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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