The place to stay in Niagara Falls
Clifton House, now the site of Oakes Garden Theatre, had a panoramic view across Niagara Falls
In the 1830s, Hermanus Crysler built a hotel at the northwest corner of Clifton Hill and what is now Niagara River Parkway in Niagara Falls.
He called it the Clifton House.
Commanding a panoramic view of both the American and Horseshoe falls across the Niagara Gorge, the hotel became a magnet for tourists for almost a century.
In 1848, construction magnate Samuel Zimmerman purchased the property and upgraded it, turning it into the place to be when visiting Niagara Falls (good enough for the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, when he visited in 1860).
During the early 1860s, it became “the place to be” for somewhat different reasons — a place where operatives from both the Union and the Confederate forces gathered to hatch plots and spy on each other for their sides in the U.S. Civil War.
The first Clifton House burned to the ground in June 1898 and remained a ruin for almost a decade.
The new Clifton Hotel opened in July 1906.
The reborn hotel prospered for another quarter century, but it too was ravaged by fire, on New Year’s Eve 1932. That marked the end of the distinguished old hostelry.
The site stood vacant until about 1935, when mining magnate Sir Harry Oakes, recently appointed to Niagara Parks Commission, bought the Clifton Hotel site and the adjacent Lafayette Hotel property and gave them to the parks commission
Thomas B. McQuesten, a Hamilton MPP who was then Ontario’s minister of highways and chair of Niagara Parks Commission, called upon some of the same craftsmen, previously employed to build Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton, to transform the former Clifton House site into Oakes Garden Theatre.
Called “an impressive triumph of ornamental horticulture” displaying the exemplary use of the best of the stonemason’s art,” Oakes Garden Theatre was formally dedicated on Sept. 18, 1938.
It became one of the beauty spots along Niagara River Parkway, just one of the many signal accomplishments of McQuesten’s chairmanship of the commission, which lasted from 1934 to 1944, a period called by some the golden age of the parks system.