All things Niagara Falls tourism…
From the Buffalo News:
Norma K. Fulp spends her summer afternoons armed with maps and information as she waits for tourists by the rapids of the upper Niagara River.
The part-time nurse and Niagara Falls resident is a volunteer for the Niagara Greeters “Info On the Go” program.
The program, in its fifth year, will dispatch dozens of volunteers like Fulp starting this weekend to streets outside Niagara Falls State Park to help tourists find their way.
From the Niagara Falls Review:
Who says travellers are sticking close to home this summer?
Nearly half of America’s 50 states were represented in the Niagara Parks Commission’s parking lot at Table Rock Sunday afternoon. Throngs of people strolled along the walkway adjacent to the falls, lazed in the park, dined in cafes in the park and on Clifton Hill, speaking in languages that would be a United Nations’ translator’s dream: Japanese, Chinese, South Asian, French, Spanish, German, Italian and ones of Eastern European origin. British and Australian accents were also heard.
But tourism operators like Tim Parker, general manager of Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, Ripley’s Moving Theatre and the Louis Toussauds Wax Works said the attractions are down about 10 per cent over a wet Memorial Day weekend last year.
From the Washington Post:
“This book documents an obsession,” writes Ginger Strand in her entertaining study of the exploitation of Niagara Falls, both town and waterfall. Niagara’s history, she claims, is fraught with “falsification, prevarication and omission.” In Inventing Niagara, she sets out on a quest to cut through the cultural accretions of centuries and find the fundamental truth about Niagara.
At its most basic, Niagara Falls is a big, green waterfall that straddles the border between the United States and Canada on the strait that links Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. But over time, Niagara has also become a place of kitschy tourism, daredevil stunts, gambling and large-scale industrial development which all too quickly turned into environmental disaster. The waterfall itself has been propped up and rejiggered by feats of engineering in an attempt to prevent it from crumbling under the force of its own water and to maintain its scenic impact despite the diversion of as much as three-quarters of its water to produce electricity.
From the Buffalo News:
The Seneca Nation sees Niagara Falls’ glass as half full. We see unrealized potential, where some see potholes.
Some point at the skyline across the river and bemoan the leadership and hard-working people on this side who get up every day and make Niagara Falls better.
From the Niagara Falls Review:
Wherever you go in Niagara Falls, people who work in tourism are nervous right now. Industry operators are walking on eggshells. Workers are wondering if the summer season will be strong enough to give them the hours they need to make ends meet.
The American economy is in a tailspin. Gas is $1.25 a litre. Niagara’s casinos – once the golden goose of tourism employment – froze wages this year and offered full-time employees “voluntary resignation packages.”
Enter Greg Sorbara.
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