How a single New York City family came to control 140 acres of the American side of Niagara Falls — and what nearly thirty years of waiting has cost the city
For a quarter century, the most powerful person in Niagara Falls, New York hasn’t lived in Niagara Falls. He hasn’t held office there. He hasn’t run a business there. He has, in fact, rarely been seen there. His name is Howard Milstein, and from a Park Avenue office four hundred miles away in Manhattan, he and his brother Edward control roughly 142 acres of land in the heart of one of the most famous tourist cities on earth — much of it walking distance from a natural wonder that draws more than eight million visitors a year.
Most of that land is empty. Some of it has been empty for thirty years.
In a country where downtowns are typically a patchwork of dozens or hundreds of owners, where assembling even a single city block can take a developer years of negotiation, the Niagara Falls situation is something close to unprecedented: a single private entity quietly sitting on a contiguous chunk of a recognized destination city’s tourist core, blocking, slowing, or simply outlasting nearly every public attempt to do something with it. To call it a real-estate story undersells it. It is the story of how a city loses agency over its own future.
To understand why a New York billionaire was able to buy half of downtown Niagara Falls in the first place, you have to understand how desperate the city had become.
Niagara Falls peaked in 1960 with a population of about 102,000. By 2010, that number had fallen by 51 percent — the steepest percentage drop of any city in New York State. Today the population sits at roughly 48,000, hovering precariously near the 50,000 threshold below which the city would lose its formal status and the state and federal aid that comes with it. Like its larger cousin Buffalo, Niagara Falls was hollowed out by deindustrialization in the 1970s, and then mortally wounded by a bulldozer-and-superblock urban renewal program that demolished its historic Falls Street tourist district and replaced it with concrete plazas and a covered mall that nobody loved.
By the late 1990s, the contrast across the river had become impossible to ignore. The Canadian side of Niagara Falls — Niagara Falls, Ontario — had become a glittering, neon-lit tourist machine of high-rise hotels, casinos, restaurants and attractions. The American side had vacant lots, boarded buildings, and, behind the spectacular state park along the gorge, a downtown core that resembled a small Rust Belt city more than a global destination. Land was cheap. Properties were available. Civic leadership was hungry for almost any private capital that would commit.
That was the moment the Milsteins arrived.
The story begins not with Howard Milstein but with a Toronto developer named Ed Cogan, who in the late 1990s assembled what he called a “dream team” to remake the American side of Niagara Falls into a destination resort district. Cogan’s vision was ambitious: a Las Vegas-style entertainment and convention complex that would catch some of the spillover from the Canadian boom and reverse decades of decline.
To fund it, Cogan brought in capital — and the deepest pockets in the room belonged to Howard and Edward Milstein, scions of one of New York City’s largest and most secretive real estate dynasties. The Milsteins agreed in 1998 to invest, and a new entity, Niagara Falls Redevelopment LLC — universally known as NFR — began quietly buying parcels.
The acquisition was methodical and, by some accounts, stealthy. Properties were purchased through layers of affiliates and shell companies. By the time the city understood what was happening, NFR controlled dozens of parcels in a 140-acre development zone bordered by Niagara Street, Portage Road, and Rainbow and John B. Daly boulevards — the heart of the downtown tourist district, much of it within easy walking distance of the falls themselves and directly across from what would become the Seneca Niagara Casino.
Then, in October 2003, Ed Cogan died.
The Milsteins assumed full control of the project. The “dream team” of developers dissolved. And what Cogan had pitched as a five-to-ten-year build-out of a destination resort began, quietly and then loudly, to look like something else entirely: a long-term land bank in the hands of a New York City banking family who appeared to be in no particular hurry.
To understand why this matters, you have to understand who the Milsteins are.
The family’s American story begins with Morris Milstein, a Russian Jewish immigrant who arrived in New York and started his working life as a floor scraper. In 1919 he founded a small flooring company called Circle Flooring. His son Paul turned it into a real estate empire — the Milsteins eventually owned, built, or controlled some of the most valuable buildings in Manhattan. Howard, born in 1951, took the family business in a new direction, earning a B.A. in economics from Cornell in 1973, a joint JD/MBA from Harvard in 1977, and then, in 1986, leading the family’s purchase of Emigrant Savings Bank — which under his leadership has become the largest privately held bank in the United States.
He is, by any reasonable measure, a billionaire many times over. Forbes has consistently estimated his net worth in the multi-billion-dollar range. He has chaired the New York State Thruway Authority. He led an ownership group that purchased the New York Islanders in 1997. He runs the Nicklaus Companies in partnership with Jack Nicklaus. He has given $20 million to his alma mater Cornell.
He is also, by reputation, intensely private and intensely litigious. Emigrant Bank has weathered controversies of its own — most notably a 2016 Brooklyn jury finding that it had targeted minority borrowers with predatory mortgages carrying rates as high as 18 percent. The Milsteins have a track record, in short, of playing long games and using the courts aggressively to defend their position.
For Niagara Falls — a city with a tax base shrinking faster than its population — going up against that machine was always going to be a profoundly unequal fight.
In the more than twenty-five years since the Milsteins began acquiring property in Niagara Falls, NFR has not, by the city’s accounting, leased or developed a single one of its hundreds of vacant parcels for the kind of major commercial use that was originally promised. Buildings have been demolished. Empty lots have multiplied. Weeds have grown over what used to be a downtown.
NFR disputes that framing. The company points to roughly $60 million it says it has invested in Niagara Falls over the years, including infrastructure work, environmental remediation, and a handful of smaller projects. It has, in fairness, done some things — including selling a parcel for what became a small data center operation. But for a 142-acre downtown footprint over nearly three decades, the visible build-out is, by any honest accounting, vanishingly small relative to the scale of the holding.
The most emblematic battle has been over a building called the Turtle.
Designed by Arapaho architect Dennis Sun Rhodes and Tuscarora sculptor Duffy Wilson, the Turtle — formally the Native American Center for the Living Arts — opened in 1981. Its concrete shell, head, legs and tail were a deliberate evocation of the Haudenosaunee creation story, in which the world is formed on the back of a giant turtle. For fifteen years it hosted exhibitions, powwows, concerts, a restaurant and a gallery, and was the largest center for Indigenous arts in the eastern United States. It closed in 1996 due to financial difficulties.
NFR acquired it. And in 2017, an NFR affiliate called NFR Turtle LLC filed for variances to demolish the building and replace it with a 200-foot, 20-story hotel. The hotel was never built. The Turtle has sat boarded up and deteriorating ever since. In 2025, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it one of the eleven most endangered historic places in America. A coalition of more than a thousand Indigenous and non-Indigenous supporters — Friends of the Niagara Turtle — has spent years pleading for its preservation.
The Turtle still stands, barely. NFR still owns it. Nothing has been built. Nothing has been restored. The building rots in place, a kind of accidental monument to the company’s larger pattern.
Critics — including multiple Niagara Falls mayors, state officials, the editorial board of the Buffalo News, and the journalists at the Investigative Post who have covered NFR for years — have come to a more or less unified diagnosis. NFR, they argue, is not really a developer. It is a land bank. It accumulates parcels in a market that may someday recover, holds them more or less indefinitely, pays the relatively low taxes on undeveloped land, and waits for the right moment — which, conveniently, never quite seems to arrive.
The strategy, if that is what it is, is rational on its own terms. Niagara Falls land is cheap; downtown land in a city with a name-recognition tourist asset has theoretical upside; carrying costs are low; and a single owner of a contiguous footprint can extract enormous value the moment a serious project does become feasible, because no other developer can credibly assemble the same site. From the Milsteins’ Manhattan perspective, the Niagara Falls holdings are arguably less an active investment than a free option on a future that may or may not arrive.
The cost of that strategy, however, is borne almost entirely by the city. Vacant land does not generate property tax revenue at anything like the rate that a developed parcel does. Empty downtowns do not attract the spillover tourism that funds restaurants, hotels and small businesses. And the simple presence of a single mega-owner with the financial capacity to outlast any city administration — and the litigation budget to fight any condemnation — discourages other developers from even trying.
Comparisons get reached for, and they all break down. The Irvine Company controls vast tracts of Orange County, but mostly in a suburban, master-planned context — and it actually develops. Ilitch Holdings owns large swaths of downtown Detroit around its arena district, but Detroit is a city of more than 600,000 people in which the Ilitch footprint is meaningful but not dominant. The Niagara Falls situation is different in kind. A single private owner controlling 142 acres of the prime downtown of a 48,000-person tourist city, holding it more or less idle for nearly thirty years, simply does not have a clean American precedent.
The current confrontation began to take its present shape in 2021, when Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino announced plans for a Centennial Park project — an arena, events center, and public plaza on roughly twelve acres of land in the city’s South End, land owned by NFR. The concept has since been pegged at roughly $210 million.
Restaino did not propose buying the land at NFR’s price. He proposed taking it through eminent domain, on the grounds that the parcels were blighted, undeveloped, and being held in a way that frustrated legitimate public purpose. NFR responded the way the Milsteins typically respond. They sued.
In short order, NFR filed a competing development plan: a $1.5 billion data center campus called the Niagara Digital Campus, in partnership with the Canadian commercial developer Urbacon, on roughly 53 acres including the very land the city wanted to condemn. Nine buildings. Roughly 600,000 square feet. By NFR’s projections, more than 5,600 construction jobs, more than 550 permanent positions, and an estimated $414 million in tax revenue to the city, county and school district over twenty years.
The timing was not subtle. After more than two decades of inaction, NFR produced a billion-dollar development plan precisely as the city moved to seize part of its land. Critics called it a defensive maneuver — a way to defeat the eminent domain claim by demonstrating that the property was not, in fact, being held idly. NFR insisted the data center had been in the works for years and that the timing was coincidental.
The legal battle that followed has been ferocious. A four-judge panel of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2023 that the city could proceed with condemning the twelve acres. NFR’s subsequent attempts to reopen the case have been rejected. NFR, in turn, has filed and refiled briefs accusing the city of “bromides and bluster,” of “manufacturing blight,” and of attempting to use the courts as a “rubber stamp” for what NFR characterizes as a politically motivated taking that would benefit the neighboring Seneca Nation casino more than the public.
The legal back-and-forth has produced its own ecosystem of partisan local journalism — pro-NFR outlets like The Niagara Reporter, more skeptical coverage from Investigative Post and the Buffalo News — and a steady drumbeat of accusations on both sides about FOIL requests, secret negotiations, polluted land swaps, and the proper role of public power in a private dispute.
By early 2026, both sides had been ordered into mediation under New York State Supreme Court Justice Deborah Chimes. What emerged from those confidential talks was a “two-project solution” in which Centennial Park and the Niagara Digital Campus would both proceed — and on June 4, 2026, the Niagara Falls City Council voted to approve it, settling all outstanding litigation between the city and NFR (and its affiliate Blue Apple Properties) at once.
The terms are worth reading closely, because they say a great deal about who held the leverage. NFR agreed to “donate” 907 Falls Street — the roughly ten-acre parcel the city had spent years trying to condemn — so that Niagara Falls can finally build its Centennial Park arena. But the “donation” is not free: the city will pay NFR $4.029 million as “reimbursement of costs and expenses,” drawn from its general reserve funds. In exchange, the city rezoned NFR’s surrounding land into a new Planned Unit Development district, clearing the way for the $1.5 billion Niagara Digital Campus data center that NFR had proposed the moment the city moved to seize its land. Both projects go forward. Both sides declare victory.
What this will mean for Niagara Falls is the question that now matters. NFR frames it as transformational: a decade of union construction jobs, hundreds of permanent positions across all skill levels, locally sourced materials, and, in the company’s words, “tax revenues unlike anything Niagara Falls has ever seen” to fund schools, roads, police and fire. If even a fraction of that materializes, it would be the largest private investment in the city in living memory — and, at long last, something built on the land instead of nothing.
But the people who have watched NFR the longest are not celebrating. Marybeth Nugent, whose Gadawski’s Restaurant sits surrounded by NFR-owned lots, put the local skepticism bluntly: “It’s super sad they can own this property and do not a darn thing… maybe they just made $4 million off of us.” Her doubt is earned. For nearly thirty years the promises have been large and the construction has been small, and this settlement asks a cash-strapped city to hand a Manhattan billionaire’s company $4 million and favorable rezoning on the strength of projections. Mayor Restaino’s answer is the developer’s creed — “you have to invest money if you’re going to develop, and I believe the money will come back to us” — and he says residents should expect to see visible progress within a year or two. The next two years, then, become the test the previous three decades never forced.
There is also a deeper skepticism about whether a two-project solution is actually a solution at all — or simply a mutually agreeable way for both sides to claim victory while ratifying NFR’s continued control of most of the original 140-acre footprint. The Centennial Park parcel, at roughly ten acres, is a small slice of what the Milsteins still own. The data center, however large, develops only a portion of the rest. Whatever is left over remains, as it has for nearly thirty years, on the Milsteins’ books — no longer contested, now simply theirs, with the city’s blessing.
Strip away the local politics and the legal procedure, and what the Niagara Falls story is really about is a question that very few American cities have ever had to answer in such concentrated form: what happens when a single private actor, acting entirely within their legal rights, accumulates enough of a city’s most valuable land to effectively veto its future?
The conventional answers — markets will sort it out, eminent domain provides a backstop, civic leadership can rally other developers — all assume conditions that do not exist in Niagara Falls. The market did not sort it out, because the owner is wealthy enough to wait out any market cycle. Eminent domain has produced, after years of litigation, the right to condemn twelve acres out of one hundred and forty. Civic leadership has cycled through three mayors and two state administrations in the time NFR has held the land, and the Milsteins are still there.
This is the part of the story that should travel beyond Niagara Falls. American cities are full of weak markets and patient capital. The legal toolkit municipalities have for confronting concentrated land ownership — eminent domain, blight designation, tax foreclosure — was designed largely for absentee slumlords and abandoned single parcels, not for billionaire-backed LLCs assembling whole districts and holding them as long-dated options. The Niagara Falls case is, among other things, a stress test of those tools, and the results so far suggest the tools are inadequate to the problem.
It is also, less abstractly, a story about a place. Niagara Falls is one of the only natural wonders in the United States that almost every American can name. The city that bears its name has been in slow-motion crisis for half a century. There is a version of the past quarter century in which the Milsteins genuinely tried to build the destination resort Ed Cogan envisioned in 1998, and it would have been one of the great civic transformations in modern American history. There is the version that actually happened, in which a downtown was acquired, fenced off, and largely allowed to decay while a family in Manhattan waited.
The settlement is signed. The data center may break ground. The Centennial Park arena may rise. The Turtle may even, against the odds, be saved. But the larger question — how a small American city ended up with so little say over its own ground, and then had to pay for the privilege of getting a fraction of it back — will outlast whatever gets built. It is the question Niagara Falls has been trying to answer, and failing to answer, since 1998. It is the question that, sooner or later, more American cities are likely to face.
In the meantime, the land sits. The weeds grow. The owners wait. And the falls, indifferent to all of it, keep falling.
Sources include reporting from The Buffalo News, the Niagara Gazette, Investigative Post, WGRZ, WIVB, WKBW, Spectrum News, Data Center Dynamics, Buffalo Toronto Public Media, Yahoo Finance, Cornell Chronicle, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the U.S. Census Bureau, the New York State Office of the State Comptroller, NPR, and public filings and statements from Niagara Falls Redevelopment LLC, the City of Niagara Falls, and the New York State Supreme Court.