Developer Wants To Reverse the Flow In Tiny Niagara Falls

Originally printed in the Washington Post
Developer Wants To Reverse the Flow In Tiny Niagara Falls
Plan Would Create Old-Style Downtown
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 20, 2006; Page A03
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario — Walk 20 minutes due north of the wax museums and honeymoon motels at the tacky core of this perennial tourist stop and you will find the eight-block stretch that locals here call downtown. It looks like any other main street in a death spiral: dozens of empty storefronts, plenty of cheap rental apartments and a few hold-out businesses limping from month to month.
But if all goes as planned, these benighted blocks will soon be the scene of a nervy experiment in urban revival. The plan is to close most of the downtown, throw a tarp over the buildings and spend more than $200 million on renovations. A year or so later, the place would reopen, this time — hopefully — with marquee retailers and spiffy residences, in a setting that might look like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.
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