The Wintergarden was a pleasant idea, a big, energy-eating greenhouse dropped smack dab in the middle of what used to be the most famous street in Niagara Falls. It provided a respite of warm greenery in the winter-choked city and it cost $1 million a year to heat.
It generated no revenue. The geniuses who put it there never thought about that. From the day it opened with much pomp and circumstance, it was a money loser for the city. It was, in fact, built to be a money loser.
Worse than that, though, it blocked the way from the city's convention center, which is now the Seneca-Niagara Casino, to the falls. Unless one wanted to go through the Wintergarden, one was forced to walk half a block around it.
Next to this pretty white elephant of a loss leader, our city "planners" erected what has to be the most hideous shopping mall ever built outside the former Soviet Union. Great garish panels of some brightly colored '70s-era construction material, one of the original big boxes. Except that instead of being located out in the country someplace, the best minds Niagara Falls had to offer decided the perfect spot for this monument to bad taste and tackiness would, again, be directly in the path of a poor tourist trying to find his way to the falls.
It is no surprise today that both of these tragic mistakes lie vacant and long unused, crumbling before our very eyes, even though they were built -- at considerable expense to the taxpayer -- barely three decades ago. And, as if the story is in need of a punchline, both the vacant greenhouse and the vacant mall are adjacent to a hideous parking ramp that is so little used a dead body could be hidden there and not found for weeks.
That's no exaggeration, of course. A while back, the body of murder victim John Montstream moldered in there for nearly a month before some homeless person who used the ramp as a bathroom couldn't stand the smell anymore and reported it.
That's the problem in Niagara Falls. Not only do residents have to deal with the problems created by today's politicians, they are forced daily to look at the idiotic decisions made by the imbeciles who ran the place a generation ago.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 1 2008 |