Seneca Niagara Hotel and Casino

Design of a 725,000 square foot, 26 story facility that includes casino gaming spaces, restaurants, retail and entertainment spaces, a large multi-purpose events hall, meeting rooms, a spa, salon and pool on the 3rd level, and a 600 room hotel tower.

Wendel has performed structural engineering, civil engineering and surveying as part of a design-build team lead by Seneca Construction Management Corporation and JCJ Architecture.  The foundation system was complicated by the fact that an abandoned and filled-in, 100‘ wide by 40’ deep former hydraulic canal traversed the site directly below the central elevator core of the 26 story tower.  Outside the canal, the foundations are drilled piers socketed into rock for proper bearing and uplift resistance connected by a network of concrete grade beams.  Inside the canal, tower columns are also supported on drilled piers to the rock base of the 40’ deep canal.  To transfer the tower’s 2,500 kips of lateral shear force to the canal’s adjacent shallow rock surface, Wendel utilized a 24” thick concrete diaphragm/mat-foundation that spans between the canal walls and is supported vertically by the tower column drilled piers.  The tower lateral bracing system utilizes braced frames in the transverse direction and moment frames in the longitudinal direction.  To control lateral drift in the longitudinal direction of the narrow hotel tower, the braced frames incorporate a unique blend of two story “super diagonals” and “hat-truss” type frames that were closely coordinated with room separation walls, room to room door openings and the main corridor at each hotel level.  At the pre-construction conference, the successful steel fabricator/erector remarked that this was the “finest set of structural steel drawings they had seen in 30 years of doing projects of this type”.