A visit to Western New York and Southern Ontario brings you straight to the heart of the social and cultural ferment of the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th centuries. The stories of the Underground Railroad, Women's Rights, the Chautauqua Movement, the Niagara Movement, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the development of modern architecture were all written, in no small part, right here.

Here amongst the shadows of Forts Erie, Niagara, and George, the architectural masterpieces of Wright, Richardson,and Sullivan, and world-class assets of the Shaw Festival, Albright-Knox, and the Buffalo Philharmonic lies a vast cultural heritage treasure trove.

Western New York and Southern Ontario share a river, the falls, a border, and binational cultural experience simply waiting for the world to view in its glorious entirety.

For years, legions of honorable people have waxed poetic about the overwhelming benefits of viewing and branding this region as a whole. There have been grants, steering committees, project management teams, outside consultants, hundreds of stakeholders, and a dozen or so conferences and symposiums. Yet to this day, marketing efforts still stop at the waters edge, or only last one weekend per year.

CulturalNiagara.com is an effort to break this log jam with a simply built marketing tool that equally embraces every cultural asset on both sides of the border.

This website is based on a total inclusion model. It only makes sense that for a website to be used, it must first be usable. Our goal is to create a comprehensive reference tool that will best serve the reader. Correctly executed, the benefits to the the individual properties and the cultural community should naturally follow.

The formula is simple. We seek to:

• visually capture a readers imagination and demonstrate in one place, the vast scope of our of binational assets
• provide simple, individual property descriptions and information
• connect property information and events with a comprehensive calendar and interactive map
• utilize basic branding techniques

This is a humble first cut of a project that is specifically designed to be improved upon.

The goal was to create an active dialog on how a tool like this can be made better, rather than how can we get a website like this started. In its infancy, it is little more than a painters canvas stripped of the anxiety of its overwhelming whiteness.

At our table, input is not only welcomed, it is highly encouraged. Please pull up a chair and have a seat.

Mark D. Donnelly, Ph.D
Publisher@culturalniagara.com
716-833-7255