John Holer, owner of the Niagara Falls amusement park Marineland, has died. He was 83.

His death on Saturday was confirmed by longtime friend Niagara Falls councillor Wayne Thomson, who’s also chair of Niagara Falls Tourism.

“We’ve been friends for 50 years,” Thomson told the Star. “I’ve been though it all with him and I feel that I was part of Marineland because it was so important to this community.”

Thomson declined to comment further out of respect for the Holer family, saying he would share his memories at Holer’s funeral, the date for which has not been set.

The tourist attraction has been a key part of the Niagara Falls community for decades and familiar to many through its commercial jingle “Everyone Loves Marineland.” But not everyone loves the amusement park, which has for many years been embroiled in controversy, including the alleged mistreatment of animals. For years, animal activists have fought to have it shut down.

Marineland has always maintained that its animals are well treated and all allegations of abuse and mistreatment are not true.

Holer was born in 1935 in Maribor, Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia. He immigrated to Canada and landed in the Niagara region in the late 1950s and started a circus.

“I saw that a vast number of visitors were coming to Niagara Falls, and there was very little for them to do besides the actual falls,” Holer recalled in a 1983 interview.

Sensing an opportunity, he opened Marineland in 1963, with a few sea lions doing shows in a small pool. Over the years, he bought up more land — this too was controversial because on one occasion it involved the eviction of 47 families from a trailer park he had acquired — and the park grew into a massive tourist attraction that included a killer whale, beluga whales, dolphins and land animals such as deer and bears.

And there were numerous incidents involving animals — a bear cub once escaped for a few days before returning and a bison wandered out onto a nearby highway. In 1977, the U.S. government seized six bottlenose dolphins that Holer had caught in the Gulf of Mexico, and following the death of a beluga whale in 1999, arson threats were made against him.