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For almost 19 years, David Donato overcame bad planning, an absentee landlord and decaying surroundings to run a successful business.
And for the last eight months, he survived in a Rainbow Centre Factory Outlet that conspicuously lacked outlets.
Donato's struggle comes to an end Thursday, May 31, along with his 38-year history running bars and restaurants in Niagara Falls, when he closes the Rainbow Room in the Off-Track Betting parlor on the mall's second floor.
After the mall's last few retail outlets closed at the end of September, the once-steady flow of tourists and shoppers had slowed to a trickle of horseplayers, city employees and TeleTech workers. Donato's revenues fell to less than half what they were in the mall's brief heyday. But with his wife and three daughters doing most of the cooking, pouring and serving, he plugged on.
In March, TeleTech announced impending massive layoffs, which went into effect Friday. Donato, a mortgage banker by day, knows a bad investment when he sees one. Without the lunch and after-work patrons coming over from next door, he couldn't subsist selling the occasional beer or snack to OTB patrons, who generally come to play the horses, not for a meal.
"We were extremely emotional," he said. "When TeleTech made the decision to pull out, my wife and I struggled with this for almost two months."
The attachment was more than monetary. Donato's grandmother ran Donato's Tavern on Memorial Parkway, just off East Falls Street. He and his late father, Cosmo, bought the Hitching Post on Hyde Park Boulevard in 1963.
When the Rainbow Centre opened on July 4, 1982, Donato debuted the Hitching Post II, the mall's only sit-down restaurant. Between the Hitching Post II and the OTB facility (which opened on Kentucky Derby Day, 1993) he and his wife, Carol, along with daughters Michelle, Jeanine and Dana, put in thousands of hours cooking, pouring and serving.
Donato still smiles when recalling the hoopla surrounding the Rainbow Centre's birth.
"It was exciting--they spent a fortune on the grand opening and fireworks," Donato said. "There was a lot of optimism for what to expect. Business was tremendous."
Even after the initial enthusiasm faded, things stayed strong for Donato until the mid-1990s, when the bottom fell out of the Canadian dollar and the retail exodus from the mall intensified.
The mall's owner and landlord, David Cordish, did nothing to prevent the free fall. The now-empty facility reeks of early-'80s tackiness, with wildy discordant colors swirling above cracked floors and an entirely excessive array of mirrors.
But Cordish's disdainful neglect extended far beyond aesthetics and routine maintenance.
"They always felt they were negotiating from a position of strength," Donato said of Cordish's Baltimore-based decision-makers. "When you've got a half-empty mall, you've got to say, 'What can I do to keep you?'"
Donato's tenant-landlord relationship with Cordish ended in 1995, when he sold the Hitching Post II and signed a lease with OTB. He'll continue running the concession at the OTB facility in Amherst.
Niagara Falls' betting parlor seems doomed as well. OTB officials have been scouting other locations in the city and will likely leave the mall entirely vacant by the end of the year, less than 20 years after its opening fanfare.
When the rest of the retail outlets closed in September, Cordish hung signs throughout the building that read: "Rainbow Centre Factory Outlet is closing its doors Sept. 30th to begin renovations to convert to a family entertainment complex."
Eight months later, there's not a hint of renovation anywhere in the mall's echoing hallways. Unlit neon lettering still spells out the names of deceased businesses, like "Honeymoon Capital Souvenirs" and "CN News and Currency Exchange."
And on May 31, the Donatos, the mall's first and last family, will leave for the final time.