Skylon Tower
observation tower in Niagara Falls, Canada
The Skylon Tower is an observation tower in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. It overlooks the American Falls, Horseshoe Falls and Niagara River.
History
Construction of the Skylon began in May 1964. The tower was opened on October 6, 1965, by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Ontario Premier John Robarts. Costing $7 million at the time of its construction, the Skylon Tower was owned by a private partnership called Niagara International Centre, which was financed by Hershey Foods shareholdings of Charles Richard Reese, former co-owner of the H. B. Reese Candy Company of Hershey, Pennsylvania. Canadian Pacific Hotels (CPH) was hired to operate the tower restaurants and lounges.
On October 1, 1975, CPH purchased the tower from Reese and his partners for $11 million. The tower's summit features a verdigris-green copper roof similar to CPH's other properties, including the Château Frontenac in Quebec City and the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta. CPH owned and operated the tower until 1986, when it was sold for $18 million to two local Niagara hotel owners, John Gruyich of Michael's Inn and George Yerich of the Holiday Inn by the Falls Motel. In 1988, George Yerich bought out John Gruyich's ownership share of the Skylon for $13 million; however, Milicent Gruyich continues to own the land the tower is built on.
“Skylon Tower” enters the record as observation tower in Niagara Falls, Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Skylon, Tower and observation can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1208032. Authority coordinates are 43.085, -79.080. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1965, 1975 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Skylon Tower” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.