Jerry Genova, the chairman of the Niagara Falls Tourism Advisory Board, told the Niagara Falls Reporter the board will be considering recommending the closure of all three parking lots at the Niagara Falls State Park. 

“It is clear these parking lots serve to lure people into the state park without setting foot in the city,” Mr. Genova said.
While the Tourism Advisory Board makes recommendations to the city and not the state, and are not binding, his comment is worthy of public debate.

Knowing a few facts might be helpful when discussing the issue:

The parking lots in the Niagara Falls State Park make around $1.6 million for Albany each year. Nothing is shared with the city.

Prior to 1985, tourists parked in the city and walked to the Niagara Falls State Park, visiting shops and restaurants in the city. This was in keeping with the design plan of Frederick Law Olmsted who, with Calvert Vaux, designed the State Park calling it the “Niagara Reservation” in 1885.

New York State still advertises the Niagara Falls State Park as an Olmsted park.  The Niagara Reservation  was America ’s first state park.

Olmsted is popularly known as the first landscape architect in the USA. He designed Central Park, Yosemite, Delaware Park in Buffalo and many others. 

One-hundred years later, the state decided to cut acres of 100-year-old trees to make a paid parking lot to increase revenues for Albany. 

Olmsted’s original plan, however, forbid parking areas, that were, at that time, for horse drawn carriages, writing that “at best many trees must be destroyed."
His plan called for the prohibition of restaurants and stores. 

"If it were a commercial undertaking into which the State was entering, in competition with the people of the village of Niagara, it cannot be questioned that the restaurant could be made profitable (in the park),” he wrote.

Olmsted’s plan was to unveil the true, natural surroundings and the unadorned natural wonder of Niagara Falls, itself.
Businesses, in such a setting, he wrote, would be "deplorable." Keeping the park entirely green and free of commercial enterprises was “a cardinal necessity of the success of the plan," he wrote.

In time, the state violated every one of Olmsted’s “cardinal” points of his comprehensive plan and today the park is in competition with the city. 

The business model is simple: Tourists drive along the state-owned Robert Moses Parkway into the state lot, and pay $10 for parking. Then to the Maid of the Mist: $15.50. Then the Maid of the Mist Souvenir store or other gift stores in the park. Then Cave of the Winds: $11. Then eat at one of several restaurants in the park. Then, because the park is small and has limited parking, get them out fast. Every tourist dollar is thus spent in the park alone. 

“Unlike other state parks that support local businesses, the Niagara Falls State Park developed into a business,” said Paul Grenga who operates a parking lot, restaurants and other business adjacent to the park.

If nothing else, in keeping with truth in advertising laws, New York Parks should change their advertising of the Niagara Falls State Park from “An Olmsted Park” to  “Formerly an Olmsted park.”