Trains and boats and bloodsucking Albany leeches

This fine-looking lad, actually a Mayor Paul Dyster boyhood look-alike, is fascinated with his Lionel Train set. It cost his parents $20. Despite Dyster’s fascination with trains and the federal and state money to help us build it, what everybody is overlooking is the train station will cost locals millions for something very few will use.

Back in 1885, when renowned American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted began work here in Niagara Falls on what would become the nation's first state park, his first order of business was to buy out the bloodsucking leeches who had despoiled the natural wonder with factories, amusement parks and other barricades to the public's enjoyment of the spectacular cataracts.

Little did he know that, in less than a century, his vision would be sullied by dysfunctional bureaucrats and career politicians in Albany who see it as nothing more than an opportunity to line their own pockets and those of their corporate masters.

This season alone, state coffers were enriched to the tune of more than $6.1 million for parking and other fees at the Niagara Reservation, and that doesn't even take into account the millions that was raked in by Delaware North, the Maid of the Mist Corp., and other concessionaires that have benefited for decades from exclusive sweetheart contracts the parties are loath to discuss in public.

Undoubtedly, Olmsted would see the state parks officials and private entrepreneurs who have insinuated their way to the public trough as the hardy descendants of the various unscrupulous interests he sought, in vain perhaps, to drive away.

The Albany scoundrels suck so much capital out of the region that it is little wonder our roads and other infrastructure are on life support and the entire economy is on its way to the funeral parlor.

Stefano Magaddino himself never had it so good.

Even people who grew up and have family here are moving away in droves, and tourists are willing to endure the interminable customs inspections and the Canadian dollar at par just to get across the river.

Meanwhile, Niagara County's other state parks -- DeVeaux Woods, Devil's Hole, Earl W. Brydges, ArtPark, Fort Niagara, Four-mile Creek, Golden Hill, Joseph Davis, Reservoir, Whirlpool and Wilson-Tuscarora -- receive scant attention from the state.

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In the Maid of the Mist case, FOIL requests for the tour boat pact made by the Niagara Falls Reporter and other media outlets were always rebuffed. It wasn't until Reporter publisher Frank Parlato obtained copies of both the New York and Ontario contracts with the Maid of the Mist that the gory details first became public.

In New York, readers were astounded to learn that the complex mathematical formula contained in the contract actually resulted in the tour boat company being paid by the state, while those on the Ontario side of the river were appalled by the paltry returns they were seeing.

That led to the Ontario Parliament rescinding its contract, and demanding it be put out for public bidding. It also resulted in the Ontario government getting $300 million more thanks to that process.

New York state, however, has so far failed to follow suit and the Maid of the Mist Corp. may not lose the iron grip it has had on the region's premier tourist attraction. Now Glynn has hired lobbyists to purchase the Governor and other Albany representatives. We will be watching to see if the people of New York get the same good deal as Ontario has.

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As a boy, young Paul Dyster was fascinated with trains. "He used to come in every week with a roll, two rolls of film to be developed," said a former employee of a drugstore near Dyster's boyhood home. "He'd go down by the old train station, the railyards, and take pictures of the locomotives, the men working on them. He must have taken a thousand pictures."

But no one could have predicted how Dyster's youthful fascination with a mode of transportation that was virtually obsolete even then would blossom into what it has become today: a full-blown, multimillion-dollar obsession with moving passenger-train service from one lonely, obscure city location to another, complete with an interpretive center dedicated to a Niagara Falls history that no one is sure ever even happened.

The plan, originally formulated by Tom DeSantis -- the longtime city planner and Dyster's old secondary school chum -- calls for the city's Amtrak passenger terminal to be moved across town, from its current North End location on Lockport Road near Hyde Park Boulevard to the old Customs House on Whirlpool Street, also in the North End.

Only a microscopic percentage of tourists visiting Niagara Falls arrive by train, though Dyster has argued that if the station were nicer more people would come. The likelihood of that seems remote, since the train from New York City takes nine or 10 hours to get here and costs more than the 45-minute flight.

Why would you move the train station anywhere in the North End? It's miles from anything that a visitor might want to see, and it's the most dangerous neighborhood in the city. Costs for the train project run from the $45 million needed to restore and open the train station itself to more than $100 million, should Amtrak and CSX buy into the plan and construct rail yards and other infrastructure needed to actually move trains.