Canalside Featured on ‘The National Post’ for Revitalization of Canal

Buffalo, its waterfront and Canalside continue to get much love from the media.  The area was featured in The National Post about Canalside's revitalization of the Erie Canal and increased tourism:

Today, you can still sit in Buffalo Auditorium seats, but now it’s to put on your skates and join the throngs skating on the artificial ice of the old canal. You can find more people on the Buffalo waterfront today than you could in its heyday when it was the grain-handling capital of the world.

Buffalo’s waterfront is now a mixture of brand spanking new structures and looming icons of a long-gone transportation era. Billionaire Terry Pegula owns both the Sabres, and the Buffalo Bills of the NFL. He built the $200-million HarborCenter complex next door to First Niagara Center (new home of the Sabres).

HarborCenter has two NHL-size ice pads that seat up to 2,000 spectators, plus two destination restaurants. One of them — a sports bar named 716 (Buffalo’s area code) — has two-storey ceilings and one of its 70 TVs is almost the size of a drive-in theatre.

This past fall, a 205-room Marriott Hotel opened in HarborCenter. There is also a six-storey indoor parking garage.

On the corner of HarborCenter, facing the canal skating rink, is a Tim Hortonsrestaurant/museum. Patrons sit on replica seats from the old Buffalo Memorial Auditorium and the walls are covered with Tim Horton memorabilia. He was playing for the Sabres when he died in a car crash on the Queen Elizabeth Way in 1974 while returning to Buffalo from Toronto.