For six years, a tall fence around a huge excavation on Rainbow Boulevard announced to the world that a $46 million underground aquarium called AquaFalls was "Coming Soon!" to downtown Niagara Falls.

As far back as September 2000, the international consortium behind the project said it had a holding tank in Florida full of sharks just waiting to scare the pants off tourists in the proposed aquarium.

But as the years rolled by, the consortium could never get the financing together, and the promised tourist attraction remained a gigantic hole in the ground.

Now, at last, the fence has been torn down - but even stranger things may be in the works for the property near the Rainbow Bridge.

Buffalo developer Frank Parlato has filled in the hole and plans to turn it into a parking lot for 300 vehicles.

Meanwhile, a company called J&M Enterprise is trying to recruit clowns, magicians and "other unique talent" to perform inside and outside the former Occidental building at the failed AquaFalls site.

On second thought, maybe they should have kept up that fence