Clifton Hill is one of the major tourist promenades in Niagara Falls, Ontario. The street, close to Niagara Falls and the Niagara River, leads from River Road on the Niagara Parkway to intersect with Victoria Avenue. The street contains a number of gift shops, wax museums, haunted houses, video arcades, restaurants, hotels and themed attractions. For visitors, particularly families and teenagers, it is a major amusement area and centre for night life.
Over the years, the various properties on the hill have been bought, sold and renamed frequently. The street is divided between two primary property owners: the Harry Oakes Company (HOCO) and the Niagara Clifton Group.
Comfort Inn, also part of Clifton Hill, closed in 2015 and was later demolished as part of the Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum expansion. Expansion began in early 2016.
Prominent attractions on the street include the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum and 4D Moving Theater, the Guinness World Records Museum, the Niagara SkyWheel Ferris wheel, and the nearby Louis Tussaud's Waxworks (which also operates under Ripley's). Tussaud's has long been a staple of the area, and a model of tight-rope walker Charles Blondin that formerly hung above Clifton Hill and has since been moved to Victoria Ave is a common long-time landmark.
The first wax museum in Niagara Falls was the Louis Tussaud's Waxworks, which opened in 1949. It was the first of many wax museums to come. Its location on the Hill closed in September 2000 when its lease ran out, and it has since reopened just above the hill on Victoria Avenue. It is noticeably similar to Madame Tussaud's (Madame Tussaud was the great-grandmother of Louis Tussaud) due to how the figures are placed in the reach of visitors.