Q & A
Paul Dyster
New leadership for Niagara Falls
By Elizabeth Licata
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Paul Dyster
Photo by kc kratt. |
Aside from his stint as a city councilperson from 1999–2003, Paul Dyster, the new mayor of Niagara Falls, is very far from being a career politician. He’s spent most of his career in the academic and beer-making worlds—until recently, when he became involved in a host of volunteer planning projects for his hometown of Niagara Falls. Now that he’s mayor, some of that planning is on its way to reality.
I think a lot of people come to Niagara Falls, U.S., look around, and say “What happened here?” What’s your answer to that question?
An awful lot has happened here. One of the ironies is that a place that has had such a rich history—that has been so important—has ended up being a backwater. I date it to sometime in the early seventies, particularly to one incident that I’ve mentioned before. I was in my Bishop Duffy High School gym class, in the locker room, and we used to read the Niagara Falls, Ontario, paper for the hockey scores. We got bored with the scores and turned to the news; the headline said “Niagara Falls, Ontario, Declares Tourism Its Leading Industry.” There was a howl that went up in the locker room: “Tourism a leading industry? Do they think we want to be bellhops or busboys?” We all assumed we’d be able to work in the chemical and steel plants, and we’d be retiring after twenty years with 50k pensions while people over the border would still be working for tips. That was still the vision of the future in 1970. And of course, those jobs left town, and, just like the Bruce Springsteen song [says], they’re never coming back.
Whatever you may think of Niagara Falls, Ontario, they realized the direction they had to go a good twenty-five years before we did. That’s a big head start. You don’t have to look very far to see what happened. When I was on the Niagara Falls City Council in 2000, I still had a hard time convincing some people that the old era of heavy industry dominance was over.
What are the main engines of economic development that you see revitalizing Niagara Falls? Could you name, say, three?
When I was first inaugurated as a city councilman, I said that the stool of economic revitalization has three legs: nature, history, and culture, and I guess I still believe that. Obviously, the big economic driver that we have here is this symbol of global significance. Niagara Falls is not just a tourism destination; it is a symbol to the world in the same way that the pyramids are a symbol of ancient civilizations. The problem we have here is that the symbol is so potent, the reality can never live up to it. When people arrive here, they don’t find the beautiful spectacle of the nineteenth-century paintings. To my thinking, because Niagara Falls is so crowded in by civilization, it becomes all the more precious. And the Niagara River gorge is the underachiever in all this. The opportunity that preservationists and progressive developers see is that we must preserve this strand of green and protect it from further encroachment, even restore natural features that have been undermined.
How do you do that when everyone wants to build near the Falls and the gorge? It was Olmsted’s dilemma and it is our dilemma now. As I remind people from other state agencies, we know things have gone wrong here. We’re not stupid, but we are poor. There is crushing poverty here. So those of us who are citizen activists threw ourselves into the planning process, as there was no money to do anything else. During the Rethinking Niagara planning process, we worked with Bob Shibley and David Cromby and people from Buffalo, and we’ve put together a group of plans including a waterfront plan and a master plan for the city of Niagara Falls. And keeping in mind that anything we do for the tourists, we also enjoy.
What about the possible removal of the Robert Moses Parkway?
I first became involved with those plans in 1999 with the Niagara Waterfront Revitalization Taskforce. The Niagara Heritage Partnership was already there, and there was another city task force. Transportation planners will tell you that based on the traffic count there is no transportation justification for having the Parkway there. The city of Niagara Falls now proposes that a portion of the Robert Moses, immediately downstream from the Falls and running past the Whirlpool Bridge, be removed. It will be a monumental undertaking but I think the payoff will be monumental.
And then you have to be certain that the highway will not be replaced by something worse. It’s not about removing the highway, per se; it’s about restoring, preserving, and enlarging the park. It involves restoring historic sites, replacing native vegetation. The gorge is not the home of rare species, but the growth habit of the plants is utterly unique, with ancient trees. That environment needs to be buffered. There is no buffer now; you have a highway running along the top of it, which represents an unacceptable threat to environmentalists. We have to find another strategy for allowing people to appreciate the natural wonder without having them driving through it in a car, which isn’t appropriate for such an environmentally sensitive setting.
What other tourism development projects are in the works?
A lot of the projects I’m working on, including the Niagara Experience Center, involve highlighting all our attractions, not just the Falls, but enough so that people can plan multi-day stays. The Underground Railroad is of particular interest to us. The Whirlpool Bridge is the site of the suspension bridge that Harriet Tubman used to lead enslaved African-Americans to freedom. There is also a Civil War-era customs building there that is now on the 2007 “Seven to Save” list. We’re working out an arrangement with New York State Parks, where they will share responsibility for development and interpretation of this building. This is also the site where we will build a new intermodal transportation facility—otherwise known as a train station. Our current train station is miles away. Niagara Falls has an opportunity to lead the way in creating a regional ground transportation system, using this historic site on the edge of the Niagara gorge, on a train line between New York City and Toronto. It’s such an obvious project. I’m very encouraged that Sam Hoyt, who is a kindred spirit on a number of issues, has advanced the cause of train travel between Niagara Falls and Buffalo.
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The Seneca Niagara Casino stands tall amidst
a downtown that is largely a wasteland. Photos by Elizabeth Licata. |
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We’ll see the improvements that have been made possible by the Niagara Greenway Project. We now have dedicated funding that will provide $9 million each year from lake to lake for fifty years. I think now there is a greater willingness to take those who really care about the Falls seriously: environmentalists, historians, urban planners. All too often in the past, these people have been treated as pariahs, but it seems that has changed at the state level. Niagara Falls USA and Niagara Redevelopment were brought here by the Pataki administration as agents of change and now there is new energy emanating from the governor’s office.
As far as immediate changes go, visitors to Niagara Falls are going to see improvements in maintenance of Goat Island and the trail system. Manmade items placed on Goat Island and close to the gorge are going to have to rise to a certain standard. Anything shabby will be replaced or revamped.
The other issue for us in the city is, what do we do on the other side of the park? We have to see that natural environment as the goose that’s capable of laying gold eggs forever, as long as we don’t compromise it. We have to keep glitz where glitz is appropriate and green where green is appropriate.
We had two planning groups, students from UB and students from Kent State’s urban planning program, here recently, and one of the students said, “The amazing thing here is that I can walk out my door and in twenty minutes I can be at the bottom of the gorge, looking at a 1,500-year-old spruce, watching salmon jump in the river, completely surrounded by this great icon of nature, but if I go in another direction, in ten minutes I can be in an urban environment, on a walkable Main Street, near a bookstore, dry cleaner, and florist. How many places are there where you can do that?”
What about the agencies that are supposed to be developing large projects here? There’s Niagara Falls Redevelopment, which owns a lot of property; there’s Cordish, which owns the now-vacant Rainbow Mall. There’s Niagara USA, the state agency.
That’s part of the environment here, and you have to go back to the beginning. This was a city that took a lot of time to recognize that heavy industry was no longer a viable economic mainstay. One thing we did do was knock down our traditional downtown in an ill-advised scheme of urban renewal where half of the infrastructure to replace it never got built, and what did get built has not been successful, or radical changes of use were needed to make them successful. So our convention center is now a casino, the Falls Street Faire shopping mall is now a conference center, one major parking garage has already been demolished, and the Rainbow Mall, right by the Falls, is crumbling and empty.
What these situations have in common is that the city, having knocked down historic buildings that could have been rehabbed, can’t take advantage of New Urbanism. So now we have to figure out how to revitalize our downtown in the absence of a traditional streetscape. We knocked down our Elmwood Avenue, so it’s not a question of filling storefronts.
So you’re looking for big developers that promise big things. There’s going to be a disproportionate tendency to believe their promises. You’re desperate and at a disadvantage in negotiating with them, using city attorneys and officials who are out of their league in dealing with these developers. You end up with lopsided agreements, with most of the benefits going to the developers.
This is not just landing on my desk. There is a succession of leaders of Niagara Falls, at least the last three, who have had to deal with a development mess located in exactly the portions of the city where development should succeed, where six to eight million people are showing up every year. So you have vacant buildings, inappropriate uses, and under-developed sites. The city was weak when it negotiated these arrangements, and has little recourse to address the lack of progress.
It’s a difficult situation. Legally, these agreements are very difficult to sweep aside. Niagara Falls Redevelopment Corporation is backed by Howard Millstein, and no one can argue with his ability to do major development projects. With Cordish, again, look at what they did in Baltimore; surely they could succeed here.
What I’ve heard from all of them is that the political leadership here has made it impossible for them to do what they’re in the business to do: make money. We don’t expect them to be philanthropists.
That’s what developers always say.
But I know the other side of it. Some of the people sitting on the city’s side of the table had other agendas than the best interests of the city.
I’d like to create a window of opportunity for these developers for some good things to happen before I write them off. When you have people with whom you have existing agreements, then you’re three or four steps ahead when they decide to move. Cooperation is best, when it’s possible. But you have to also let them know that we’re not going to wait forever, that the situation that existed in the past is not acceptable. That’s what I like about Elliot Spitzer; he seems to operate on a very short fuse, and if you’re mayor of Niagara Falls, that’s the kind of ally you need.
Will you be able to improve Niagara Falls’s cut of the casino revenues?
I was on the city council when the compact was signed, and I can tell you how little involvement the city had in that process. If the compact had been negotiated in the framework of the Indian Regulatory Gaming Act rather than the Settlement Act, the municipality’s interests would have been a priority. The host community is supposed to benefit from the casino being there. For me as mayor, whatever our cut is—whether it’s paid directly to us, or from the state’s investment, or from Seneca Gaming’s investment—if it’s not enough to support a city that can be successful alongside the casino, then something’s wrong with the arrangement. For example, the casino is going to build another large hotel and some other infrastructure, and that impacts our public safety costs, but there’s no provision in the compact to cover that additional expense.
Recently, we’ve heard of some brownfield development options where many of the Buffalo Avenue chemical factories used to be.
[At this point, Thomas De Santis, senior planner for the city, joins the interview.]
De Santis: We are confronted with the reality that we have to clean things up, and we have to know how serious that is. And we have to know the value of the proposed use to make clean-up economically feasible. There used to be 1,000 acres of manufacturing along that corridor, but today there are about 300 acres of manufacturing.
Dyster: There’s no lot on the island of Manhattan that could be too contaminated to make it not worthwhile to clean it up. And then you have something like the HealthNow site, where the clean-up costs are $20 million of a $120 million project. That makes sense. For us, along Buffalo Avenue, we may be facing daunting costs. So we need to find uses that justify that.
De Santis: And you can’t do it on a piecemeal basis. People have to be sure that others will be developing alongside them.
And the tape ran out. We had been talking about Niagara Falls for almost two hours, and I am sure we could have easily spent two hours more. But I left Dyster’s office feeling inspired by his thoughtful idealism. New hope for the Falls? Perhaps, if inspiration and idealism can lead to action.
Elizabeth Licata is editor of Buffalo Spree.
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