Railroad Station: New York Central Station, Falls and Second St., for New York Central System, Lehigh Valley R.R., Pere Marquette Ry., Michigan Central R.R., Wabash Ry., and Canadian National Rys.
Bus Stations: International Railway Terminal, Riverway opposite Prospect Park, for Canadian-American Trailways; Falls St. Terminal, foot of Falls St., for Greyhound, Great Eastern, Gray Coach, and Niagara Scenic Bus Lines, sight-seeing busses, and shuttle service to Canada.
Airport: 6 m. NE. on State 18D; no scheduled service.
Bridge: Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, Whirlpool St. and Mill Ave.; tolls: car and driver 25¢, each additional passenger 5¢. The border may be crossed quite casually. Naturalized U.S. citizens should carry proof of naturalization. Noncitizens require passport and visa. Automobiles may enter Canada for a 48-hour period upon deposit of registration card; 60-day tourist permits are free and renewable for 30 days. Corn on the ear and plants with roots may not be carried into Canada. U.S. residents returning from Canada are allowed to bring in, exempt from duty, goods up to $100 in value after a visit of not less than 48 hours.
Street Busses: Fare 8¢, 2 tokens for 15¢.
Taxis: 25¢ up; zone rates. Sight-seeing cabs slightly higher.
Accommodations: 16 hotels; wide range of tourist homes and tourist camps.
Information Service: Chamber of Commerce, 43 W. Falls St.
Motion Picture Houses: 8.
Golf: Municipal course, Hyde Park, Hyde Park Blvd. between Pine and Linwood Aves., 27 holes, greens fee 75¢.
Tennis: Hyde Park, free.
Swimming: Hyde Park, free.
NIAGARA FALLS, NEW YORK (575 alt., 77,374 pop.), stands in the corner formed by the river at the falls; and Niagara Falls, Ontario, stretches northward from the brink of the Horseshoe Falls. The world-wide reputation of the falls as a natural wonder attracts more than 1,500,000 visitors annually—particularly honeymooners—who promenade along Falls Street and through the parks, crowd the many tourist quarters, and purchase countless souvenirs and camera films. The State has carefully preserved the beauty of the area above the falls; and, in order to preserve the cataract as a spectacle, a British-American treaty limits diversion of water to 20,000 cubic feet a second on the American and 36,000 on the Canadian side.
The wide lawns of Prospect Park extend to the very edge of the roaring waters. Crowding the park and reaching northward along the gorge to Ontario Avenue is the business and shopping district, a collection of three-and four-story structures dwarfed by the 17-story United Office Building. The main industrial district borders the river above the falls, and from the smokestacks along Buffalo Avenue constantly rise the fumes of industry. The large central part of the city is residential, the more exclusive district being the De Veaux area to the north, just east of Whirlpool State Park.
Control of this region was of strategic value in the Colonial period because of the seven-mile portage around Niagara Falls—the only break in the all-water journey between the St. Lawrence and the upper reaches of the Great Lakes. The first published view of Niagara Falls, reproduced in a volume in 1697, was a sketch made by Father Louis Hennepin, who visited the falls on December 6, 1678. In 1745 and 1750 the French built two forts near the falls to supplement Fort Niagara at the mouth of the river and to guard the upper end of the portage. Before the approach of the British in 1759, Chabert Joncaire, French master of the portage, burned the forts and retreated across the river.
Under British occupation, John Stedman received a grant of land along the river from the Indians and became master of the portage. Fort Schlosser, more substantial than its predecessors, was erected by Captain Joseph Schlosser, a German officer in the British army. An old stone chimney, the only part of the French forts not destroyed by Joncaire, was built into the mess hall of Fort Schlosser and now stands, reconstructed, on the grounds of the Carborundum Company.
Augustus Porter visited the place in 1795, returned in 1805 or 1806, purchased the land immediately surrounding the falls, moved his family there, built a gristmill, and succeeded Stedman as master of the portage. Visioning a manufacturing center that would rival the English city, Porter named the settlement Manchester. The fighting that took place on the Niagara Frontier throughout the War of 1812 culminated in the burning of Manchester and Fort Schlosser by the British in 1813. Only a few houses escaped the flames.
When Porter realized that the Erie Canal had destroyed business on the portage, he urged capitalists to develop Niagara power. As a result, a canal between the upper and lower rivers, begun in 1852, was completed in 1862 at a cost of about $1,000,000. In 1877 the entire property was bought at auction for $76,000 by Jacob F. Schoellkopf, whose descendants merged their holdings with the Niagara Falls Power Company during the World War. Niagara water power turned the first generator in 1881; power lines reached Buffalo in 1896 and Syracuse in 1905; today they extend into western and central New York, serving a population of more than 2,500,000. The more than 450,000 horsepower of electric current generated, not only turns the wheels of local plants producing abrasives, paper, flour, foundry materials, and machinery, but also has made possible the remarkable technological development of the aluminum, calcium, carbide, ferroalloy, silicon, and graphite industries. About one third of the city’s population is of foreign stock, with Italians and Poles, who supply most of the labor in these factories, predominating.
POINTS OF INTEREST
The NEW YORK STATE NIAGARA RESERVATION, 412 acres in area, includes Prospect Park, Luna, Goat, and several smaller islands, and Whirlpool and Devil’s Hole State Parks. A decade of legislative setbacks preceded the actual transfer of the land in 1885. The bill was signed by Grover Cleveland as Governor. The largest unit in the reservation is Prospect Park, Riverway and Riverside Drive, which extends 1,000 feet along the river chasm and a mile along the rapids above the falls.
Points of Interest 1 to 7 are in the reservation and are listed in a sequence convenient for a tour.
1. PROSPECT POINT (parking 10¢), at the very brink of the ledge, offers a magnificent view of the AMERICAN FALLS, about 1,000 feet wide, the CANADIAN FALLS, with its curved crest of about 2,500 feet, and GOAT ISLAND, which separates the two cataracts. The ‘Thunderer of Waters,’ as the Indian name for the Falls is translated, pours 205,000 cubic feet of water a second over the ledge and plunges with an energy of about 4,000,000 horsepower. Six per cent of the flow passes over the American Falls, the remaining 94 per cent over the Canadian Falls. The white, broken waters of the American Falls seem to hesitate momentarily, then roar over the brink and hit the rocks 157 feet below with a reverberating crash. The Canadian Falls, because of their distance, seem to descend in a smooth, noiseless sheet of water that gently bursts into an immense mass of surf and spray in the cauldron below. Both falls are tinted by rainbows and surmounted by mists that rise in pillars, then separate into lacy, floating clouds. In the evening, colored floodlights are trained on the falling waters. In the winter the freezing spray builds mountains of ice on both sides. Thrill-seekers walked from shore to shore over the ice bridge until tragedy befell a man and his wife in February 1912, when the ice bridge broke apart.
Daredevil stunts have been numerous. In 1829 Sam Patch leaped twice from a platform about 100 feet high into the gorge at the foot of the falls. In 1859 and 1860 Blondin, French tightrope walker, crossed and recrossed on a rope several times, once with his manager riding on his back. In the eighties several people navigated the rapids in barrels; in August 1886, William J. Kendall, a Boston policeman, passed through the rapids protected only by a cork life-preserver; in September 1889, Steve Brodie went over the falls in an India-rubber suit heavily padded and protected by steel bands. The first woman to go over in a barrel was Mrs. Annie Edson Taylor, a schoolteacher, in October 1901. Bobby Leach, an Englishman, went over Horseshoe Falls in a steel barrel in July 1911, and then spent 23 weeks in the hospital recuperating. Jean Laussier shot over the Falls in July 1928, and came out smiling, thanks to a rubber ball of his own construction. Several publicity seekers have lost their lives.
KEY FOR NIAGARA FALLS MAP
1.Prospect Point 2.Hennepin Point 3.Goat Island 4.Luna Island 5.Cave of the Winds 6.Terrapin Point 7.Three Sister Islands 8.Niagara Falls Museum 9.Shredded Wheat Plant 10.Niagara Falls Power Plant 11.Whirlpool State Park 12.Whirlpool Rapids Bridge
NIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO
13.Queen Victoria Park 14.Lundy’s Lake Battlefield 15.Chippawa Battlefield 16.Niagara Gorge and Whirlpool Rapids 17.Spanish Aero Car 18.Niagara Glen 19.Queenston-Chippawa Generating Station 20.Queenston Heights Park
At the close of the Ice Age, the Niagara River plunged over the truncated edge of a dolomite formation into Lake Ontario. At the foot of the fall, the swirling water in time eroded the soft shales from under this massive rock. Blocks of the dolomite, thus undermined, broke off and caused a recession of the crest of the waterfall. As the fall receded, it formed the gorge. This action is still going on; it is estimated that the fall has moved southward from the southern shore of Lake Ontario to its present position at the rate of about one foot a year. If the fall reaches Lake Erie it will disappear. Steps are being proposed to arrest the process and to hold the fall to its present location.
At the Prospect Point parking area, elevators (open 9–6 daily, 8:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m. during July and Aug.; adm. 10¢) lead to the foot of the falls, close enough to the plunging water for one to become soaked with spray and mist and deafened by the roar of Niagara. A small steamer (75¢ a trip) named Maid of the Mist bobs on the rushing currents and pierces the billowing spray beneath the cataract.
2. HENNEPIN POINT is said to be the spot on which Father Hennepin stood when he beheld the Falls and drew the first known picture of Niagara. There is a safe view down the precipice of 187 feet.
3. GOAT ISLAND (picnicking free), a 70-acre park banked by jagged perpendicular rock, splits the rapids into two cataracts and offers one of the best views of the Upper Rapids. The name is in reference to the bearded goat that was the only one of the herd to survive the winter of 1779, after having been left here by John Stedman. More than 200 rare plants grow here.
4. LUNA ISLAND affords a view of the brilliant rainbows that arch through the spray, even in the moonlight. In winter the island is transformed into a kingdom of ice.
5. The CAVE OF THE WINDS (open 9–5 daily, May–Oct.; trip, including guides, flannel and rubber clothing, and special shoes, $1), reached by two elevators leading to the foot of the American Falls, is alive with stinging spray and buffeting blasts of air. A series of paths and bridges offers a succession of unusual views. The climax is the walk to the Rock of Ages, where Luna Fall crashes.
6. TERRAPIN POINT is connected with TERRAPIN ROCKS by a handrailed walk. From the rocks is a view into the deep cleft that forms the apex of Horseshoe Falls, where the vast accumulation of water concentrates in a spectacular exhibition of power.
7. The THREE SISTER ISLANDS, named for the three daughters of General Parkhurst Whitney, builder of the Cataract House, provide splendid views of the Upper Rapids.
8. The NIAGARA FALLS MUSEUM (open, summer, 8 a.m.–12 p.m. daily; winter, 8–5 daily; adm. 25¢), Riverway opposite Prospect Park, is a four-story stone building with a cupola. Founded in 1830 in Queen Victoria Park, Ontario, and moved here in 1864, the museum is one of the oldest in the country. The 700,000 exhibits include a tree 25 feet in diameter, the skeleton of a humpback whale, Indian relics, Eygptian mummies, the rubber ball of Laussier, the barrels in which Mrs. Annie Edson Taylor and Bobby Leach went over the falls, and the one in which Miss Martha Wagenfuhrer plunged through the whirlpool rapids.
9. The SHREDDED WHEAT PLANT (open 8–11, 1–4:30 Mon.–Fri.; guides), 424 Buffalo Ave., occupies two city blocks and employs 600 persons. Visitors are shown the processes in the manufacture of the company’s products and are served luncheon.
10. The NIAGARA FALLS POWER PLANT (open 8–5 weekdays; guides), lower end of Canal Basin at the terminus of the hydraulic canal, contains three 70,000 horsepower units, among the largest hydroelectric generators ever constructed. Dating back to 1890, it marks the first and greatest development of hydroelectric power in the world. During the World War the company absorbed the earlier Niagara hydraulic developments.
11. WHIRLPOOL STATE PARK, Niagara Rapids Blvd. near College Ave., part of the New York State Niagara Reservation, provides splendid views of the swirling waters of the pothole whirlpool, 1,754 feet wide and 126 feet deep. Here the course of the river bends westward, and then, blocked by the jagged mouth of a filled glacial channel, curves back to follow the present gorge to Lake Ontario. Charles Dudley Warner wrote: ‘When it [the Niagara River] reaches the whirlpool it is like a hungry animal returning and licking the shores for the prey it has missed.’ The whirlpool has its gruesome side, for here Niagara usually gives up its dead; one old riverman has recovered 150 bodies.
12. WHIRLPOOL RAPIDS BRIDGE (tolls: car and driver 25¢, passengers 5¢. each; pedestrian 5¢), built in 1887, a double-deck steel arch structure crossing to Niagara Falls, Ontario, provides an impressive view of the gorge and upper rapids.
POINTS OF INTEREST IN ENVIRONS
Niagara University and Devil’s Hole State Park, just N. of city line, 4 m. from Falls; Tuscarora Indian Reservation, 9 m.; Fort Niagara, 14 m. (see Tour 26).
Niagara Falls, Ontario
Railroad Stations: Canadian National Station, Bridge St. head of Erie Ave., for Canadian National Rys.; Michigan Central Station, SE. corner of Queen St. and Erie Ave., for Michigan Central R.R.
Bus Stations: 120 Bridge St. for Gray Coach Lines; Queen St. and Victoria Ave. for Canada Coach Lines.
Street Busses: Fare 10¢, 4 tokens 25¢.
Taxis: 25¢ in city, regardless of number of passengers; special rates for sight-seeing.
Accommodations: 9 hotels, numerous tourist homes.
Information Service: Chamber of Commerce, 1005 Victoria Ave.; Provincial Tourist Information Bureau, Bridge St. and River Rd.; Niagara Parks Commission Information Booth, Queen Victoria Park, Niagara River Blvd.
Motion Picture Houses: 2.
Tennis: Queen Victoria Park.
Swimming: Municipal Swimming Pool, Jepson St.; Niagara Parks Commission Pool, Dufferin Islands.
NIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO (560 alt., 18,727 pop.), incorporated in 1903, is a modern city with an attractive business section. The river front is protected by law; River Road is kept free of unsightly structures, and the power houses are designed to blend with the sheer rock walls of the gorge. The city shares the large tourist trade with its neighbor across the border, and, like its neighbor, it has several factory districts close by avenues of homes and gardens and park areas. A number of nationally known United States concerns have built factories here to avoid paying duty on their products sold in the Canadian market.
POINTS OF INTEREST
The NIAGARA PARK SYSTEM, controlled by the Niagara Parks Commission, extends for 38 miles along the Niagara River between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Niagara Boulevard, a two-lane parkway bordering the river, provides convenient access to the points of interest on the Canadian side.
13. QUEEN VICTORIA PARK, at the falls, with its 196 acres of luxuriant lawns and gardens, offers the best views of both cataracts. At the north edge of the park is the OAKES GARDEN THEATRE, a reproduction of the Shakespeare theater at Stratford-on-Avon.
In the spray at the brink of the Canadian Falls is TABLE ROCK HOUSE (open year round; 9–6 in winter, 9 a.m.–10 p.m. in summer; $1 a person including boots, waterproof coat, and guide through tunnel). An elevator descends to a subterranean tunnel, which leads to lookout portals close to the falling water. Opposite the Upper Rapids is the TORONTO POWER GENERATING STATION of the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario, a large cut-stone building with steel framework, designed in a modified Italian Renaissance style. The 11 great dynamos are visible through plate glass windows. The interior is finished in Italian marble. At the south end of the park are the DUFFERIN ISLANDS, with their numerous cascades and safe swimming places.
14. LUNDY’S LANE BATTLEFIELD, Lundy’s Lane between Main Ave. and Drummond Rd., is marked by the Drummond Hill Cemetery. The bloody battle, fought in the evening of July 25, 1814, has been the subject of debate ever since. British and Canadian writers on the one side, and Americans on the other, claim the victory; others call it a draw. The cemetery contains a monument dedicated to American participants.
POINTS OF INTEREST IN ENVIRONS
(South of Bridge Street)
15. The CHIPPAWA BATTLEFIELD, 4.5 m., is marked by a bronze plaque on a granite monument at the side of the parkway. The Battle of Chippawa was fought on July 5, 1814, 20 days before Lundy’s Lane. The Americans under General Winfield Scott won a brilliant victory.
Niagara Boulevard becomes Queen Victoria Boulevard, which leads to the Peace Bridge, 20 m., Fort Erie, 21 m., and Buffalo, 21 m. (see Buffalo).
(North of Bridge Street)
16. A trip by elevator and through a rock tunnel reaches the bottom of the NIAGARA GORGE and WHIRLPOOL RAPIDS (open 8 a.m. to dark daily, all seasons; 50¢ per person). A 1,500-foot walk along the edge of the rapids offers a close-up view of the turbulent waters as they drop 50 feet in three quarters of a mile.
17. The SPANISH AERO CAR (open 8 a.m. to dark daily, all seasons; 50¢ one way, 75¢ round trip), 0.8 m., offers a ten-minute thrill and an unusual view to passengers in a car suspended on six cables above the Whirlpool.
18. In NIAGARA GLEN, 2.8 m., a dry gorge, huge potholes reveal to geologists the site of an ancient rapids and waterfall. Trails lead to the Lower Rapids.
19. The QUEENSTON–CHIPPAWA GENERATING STATION of the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario (open 9–4; guides), 4.5 m., cutting 300 feet into the side of the gorge, supplies 750,000 horsepower to Canada and the United States. Transmission lines reach 250 miles into New York State.
20. QUEENSTON HEIGHTS PARK, 5.7 m., is on the site of the Battle of Queenston Heights, which took place on October 13, 1812. The BROCK MONUMENT, 185 feet high, is a statue of Brock standing on a Roman column supported by a high base and pedestal. It was dedicated in 1853 in memory of Sir Isaac Brock, British general who was killed in the battle. Refusal of New York militia to cross the river to reinforce their comrades was largely responsible for the defeat of the Americans.
The LAURA SECORD MONUMENT, near by, a granite marker, was unveiled in 1901 in memory of the American-born woman who on June 24, 1813, walked 25 miles on foot, all one day and into the night, to warn a Canadian force of an impending attack. Her warning enabled them to surprise and defeat a much larger American force in the Battle of Beaver Dams.
From Queenston a bridge (toll 25¢ a car) connects with LEWISTON, 7.5 m. (363 alt., 1,013 pop.) (see Tour 26).
