Tower Hotel (Niagara Falls)
The Tower Hotel, opened in 1962, is located in the Fallsview district of Niagara Falls, Ontario and was the first of the contemporary observation towers built near the brink of the Falls. It features an indoor observation deck, restaurant, and hotel. The tower is tall above street level and above the falls. The tower assumed its present name in 2010 as a result of its most recent renovation; as Minolta was the longest-tenured sponsor of the building, tourists and locals may still call it the Minolta Tower.
History
Previous towers
For more than 100 years, there had been various smaller towers built throughout the area with most of them being wooden structures. Two notable towers were the wood construction tower located at the top of Drummond Hill on Lundy's Lane behind the historic Drummond Inn, and Street's Pagoda on Cedar Island.- Drummond Hill Tower was built for visitors to have an aerial view of the War of 1812 Battle of Lundy's Lane battle field and the Drummond Hill Cemetery where many British and American soldiers killed during the battle are buried.
- Street's Pagoda was named for an early area settler, Thomas "T.C." Street, who had ownership of Cedar Island, located between the Horseshoe Falls and Dufferin Islands. This tower was dismantled in 1887, and Cedar Island was eventually made part of the mainland with the construction of the Rankine Generating Station upriver by 1910.
Construction
The tower opened for business on July 1, 1962.
Changing skyline
When the tower and surrounding area was first designed prior to groundbreaking on March 15, 1961, it was to be the centrepiece of a proposed hotel/convention centre. Due to finances, the accompanying hotel buildings were not built, and it would be over forty years before hotels began to rise adjacent to the tower.During the 1970s and 1980s, the surrounding land was occupied by an aquarium to the north, and the Waltzing Waters attraction to the south. The Waltzing Waters site was moved across the street in 1995 to allow for site planning of the current Marriott hotel. The Waltzing Waters, a light and water show synchronized to music, disappeared altogether by 2000. The aquarium was dismantled in 1996 to allow for further site expansion.
The 2000s boom in large hotel construction on Fallsview Boulevard, such as the Fallsview Hotel, Hilton Hotel, and Embassy Suites by Hilton, as well as the nearby Oakes Hotel and Radisson, has diminished the Tower Hotel's prominence as a landmark. All of these hotels strive to give their guests as good a view of the Falls as possible by taking advantage of their position of the height on land above the falls, once dominated solely by the Tower Hotel. In contrast, the airspace around the Skylon Tower remains fairly open, thanks to its position further down the Niagara River away from the American Falls and Horseshoe Falls.