The End of Boom Times

The final blow to the river region’s importance as a trading hub came with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959.  Like the Welland Canal, the Seaway had initially been conceived as a joint operation between the US and Canada.  But it was not to be.  Railroad and private industrial interests, as well as Buffalo and other port areas that would be affected, lobbied hard against American involvement.  During the Depression years they successfully turned federal interest away from international development schemes of that sort and toward internal opportunities like the Tennessee Valley project.  By 1951 Canada had decided to act unilaterally, and in 1959 the St. Lawrence Seaway opened an alternate (and vastly superior) water route to the east.  With no regional logic or cooperative imperative driving it, the Seaway dramatically upended the Niagara economy.  Although the Welland Canal continued to service this route to the east, the antiquated and little-used Erie Canal ­ and its terminal city Buffalo ­ were now bypassed by water traffic.  In the past, Buffalo had flourished because of the shipment transfers that had occurred there, from Great Lakes barge to canal boats or railroads.  The improved Welland offered no stopping point like this, and no new transshipment hub or manufacturing center sprang up along its banks to take Buffalo’s place.  Indeed, very little shipping volume either originated or had a destination in the canal.

Denuded of its historic role as a vital link between east and west, the Niagara Frontier saw much of its shipbuilding, grain storage, and milling industries collapse.  Other industries soon followed, most devastatingly Buffalo’s steel mills and automobile factories, and residents soon followed, with both sides of the river seeing declines in population late in the century.  In the wake of these departures, the region became better known for the poisonous fallout of industrial activity than for industrial activity itself.  The biggest headline to come out of the area in the second half of the 20^th century may well have been the Love Canal disaster, in which a school and neighborhood built on land contaminated by Hooker Chemical back in the 1940s had to be evacuated in the 1970s because of seeping toxic waste.  The Welland suffered no public relations disaster of this magnitude, but the canal and its related industries had given birth to its own unaddressed environmental problems.

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