Angels pitching in $3M for Titanic project
Niagara Falls museum expected to employ 250 people in construction and facility operation
More than a year after first floating the idea, plans to build a Titanic museum in Niagara Falls are steaming ahead with no icebergs in site.
Fuelled with a $3-million commitment from the Niagara Angel Network, proponents of the attraction hope to welcome aboard their first passengers by the middle of next year.
While celebrating investments made in the past three years totalling just more than $12 million to help establish 29 businesses including several in Niagara, Angel Network executive director Terry Kadwell also announced plans to pitch in for the Experience Titanic interactive museum planned for Niagara Falls.
He said the organization chose to get involved in funding the Titanic project because of the jobs the attraction is expected to create.
“Factoring in construction and operating staff, this could very well bring over 250 fulltime and part-time (jobs) to the Niagara region,” Kadwell told members of the Angel Network — a group of local venture capitalists —
during a meeting at The St. Catharines Club Wednesday evening.
DV3 Imagineering Inc. director David van Velzen, who spearheaded the project first announced in January 2017, said the $21-million facility will give visitors the chance to experience what it might have been like to be aboard the doomed ship that sank on April 14, 1912.
For instance, he said, the attraction will include a platform that will shudder, simulating hitting an iceberg.
“The idea is to allow people to experience what it is to be in first class, second class, in the engine room,” he said. “The idea is basically to start at the bottom in the engine room. We’ll have video and sounds and smoke, we’ll recreate you being in the engine room. Then we’ll start to bring you up. Then you’ll be in first class in all the opulence, the whole thing. And then we’re going to drive you right back down to the ocean floor.”
While the developers are working with other lenders to finance the rest of the project, Kadwell said the funding provided by the Angels will be earmarked specifically for the attractions within the facility.
“It’s going to take a lot of capital to do something like that. It’s taken longer because we need to do it right,” he said. “There’s no other location like Niagara Falls for this.”
He later said the local organization will reach out to more than a dozen other Angel investment groups from throughout Ontario to contribute to the project.
“We’re in a prime position to use our ability and our influence, to get others to invest in Niagara in the project,” he said. “Once we have firm commitments and cheques are written from the Niagara angels, we will be then approaching other provincial Angel groups … to get this thing built.”
Van Velzen said additional investors are pitching in on other costs associated with the project.
“We know the parameters we have to work in for getting financing for all this,” he said.
With that financing behind them, he said the goal is to open doors within 12 to 14 months.
The developers have identified two potential three to four acre sites in Niagara Falls’ tourist district for the roughly 4,950square-metre (55,000-squarefoot) facility.