Niagara Falls: Spectacle and Power

The Niagara River’s dual role as the dividing border and unifying heart of its region is perhaps best exemplified by spectacle of Niagara Falls.  As a tourist attraction and as a source of endless cheap power, it has fundamentally shaped and defined the communities that surround it.  And this has held true not only for the cities that grew up on its Canadian and American edges, but also for other regional locales which, for example, have advertised “come to Buffalo and see the Falls” while building up healthy processing and manufacturing industries based on hydroelectric power.  The Falls’ plenitude of potential riches has engendered divisions ­ competing tourist attractions, for example, or international maneuvering over who would profit from its hydroelectric power ­ but it has also produced connections, as personal as those made by visiting honeymooners and as grand as the bridges that span it and the regional economy it has powered.

Niagara Falls today remains one of the most-visited tourist spots in the world, receiving nearly 20 million visitors yearly.  And yet, planner Ernest Sternberg argues, the spectacle has been poorly exploited as a tourist destination.  Relying solely on the (carefully staged) drama of the falling water itself, little effort has been made to place the cataract in the context of a broader narrative that could sustain a visitor’s experience beyond the 20 minutes that it mesmerizes the average tourist.  This has not always been so.  Before transportation improved with the advent of the Erie Canal in 1825, the Falls’ inaccessibility gave it an air of exotic profundity, and early tourists often spoke of their visits there as pilgrimages to an otherworldly realm where anything at all seemed possible.  For decades afterwards, the cataract maintained its mysterious and magical aura for visitors.  The awful and terrifying spectacle of the so-called “River of Death” invited contemplation of the sublime, of the meaning of nature and the frailty of human accomplishments, and, perhaps most profoundly, the meaning of death.  At the same time, of course, the fame-seeking acrobats like Blondin and Farini drew crowds by braving the horrors of the Falls on seemingly flimsy ropes.  Ultimately, historian Patrick McGreevy argues, honeymooners were drawn to this liminal boundaryspace where the ordinary rules of everyday life might be suspended for the equally otherworldly rituals of passion.

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The Falls also inspired other dreams, no less grandiose but certainly less otherworldly:  dreams of electric power and the fortunes that could be won with it.  The majestic profundity of the cataract had already suffered from the unscrupulous “sharpers” who, on both sides of the border, had taken every advantage of the spectacle’s growing tourist value in the post-Erie Canal era.  These con men ultimately succumbed to the reformist sweep of the Progressive Era, but ready to take their place were the dreamers and speculators of an economy that had just begun its meteoric rise through industrialization.  Rather than seeing a sublime statement about the nature of existence, men like Edward Dean Adams, president of the Cataract Construction Company of Niagara Falls, New York, saw “a power almost illimitable, constantly wasted, yet never diminished ­ gazed upon, wondered at, but never hitherto controlled.” 

By the end of the 1890s, eleven major electric companies had located in Niagara Falls; by 1909 there were twenty-five.  Meanwhile, development on the Canadian side had been stymied by a stubborn belief in steam power and the not-accidental ownership by American companies of the exclusive rights to develop electricity from the Canadian falls.  It was not until after the great coal strikes of 1902 that Canada, made suddenly aware of its dependence on American coal, dug a tunnel under the Falls to generate hydroelectric power.

Thus began Niagara Falls’ domination by industry and economy.  Although some careful planning was evident during that era ­ for example, US water diversions were limited under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, and a treaty with Great Britain similarly limited Canada’s siphoning ­ it was also a time of extravagance and excess.  Humanity’s limitless imagination envisioned future utopias entirely powered by a conquered Niagara Falls.  The popular American comic strip “Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century,” for example, cast the fictional city of "Niagara" as the capital of the futuristic nation.  For a good while, such visions won out over careful planning, and industrial pollutants invisibly poisoned a natural wonder that was already being undermined and obscured by power and processing plants.  In the mid-20^th century, when the industrial strength of the region sagged, Niagara Falls would be bereft of transcendent meaning:  no longer a meditation on the sublime, no longer an exotic outpost of the otherworldly, no longer the centerpiece of an imagined industrial utopia, the Falls became simply a mass of falling water to be witnessed for as long as it entertained the eyeball.The Importance of the Border:  Race and Nation