The Fall of Niagara Falls

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"Precisely because the community was so excited by the promise of an enormous amount of development over a decade ago, I think today many people in our community feel let down by their inability to build something," said the city's mayor, Paul Dyster. Once hailed as a savior, Milstein is now maligned as a slumlord by many in Niagara Falls. "He's a big boa constrictor," said David Crapnell, a Presbyterian minister and community activist, who accuses the developer of "bad faith." To the pastor, the past decade of dithering and decay offers a parable of the risks any city takes when it wraps up its redevelopment hopes with a rich investor.

Milstein declined multiple requests for comment. Anthony Bergamo, a longtime Milstein lieutenant who is the chief executive of the Niagara Falls venture, places the blame on a dysfunctional city government. As the master redeveloper, Bergamo said, Milstein's role is to assemble and market the site to potential investment partners, such as hotel chains. "We have met with over 150 developers," he said, "all of whom declined to do business in Niagara Falls."

In truth, the failure can't be attributed to any single entity. It's the product of a machine that has for decades been running on unfulfilled promises, from the public and private sector alike, just whirring on in an endless cycle of dashed hope and failed deliverance.

Niagara Falls used to inspire people to dream. In the 19th century an investor named William T. Love proposed to build a utopian metropolis called Model City there, along the banks of the canal he was digging. His city was never built, and Love Canal went on to become a notorious toxic waste site. "Because it was a place that always drew visionaries and big thinkers, it has always showed the way that the nation is going," said Strand. If economic stagnation and distrust of government are the defining features of this American moment, Niagara Falls charted the way to the bottom.

WHITE ELEPHANT

People in Niagara Falls are so angry, they have not reelected a mayor in 20 years. Things are so depressed that one of Niagara Falls' major crime problems is an "epidemic" of pointless arson, the former fire chief told a local newspaper. In late October, fury led many households in this traditionally Democratic town to put up yard signs that read "I'm mad as hell too, Carl," advertising support for New York's Tea Party-backed gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. Although Paladino was trounced by Andrew Cuomo on Election Day, he took more than 60 percent of the vote in Niagara County, and the town threw out both of its incumbent Democratic state legislators.

Niagara's original sin, old timers say, was buying into a particular ideal of progress. A couple of generations ago, when the Canadians started building up their tourism sector, the Americans just laughed. They weren't going to work as bellhops, not when there were plenty of safe union jobs at the state's hydroelectric plant or in the heavy industries it powered. Then, after the manufacturers and chemical companies departed, leaving behind husked factories and brownfields, a second and perhaps more corrosive delusion set in—call it the fantasy of the silver bullet.

The city fathers, in their desperation, embraced a succession of capital-intensive cure-alls. In the 1970s they pinned their hopes on the convention center, soon to become a white elephant, while in the 1980s the Ghermezian brothers, who built the Mall of America outside Minneapolis, proposed to erect a massive shopping complex called Fantasyland right in the center of town. That idea collapsed in the face of local opposition. All the while, Niagara Falls kept getting poorer.

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