the way — Cordish and NFR,” Glynn said.
He was referring to David Cordish, who owns the nearly-empty Rainbow Centre mall downtown and has not lived up to repeated promises to redevelop it, and Niagara Falls Redevelopment, a private company that has yet to build more than a single foundation on any of the downtown properties it has been acquiring in a 142-acre tract during the last decade.
“Unless we can get those properties developed,” Glynn added, “the city is back to where it was.”
