If Clifton Hill Sucks So Much, Why Do I Love It?
If you’ve ever been to Niagara Falls, you’ll probably remember Clifton Hill, if not by name. It’s the lane of cheap, junky tourist traps directly perpendicular to the waterfall itself, like a gaudy capitalist leech clinging onto a genuinely beautiful natural wonder, hoping to siphon some cash from tourists with mirror mazes and expensive ice cream. Objectively speaking, it sucks.
So how come I love it?
I grew up in the Niagara region (not the city of Niagara Falls, for the record), but it’s not like we would go very often. It was a 20 minute drive away, back when going for a drive meant getting my parents to drive me (at least before all my friends got licenses- but somehow, when that happened in late 2020, no one was super thrilled to go into a large crowd of tourists). I would visit 3 times a year, maximum. I went to the dentist more often than the Falls.
But still, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, I’m obsessed with this place. I mean it. There is a very high chance that I am the number one Clifton Hill fan on Earth.
Why is this? I know, consciously, that it’s cheap, cynical garbage stuffed with wax monsters and/or bored teens. I haven’t even been inside most of the buildings. Either they’re too expensive (I’ve got bills to pay), or they’re haunted houses (I’m a pussy (I write for mathNEWS I clearly have no reputation to protect)), or they’re vape stores (see above). The draw can’t possibly be the actual content of the Hill. So what is it?
Is it as simple as childhood nostalgia? That would make sense, right? I didn’t go that much, but when I went, it was meaningful. It felt like a trip to Disney World that didn’t cost my family several thousand dollars, just 25 bucks for parking. There was always something new and exciting to do, but even if we just walked down the street, being in the thick of this bizarre carnival was enough for me.
I was watching a YouTube POV of someone walking down the hill when I realized something: I had some form of attachment to every single building. Maybe it was a fully formed memory- that’s where I had my first date, that’s the wax museum we stopped at on a field trip, that’s the haunted house I wouldn’t even walk on the same side of the road as. For others, it was as small as a fragment of an emotion, the lingering remnants of a laugh or a scare or simply a curious glance I had when walking by the building as a kid. Every single building has, in some way, stuck with me.
Maybe Clifton Hill is just my thing, y’know? My one, bizarre, completely impractical obsession that’s stuck with me from childhood. Everyone has their thing, and maybe this one is mine.
(As an aside- I don’t trust people who don’t have a thing. People who are too embarrassed or proud to admit they care too much about something random and stupid, or that they only have ‘adult interests’, tend to be really boring and/or insecure.)
But somehow, I don’t think that’s the whole story. I have a lot of things I was interested in or attached to as a kid, but now I’m not interested anymore. I used to watch the movie Cars once a day when I was a kid, and now I only watch it once a week. I feel like I’m pretty aware if I’m just swept up in nostalgic excitement, but this feels deeper than that.
Maybe one of the reasons could be just how aggressively, impossibly gaudy the entire thing is. Which seems like a reason I’d hate it but… I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s so extreme it almost feels like an elaborate joke. As if it’s some Omega Mart-like elaborate parody of itself, or I’ve stepped into a sitcom where a family visits the most absurd tourist trap in the world.
Consider, for example, the House of Frankenstien- an honest to God combination haunted house/roller coaster/Burger King.
Look at it. Seriously, look at it.
This looks like a Simpsons gag. It looks like something from Itchy and Scratchy Land. The elaborate, gothic castle facade, with a winding roller coaster plopped awkwardly on top, tied together with a gigantic Frankenstien, towering over the skyline, munching down on a delectable Whopper.
This shouldn’t exist. It just shouldn’t. It’s not a real building, it’s a Grunkle Stan-style over-the-top absurd hustle. It’s the tower of Babylon, a testament to humanity’s shamelessness and boldness and ego that something like this exists, and a part of my mind finds it impossible to imagine as anything other than an elaborate joke that I’m also in on.
I can’t help but laugh along. Yeah man, it’s hilarious you built a go-kart track on the edge of a waterfall. Remember that awesome bit where you have a decomposing, decrepit Planet Hollywood directly across the street from the Duty Free? It’s so funny you had a wax museum featuring Wax Jack the Ripper, Wax Jeffrey Dahmer, and Wax Hitler- and it’s even funnier that someone stole Wax Hitler and they never found him again.
That Wax Hitler story is true, by the way. Look it up.
On that note, maybe that’s another part of what fascinates me about this place. The stories that have built Clifton Hill are varied, and mostly crazy- but they’re also obscure. Information about specific events, or even records of when something was built/destroyed can be extremely difficult to track down.
I’m, in particular, fascinated by Marvel Super Hero Adventure City- a defunct Marvel themed arcade/amusement center built into the basement of a hotel. It featured officially licensed Marvel attractions- plural- anchored by an honest to God 3D Dark Ride starring Spider-Man, one of the top 5 most popular fictional characters on the entire planet- and no one seems to know anything about it.
I had to have seen it. I have no memory of it, and I would have been really young, but the timeline of my youth and its existence make it basically impossible that I wouldn’t have gone.
Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the information age, where I just take for granted that some obsessive superfan will keep track of this information for me to look up at my leisure. The fact that something this big, featuring the most popular superhero in the world, can just appear and vanish without a trace… It drives me crazy. No one but me cared enough to pay attention.
There’s one ride video that exists, and it’s from the production company that made it, uploaded in 2007. Nothing else exists besides old Flickr photos of the outside of the building, and pictures from the Niagara Falls public library. There isn’t even an exact date for when it got the Marvel theme stripped away- 2007 to 2009 is my best guess. There isn’t even an official reason, as far as I can tell.
I’ve always been most interested in the things we know very little about. Even as a kid, I gravitated towards stories about folk legends, cryptids, things that could only be half-true at best. I loved diving into the margins and living on the fringes. I found staying on the well defined road with the well defined facts to be extremely boring. I much prefer having to find the truth to being told it.
Clifton Hill is packed with these kinds of stories. Full attractions that existed for years that no one cared enough to document. Thousands of man-hours spent imagining and constructing it, potentially hundreds of thousands of people who have walked through, been entertained, been scared, been intrigued, had their lives touched ever so slightly by these experiences- and all we have to show for it is a handful of forum posts from 2003. What a legacy to leave.
Researching this stuff feels like archeology. I could fall into hour-long rabbit holes looking for any evidence that these things ever existed. In fact, researching this article, I fell into the Spider-Man rabbit hole again.
(If you’re interested, the Marvel complex still exists and is now simply Adventure City. It sits at the bottom of the hill, right next to the last Rainforest Cafe in the country. The Marvel characters have been very, very lightly rethemed, but most of the structure still exists. Like most things on the Hill, it sucks and I adore it.)
There’s one more dominant feeling I got from Clifton Hill, and I think it’s an interesting one. Every time I went to a good themed entertainment center as a kid, something like a Disney or a Universal, I always walked away with a sense that I had been transported into another universe. It barely even registered to me that someone made these things. Even as an adult, I look at those experiences with an admiration for the creativity, engineering, and ingenuity it takes to make an experience on that scale. I remain deeply in awe of the artistry of many of these experiences.
The feeling after I left Clifton Hill was different. It was almost always “I could do that”- and later, “I could do better”.
Even as a kid, I could always see the seams. I knew that “haunted castle” was made out of plastic and plywood. I could see the exposed wiring and the chipped paint and the barely-disguised projectors that make up what could charitably be called attractions. I knew these were man-made.
If the goal was immersion, then these experiences obviously failed. If the goal was entertainment, then their success is debatable. But they had a different effect on me, one I’m not sure they intended- they inspired me. These were deeply flawed and messy, but they felt made by real people, not just dropped from space. They were understandable, comprehensible- and it made me feel like if I just worked hard enough, I could make something like that too. It took the act of creation and helped me realize that mere mortals can do it too.
For as long as I remember, I’ve always wanted to entertain. When I was really young, the vector through which I tried to do that was by dreaming up my own ”rides” that I could make with an iPad, a copy of iMovie, and the toys in my basement. I would film a POV of running around in the backyard, then play it on a computer monitor. I would sit my little brother in the chair and shake the chair around in time with the action on screen, to simulate a 4D theater effect.
I’m not sure what in my childhood made me so determined to work so hard on ways to surprise and entertain other people with the power of cool technology. But I know for sure that Clifton Hill- via sucking so much- made it clear to me that I could. I can trace the path my life has taken back to that original inspiration in a pretty straight line.
I’m not sure if I have a closing point to this. I don’t really think I’ve gotten to the bottom of why I care so much about this terrible, terrible place, but I think I’ve come to at least understand it- and myself- a little deeper.
But I guess a sensible explanation, or an obvious explanation, or a conclusive explanation, or even just a good explanation… that wouldn’t fit the spirit of things, now would it?