On the Canadian side the tourists are entertained, on the American, they are educated. Within the curving contemporary architecture of the Schoellkopf Geological Museum, the saga of the cataract’s birth is told in sound and film. In the Robert Moses powerplant, with its spectacular glass-walled walkway, the drama of Niagara’s power development graphically unfolds. Each of its characters, from Porter and Evershed to Adams and Moses himself, receives his due. Hennepin is there, too, in Thomas Hart Benton’s vast mural.
The most conspicuous human symbol in the New York State Reservation is a larger-than-life statue of Nikola Tesla. In Canada, it is an effigy of Charles Blondin, teetering on a tightrope stretched across Clifton Hill. The two plants named for Sir Adam Beck no longer admit visitors; the emphasis on this side is on doom and daredevils. There are barrels everywhere: imitation barrels for those who want a souvenir photo showing themselves tumbling over a painted cataract, real barrels in which the impetuous and the foolhardy – Maud Willard, George Stathakis – met their fates, and counterfeit barrels such as the replica that Annie Taylor commissioned to stand in for the original that was stolen. (The Annie Taylor mannequin, slender and comely, is as spurious as the barrel itself.)
Others as rash as Annie continue to follow her example, heedless of the authorities on both sides of the river who can – and have – set fines as high as five thousand dollars. The barrel performers, like the tightrope walkers of an earlier day, have become commonplace, yet the parade goes on, with each striving to outdo the others. In 1984, Karel Soucek went over the Horseshoe and billed himself as the Last of the Niagara Daredevils. He wasn’t. The following year he lost his life in a plunge at the Houston Astrodome, and he lost his title to Steven Trotter, who, at twenty-one, made the plunge successfully as the youngest daredevil of all (ignoring Roger Woodward, who never claimed to be anything). Dave Munday in 1987 became the first Canadian to go over the Falls and live. Two years later, two of his fellow countrymen, Peter DeBarnardi and Jeffrey Petkovich, went him one better by stuffing themselves, face to face, into a single barrel, to emerge alive from their tandem journey. When barrel riding became banal, a white-water expert from Tennessee, Jessie Sharp, challenged the Falls in a kayak. He did not survive.
In a specially designed theatre, the Canadian film process known as IMAX concentrates heavily on daredevils. The great exploits of past heroes – of Charles Blondin, Joel Robinson, and Annie Taylor – have been brought eerily to life. The screen is so gigantic that peripheral vision vanishes, the past and present interlock, and the audience feels drawn inside the picture. More than most films, this one provokes the kind of nervous thrill – shocking yet exhilarating – that induced a rush of adrenalin in those who witnessed the real thing a century or more ago.
In a curious way, the IMAX production has itself become part of the history of the Falls because its actors had to undertake stunts almost as hazardous as those described in the tourist pamphlets. One cannot fake the Falls or build a replica on a back lot. No film director, no matter how brilliant, no production company, no matter how wealthy, can counterfeit what nature has made unique. The IMAX producers were aware that whoever played the part of Deanne Woodward would have to be flung directly into the furious current on the Canadian side of Goat Island only a few yards from the lip of the Horseshoe – a truly daunting prospect.
No professional stunter could be found to attempt the feat. Apart from Deanne Woodward herself, no human being had ever come within five yards of the cataract’s brink without being swept over the precipice. The speed of the water here is close to forty miles an hour. Finally, a twenty-four-year-old Toronto advertising woman named Jan Gordon, eager to break into films, heard about the production and volunteered. Attached to a fifteen-foot leash, she took the plunge and survived as the cameras (one fixed to a gigantic crane) rolled. For her work on the film she received close to five thousand dollars; more important, she got the job she wanted in the motion-picture business.
Once again past and present interlocked, as Deanne Woodward’s ordeal was recreated. Standing on the bank with a long, hooked pole in his hands, ready to pluck Jan Gordon from the current, was the last of Red Hill’s four sons, Wesley. Employed for fifteen years by the Maid of the Mist and now a park policeman, he has had no desire to engage in the ventures for which his father and two of his elder brothers were famous. He still pulls bodies from the river as they did, at $150 a corpse, and has served as an adviser on every recent motion picture about Niagara.
For the IM AX production Wes Hill helped to replicate a deed that many considered impossible: Joel Robinson’s 1861 trip through the Whirlpool Rapids aboard a fragile sidewheeler. For this a sturdier craft was built, heavily reinforced with steel and driven by two powerful Chrysler 318 engines. Even so, it required scores of men hauling on a thousand-foot hawser to keep the boat from breaking loose in the Whirlpool and hurtling down to Lake Ontario. The sequence was the most difficult and hazardous the production team had ever experienced and confirmed Robinson’s reputation as one of the great figures in Niagara history.
Today such risks are properly confined to the movies. It was once a terrifying experience to clamber down the swinging Indian ladders to the bottom of the gorge. Nowadays, protected by shrouds of yellow plastic, visitors are whisked by elevator to concrete-lined tunnels bored in the cliff face. There, secure from the tempest that all but sucked the breath from Timothy Bigelow in 1805, they experience the thrill without the peril.
If the hazards are gone, so is the spontaneity. The tourists are channelled in clearly defined routes from one vantage point to the next. In 1854, Isabella Lucy Bird scrambled down alone to make her way out to a big rock near the water’s edge and to gaze in solitude at the young moon casting its pale light on the shimmering waters. It is hard to imagine anybody doing that today. The margin of the river has been shored up and the crowds – 250 times as large as in her day – conspire against any private contemplation.
Table Rock is long gone. Its name has been preserved in Table Rock House, a park restaurant. The old site serves as a reminder of the remorseless retreat of the cataract, which has moved back at least the length of a football field since Miss Bird “did” the Falls.
The art lover will search in vain for the vantage point from which Frederic Church created his celebrated canvas. It cannot be found because it never existed; Church painted the ideal, not the reality. And now even the reality has been much altered by nature and by man. The waters have long since gnawed their way past the spot from which Church made his preliminary sketches. Framed against the onrushing flood, the silhouette of a derelict scow occupies the foreground – the same scow from which Red Hill rescued two marooned mariners. On the bank above stands the pillared powerplant that Edward Lennox designed for the Electrical Development Company and from whose roof Hill’s breeches-buoy was strung. Sealed but not abandoned, the building is to be restored as a museum by Ontario Hydro.
Not far away in Queen Victoria Park, on the site of the old military chain reserve, stands a memorial to Sir Casimir Gzowski, who helped save the gorge for the people. The park is not quite what Lord Dufferin visualized when he talked of preserving the land “in the picturesque condition in which it was originally laid out by nature.” The commissioners have long since opted for what Dufferin dismissed as “the penny arts of the landscape gardener.” The park, with its edged borders and cropped lawns, derives its ambience from the British colonial style, not the untamed natural beauty of the Canadian wilderness. Supported by fees from souvenir shops and restaurants, the park commission spends $12 million a year just cutting the grass.
The past is well posted on both sides of the river. A guidebook is hardly necessary to find Thomas Barnett’s original museum of curiosities – now grown to 700,000 exhibits – or the Oakes Garden Theatre, Prospect Point, and Bloody Run. One landmark, however, frustrates discovery. No sign points the way to Love Canal; no guidebook locates it on a map.
It can be found on the sou
thern edge of town, and it is known today – the part of it that has been declared “habitable” – as Black Creek Village, “A Modern Community,” in the sales phrase of the Love Canal Revitalization Agency. The visitor happens upon it suddenly – so suddenly he may not know he has arrived. At first glance, 102nd Street with its row of modest homes looks like any other residential avenue. But something is wrong; the street lacks resonance. Why are there no cars parked in the driveways? Why no children on bicycles, no mothers wheeling baby carriages down the sidewalks? Why are the front yards empty of life – no bent figures weeding gardens, no homeowners pushing lawn mowers?
It is then that a shiver runs down the spine as the visitor realizes that all the windows are boarded up, the eaves troughs are crumbling, the paint is peeling, the front porches are falling apart. Here and there, behind an unprotected and shattered window, the remnants of an old Venetian blind hang limply. And above each doorway a naked light bulb bums day and night, a wan message that the house has been abandoned.
It is an eerie sight, this suburban ghost town. Block after block, the spectacle is the same. Three hundred acres that were once home to twenty-six hundred men, women, and children lie deserted. We are familiar with films and photographs of abandoned mining camps and false-fronted cow towns. But this is not the Old West. This is modem America. Is the shape of things to come to be found here within earshot of the continent’s greatest natural wonder? Already another community some three miles away – Forest Glen – has had to be abandoned for similar reasons.
Love Canal is still not free of controversy. People are moving back into the outer ring of homes, two hundred of which were put up for sale by the revitalization agency after a federal survey in 1988 deemed them “habitable.” By the spring of 1992, thirty had been sold. But what does “habitable” mean? Only that these houses are no worse off than comparable housing elsewhere in Niagara Falls. For Lois Gibbs, still fighting the environmental battle from her new base outside Washington, that does not mean the houses are free of risk. Even as the new tenants moved in, her organization and several others were planning court action to force a study.
Suits and countersuits drag on. Occidental, which has paid $20 million to 1,328 plaintiffs as the result of a class-action suit, is suing the state, the city, and the school board for funds to help pay the costs of a clean-up. The total cost of litigation has been estimated at $700 million.
This may be only the beginning. The empty homes with their naked light bulbs stand as testimony to the great dilemma of our times: what to do with the unwanted by-products of industry? The problem extends far beyond those ghostly streets. After Love Canal, three more Hooker dumps in the Niagara Falls area were identified, each much larger than the original. Together these alone contain a million tons of waste products. Thanks to the Love Canal controversy, the industries along the river have been cleaned up; they no longer discharge their wastes into the Niagara. But the old dumps remain, some unidentified because no one can remember where the truck-loads of poison were taken decades ago. There are an estimated 250 of these trouble spots within three miles of the river. To find them, excavate them, and remove their contents represents a herculean and hideously expensive task.
The great cataract has become a victim of its own immensity. Its spectacular presence alone was never enough to satisfy those who sought to transform it into a theatrical backdrop for high carnival or to harness its apparently limitless energy to banish industrial grime. The Falls proved a fickle servant. It was that same energy – captured by man, channelled and transformed – that powered the chemical revolution that defiled Niagara’s waters. Those early pioneers who talked so enthusiastically of the genie in the bottle did not live to see the havoc caused after the genie escaped.
How bitterly ironic that 89 percent of the pollution that is leached into the Niagara comes from the American side and not from the side show on the opposite shore! Those early pioneers – Porter and Evershed, Schoellkopf and Adams – could not know that the by-products of their vision would some day defile the river. Their purpose was laudable enough – to separate the great cataract from the beneficiaries of its power, to create an industrial community that did not encroach upon the glory of the Falls. The result is Buffalo Avenue, that crowded chemical alley of squat factories and high-tension pylons that leads from the Love Canal area to the business centre of the city. Buffalo Avenue is to Niagara Falls, New York, what Clifton Hill is to Niagara Falls, Ontario. But the much-maligned hill, for all its tinsel glitter, does not befoul the waters.
Yet there is one crowning glory that remains, and it is to be found on the American side. Goat Island continues to provide a haven from the industrial world as it has since the days when Augustus Porter saved it from commercial exploitation. The manicured park land and the encircling roadway of the state reservation are encroaching upon the wild, but thanks to men like Olmsted and Church, some of the original forest remains and visitors can enjoy the kind of ramble in the woods that helped spark the preservation movement of the last century.
Well away from the tourist routes is one little glade where commerce does not intrude. Just opposite little Luna Island on the eastern bank of Goat Island beneath a canopy of birch, black willow, and shagbark hickory, a narrow pathway meanders along the water’s edge. Here, beside the slenderest of Niagara’s channels, the workaday world is blotted out. The cataract’s roar and the hiss of the rapids, racing over the limestone ledges, blur the stridence of the twentieth century. The soft curtain of foliage conceals the jagged silhouette of the skyline beyond.
Here is the peace that Francis Abbott sought. One can easily imagine him in his brown cloak, with his dog by his side, lounging on this very spot and staring into the violent waters at his feet, calmed by the tranquillity of the forest yet haunted by the magnetic pull of the river on its final rush to the brink. Did he shudder a little at the power and treachery of the Niagara River and the Falls beyond? Or did he simply surrender himself to their sorcery? Beauty, danger, terror, and charm are here combined. Over the centuries, poets, essayists, historians, and ordinary visitors have struggled, and often failed, to find words to describe the lure of these waters. Yet in the end, a single word – an old, well-used word – best captures the essence of Niagara. In spite of mankind’s follies and nature’s ravages, in spite of scientific intrusion and unexpected catastrophe, in spite of human ambition and catchpenny artifice, the great cataract remains what it has always been, and in the true sense of the word, Sublime.
The Falls, with Table Rock in the background, right, engraved from a painting by John Vanderlyn in 1803 when the flow of water over the precipice was twice as great as it is today.
The Horseshoe Falls from Goat Island, painted in 1830. Note the precarious bridge to the Terrapin Rocks just above the crest.
W.H. Bartlett, the much-reproduced artist of American Scenery and Canadian Scenery, sketched the massive overhang of Table Rock in 1837.
The fall of Table Rock in 1850. The hackman, washing his Carriage, barely escaped when the dolostone cap crumbled.
One of the locks on the Erie Canal, which helped turn Niagara Falls into a fashionable spa, rivalling Saratoga Springs.
Like the drawing above, this one was made in 1837 by Bartlett for American Scenery. It shows the Terrapin Rocks, Tower, and bridge.
An advertisement of the Great Western & Michigan Central shows off Roebling’s famous bridge. The painting below was made about the same time by an anonymous artist. The railways made the Falls a tourist centre.
Black-and-white reproduction does not do justice to Frederic Edwin Church’s great painting showing the full sweep of the Horseshoe Falls from the very edge of the water. The Terrapin Tower can be seen in the background, left.
The early days of tourism, circa 1860. The hackman poses his fares not far from the two hotels at Table Rock. The Luna Falls (also known as the Bridal Veil Falls) can be seen on the right.
This daguerreotype, made about 1853, shows tour
ists at Prospect Point standing above the lip of the American Falls.
To go “behind the sheet” in 1879, oilskins were provided – at a price –though many an unwary tourist thought they were free.
The great Blondin, balancing pole in hand, skips lightly across Niagara’s gorge – for him, it was no more dangerous than a country stroll.
Blondin’s great rival, Bill Hunt, a.k.a. Signor Farini, hangs by his heels from the slack wire.
As a crowd of spectators watches from the bank, above, Charles Blondin calmly reads a newspaper high above Niagara’s torrent. Note the guy wires in the background.
Saul Davis’s notorious Table Rock Hotel, “the cave of the forty thieves,” overlooks the Horseshoe. His stairway down the gorge wall is just visible in the foreground of the photograph.
The famous “Front,” circa 1862. Davis’s stairway is in the foreground; Barnett’s Museum is beyond Robertson’s pagoda. In the distance, right, is the Clifton House, where the élite always stayed.
Barnett’s Museum in 1862. It was moved several times. The collection, much enlarged, can still be seen at the Falls.
In its day, the Clifton House was the finest hotel at Niagara. Cupolas and pagodas were the architectural whimsies of the time.
A bedraggled Annie Taylor photographed just after she emerged, slightly stunned, from her barrel, which she later put on display. Her manager, F.M. “Tussie” Russell, poses with her, but this barrel is actually a replica of the original.
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