If he was standing on the lawn outside the long-shuttered Native American Center for the Living Arts at the corner of Rainbow Boulevard and Old Main Street in downtown Niagara Falls, Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen could toss a football through a window of The Giacomo hotel, probably with relative ease.
I’m not sure he could be as precise on a throw to the Hotel Niagara, but I wouldn’t bet against him or his arm.
The thought occurred to me as I walked back from an event at Cataract House Park last month.
I just left a group of preservation advocates who gathered to celebrate a decision by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation to designate the turtle-shaped Living Arts building as eligible for placement on the National Register of Historic Places.
As you can see by the photo I took that’s attached to this column, if you stand in the right spot, just outside the Turtle, you can get all three buildings in one frame.
The view is significant because it represents the vestiges of something important downtown Niagara Falls mostly lost to its own detriment over the course of decades.
These are highly recognizable and unique structures of historic, cultural and architectural value, the kind most places would embrace and restore and cherish.
For two of the three, the city and the state have done just that, or are currently trying.
Buffalo developer Carl Paladino completed the transformation of the former United Office Building, located at 222 First St., into the Giacomo Hotel in 2010. The Great Depression-era structure is considered by many to be an important historic landmark due to its representation of Mayan Revival, a subset of Art Deco style.
The state of New York deemed the building important enough to sell it to Paladino for $1 so he could restore it to something closer to its original luster.
The rest, as they say, is history.
It’s a similar story with the building across the street, the former Hotel Niagara, which is known as “The Grand Old Lady” of downtown Niagara Falls.
The state, through its USA Niagara Development Corp., thought enough of the 12-story hotel, built in 1924, to buy it from its former owner for $4.4 million. The state development agency later entered into an agreement with Syracuse developer Brine Wells to restore the building under what was at the time the promise of a $42-million redevelopment plan.
The project was delayed during the pandemic and is now subject to a lawsuit involving Brine Wells and another developer, the Merani Group.
Cooler heads should eventually prevail in the hotel’s case as most everyone, from Gov. Kathy Hochul on down, recognizes the building as an integral piece in the ongoing process of reimagining and reawakening downtown Niagara Falls.
“The rebirth of the Hotel Niagara is part of our continuing efforts to transform Niagara Falls, create jobs, and draw more visitors to Western New York,” Hochul said during a 2019 groundbreaking event. “Through strategic investment, we are bringing new economic activity to the city while at the same time restoring a historic landmark. This is an important day for the future of Niagara Falls.”
The talk around the future of the Turtle building isn’t the same, this despite the Turtle being, well, shaped like a turtle, making it one of the most unique examples of zoomorphic architecture in the entire United States.
It was also designed by Dennis Sun Rhodes, an Arapaho architect who envisioned the building as being reflective of the indigenous creation story which tells of how the Earth was created on the back of a sea turtle.
How anybody in a struggling tourism city like the Falls would not want to embrace a building with such a compelling story is beyond me, but here we are.
The turtle’s owner, the private firm Niagara Falls Redevelopment, has made it clear that they have not seen any “viable” plans for the building’s reuse.
The company, owned by the deep-pocketed Milstein family of real estate developers and bankers from New York City, lobbied city lawmakers in a successful bid to reject designating the building as a local landmark.
It’s my understanding placing the turtle building on the National Register would require NFR’s cooperation, which certainly seems like a long shot.
However, the matter is not without positive precedent, if you favor preservation here.
Before the state sold the United Office Building to Paladino it was owned by NFR and considered one of the main focal points of the company’s early development plans.
In 2002, NFR’s former managing partner, the late Toronto developer “Fast” Eddie Cogan, waived the company’s claim to the building so it could be transferred to the state.
At the time, Cogan told the Buffalo News he did so out of a “sense of partnership.”
“We have a marriage with the city,” Cogan told the newspaper, “and in a marriage you do what you can to help.”
That’s the sort of thinking local preservationists wish they could hear from NFR’s representatives as they continue to push for the realization of their dream, a fully reawakened turtle building next to the state park in downtown Niagara Falls.
It doesn’t seem like a likely scenario under present circumstances, but hope springs eternal when it comes to turtles, an animal with a reputation built on some pretty cool things like patience, wisdom, healing, conversation and luck.