Its rococo charm has been a signature feature of the city landscape for a century. At one time it was an anchor on a busy urban arterial, at another time it was a lone sentinel muted by the din of wrecking balls and dump trucks but it was always a witness to commercial, demographic, and regulatory caprices in Niagara Falls, NY. In very few other places in the world, the term “Urban Renewal” is not as strong a curse word as it is in this neighborhood. More than half a century later, the economic refugees of a certain age will use it in every possible shape of disdain, derision, and disgust. Numerous works of scholarship exist on this urban planning aspect and the addition here is not one of nostalgia but rather a subjective celebration of its resulting Modernist quilt blanketing re-purposed railroad tracks and canal beds. Afterall, the address itself is not a national memory like 7 World Trade Center, Pennsylvania Station, or the Larkin Soap Building. It is however a figurative fulcrum that the nation’s progressive experiment of fair housing, urban design, and public investment were sharply pulled up, through, and down. Other buildings may have a better pedigree, or been the site of former singular glory, but from its windows, a diorama of the decisions of the day still develops today. Explore unexpected consequences of the fight against blight in the following sections.
