IN EARLY AUGUST 1869, Frederick Law Olmsted took a stroll around Niagara Falls. After years of civil war, the nation was painfully rebuilding itself, and Niagara, its best-known natural icon, was in need of rescue, a maiden about to be despoiled by nefarious mustache-twirlers. The Falls required a savior, and the eminent landscape architect and planner—already famous for co-designing Central Park with Calvert Vaux—fit the bill.
Fred Olmsted was an enthusiast. Born to a well-off Hartford family who traced their lineage back to Connecticut’s original settlers, he spent his youth being supported by his father as he threw himself into different careers. He went to sea and almost died of scurvy. He bought a farm and won a prize for his pears. He rambled around England and wrote a travelogue, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. He toured the American South as a correspondent for The New York Times and wrote three volumes of essays, collected as The Cotton Kingdom and still considered one of the most vivid contemporaneous accounts of slavery. When the Civil War broke out, he founded the U.S. Sanitary Commission, predecessor to the American Red Cross, and ran it with autocratic efficiency. Then he headed for California to oversee an unsuccessful gold mine. While there, he fell in love with the beautiful Yosemite Valley and lobbied the California legislature to preserve it for posterity in a state of nature. Now, coming back to his own side of the country, it made sense he would turn an eye to the East’s great wonder, Niagara. What he saw there appalled him.
The most common photo of Olmsted—the one that appears on signboards in Niagara Falls State Park—shows a bearded, heavy-browed grizzly of a man, a tremendous forehead enclosing the deep thoughts percolating behind it. But a photo in the New York Public Library gives a better sense of Fred’s character. In it, five young men sit before a table holding an open book. Four of them—including Frederick’s younger brother, John Hull Olmsted—are students at Yale. Frederick was meant to be enrolled there as well, but was prevented from matriculating when an attack of poison sumac weakened his eyes. The four Yale students gaze confidently at the camera, no one more so than Charles Loring Brace, a fervent young man who would go on to become a well-known humanitarian and founder of the Children’s Aid Society. Brace frowns into the camera with the powerful moral conviction he held even as an undergraduate. Frederick Law Olmsted, an intense youth with pretty, almost feminine features, gazes avidly at his lifelong friend as if hoping to find his own life’s mission written on Brace’s stolid face.
By 1869, he had found it. After the Civil War, Olmsted took up the cause of Reconstruction. Returning to New York from his nonproducing gold mine, he helped manage a new, idealistic magazine he had co-founded, The Nation, while launching the landscape architecture firm of Olmsted & Vaux. Within four years, the firm had been consulted on parks and campuses in Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Albany, Providence, Newark, Montreal and the District of Columbia, among others. For Olmsted, this work was not simply an aesthetic avocation; it was moral and patriotic.
Olmsted believed avidly in democracy. And like many nineteenth-century reformers, he believed that democracy required, first and foremost, the elevation of the moral and spiritual condition of the “common man.” This was the purpose behind his public park designs no less than behind The Nation: true democracy could only happen when everyone, from legislators to laborers, shared a common culture.
In the early nineteenth century, as immigrants swelled the population of the young United States, that task looked difficult. After the Civil War, it looked nearly impossible. The war had exposed the sharp divisions that underlay America, not just between North and South, but between rich and poor, city and country. It magnified the challenges of democracy, especially with the drastic and extremely rapid changes society had been undergoing since the early 1800s. The Industrial Revolution, immigration, urbanization, and now emancipation: how was the reeling nation going to embrace and educate a vastly heterogeneous population? And how were those people going to adapt to the new conditions of life in an industrialized, city-centered world?
These issues furrowed Olmsted’s heavy brow as he strolled around Goat Island in 1869, but they galvanized him too. Even with the horrible war still fresh in his memory, he was somehow filled with hope for the future. He shared his ideas with the friends accompanying him: northern New York’s district attorney, William Dorsheimer, and prominent architect Henry Hobson Richardson, who was designing a mansion for Dorsheimer in Buffalo. Later that evening, they were joined by a couple more well-heeled gentlemen in Dorsheimer’s Buffalo office, and there, according to Olmsted’s account, the movement known as Free Niagara was born.
“A lot of people think Free Niagara meant free the Falls from the grip of commercialism,” Tom Yots tells me. “It may have meant that, but it also meant the Falls were going to be free to the public.”
Tom Yots is the city historian for Niagara Falls, New York. When he was first asked by the mayor to take that position, he said no. He felt he wasn’t qualified; he was no historian, but a preservationist. His expertise was helping owners of historic properties get their buildings designated as local or national landmarks. He did this with his own home, a richly detailed Arts and Crafts mansion not far from the public library, built by Union Carbide founder James Marshall. Tom and his wife Louise have turned it into an elegant bed-and-breakfast.
In spite of Tom’s reluctance, the mayor persisted, and Tom added the duties of city historian to those of preservation consultant and hotelier, working on books about regional history and answering queries from curious tourists. One of the duties he enjoys now is leading walking tours of Goat Island during which he stops and reads Olmsted quotes to the walkers. He has agreed to give me a private version of this walk.
Tom is a small, impish man with a neatly trimmed, whitish-gray beard. He looks a little like the pictures of Calvert Vaux—thoughtful yet energetic. He speaks and moves with precision. He brings his readings with him for our two-person walk around Goat Island on this cold and windy morning. His black binder, filled with snippets of text taped to pages and sticky notes bearing obscure codes, flaps violently in the wind whenever he brings it out. His black cocker spaniel Ollie looks at us quizzically whenever we stop for one of his readings. She’s a creature of habit, and usually the only interruptions to her daily walk are regular stops for treats. Ollie’s a bit rotund, and in the interest of slimming her down, her treats have recently been changed to green beans.
To join Tom at our meeting place—the old Schoellkopf Power Plant on the gorge rim below the Falls—I have cut through the parking lot of the Howard Johnson, crossed an entrance ramp, and sloshed my way down the mucky median of the Robert Moses Parkway to skirt a chain-link fence whose only apparent purpose is to keep pedestrians from accessing the Niagara Gorge or its park. The payoff for this indignity is immediate: Tom takes me right to the viewing platform that pokes out into the gorge and begins pointing out parts of the ruined power plant, destroyed by a rockslide in 1956. He identifies an old penstock outfall in the gorge and tells me there’s still a wrecked turbine sitting down there. You can scramble over to it from the gorge hiking trails. I make a mental note to use this fact the next time I’m trying to convince Bob to accompany me to Niagara Falls. He loves turbines.
As we begin to walk upstream from the old power plant, Tom tells me the old hydraulic canal that used to run right through town lies directly under the Howard Johnson’s indoor pool. This canal was the earliest successful attempt to systematically capitalize on Niagara’s vast power potential. It was begun by Augustus Porter, who worked with civil engineer Peter Emslie to design a hydraulic canal leading from the river above the Falls to the riverbank just below the Falls. Taken over after Porter’s death by Horace Day, the 4,400-foot canal came into use in 1861, and an assortment of mills and factories sprang up along it, using its water directly for their waterwheels and then discharging it through tailraces on the riverbank. By 1885, the dense cluster of mills and factories known as the “milling district” was utilizing all of the canal’s motive force, about 10,000 horsepower. When the first electrical power plants were built, it made sense to put one on the old canal near the factories, where it remained in operation until the 1956 landslide. Only then were the factories of the milling district razed. Today, the factories have been replaced by a Days Inn, a Howard Johnson, Twist o’ the Mist (an ice-cream stand shaped like a giant, soft-serve cone) and, on the site of the old power plant, the Schoellkopf Geological Museum and park.
We’re starting in the milling district because it’s one of the eyesores Olmsted and his buddies deplored. Olmsted, according to Tom, would have liked to include some of this area in the State Reservation, but he was too much of a realist to think he could talk the state into eliminating the prosperous factories and their ugly tailraces, man-made waterfalls spilling dirty water into the gorge. Instead, Olmsted focused on the district he thought he could change, the commercialized area around the waterfall itself and the rapids just above it.
To get to the rapids, we walk upstream along the Niagara Gorge toward the Falls. The little-used asphalt trail we’re on dips down and passes under the Rainbow Bridge to Canada, offering a great view of the gorge, the Canadian riverbank, and the bottom of the bridge. Beyond the bridge, the Niagara Reservation, America’s first state park, begins. We walk past the visitor center, heading for the bridge to Goat Island. As we walk, Tom tells me about the thinking that underlay Olmsted’s park design.
“We have people who would like to go back to honky-tonk and billboards,” he says. “They say we’re using nineteenth-century design principles. I say Olmsted may have had design principles, but he also had a design philosophy. He believed that all human beings were capable of experiencing what he called the aesthetic impulse. If you took a human being and put him into a natural setting, he would have a reaction to that and be uplifted by that.”
When we get to the rapids just above the Falls, Tom stops and flips through his notebook. He finds a picture of the same spot in the 1870s and shows it to me. Along the rushing rapids sits the area Olmsted hated even more than the milling district. There, on the riverbank where Father Hennepin once struggled through dense forest, the booming tourist industry of the post–Erie Canal era gave birth to the Midway’s jumble of hotels, attractions, fenced-off views and “Indian bazaars.” Every inch of it was crammed with cheap attractions, ramshackle buildings and ugly signs. To Olmsted, the scene suggested nature forced to bow to the demands of crass moneymaking. It was not just an aesthetic loss, but a moral one.
Tom has inherited Olmsted’s principled disdain.
“Part of the deal was to remove the amusement park here that was so disgusting,” he tells me. “And now”—he gestures toward the skyline across the river in Canada—“look at what’s here.” The Skylon Tower looms over a thicket of behemoth franchise hotels, and the giant red word “Casino” regards us unapologetically.
Ollie has been waiting patiently at our feet, and a group of tourists coming down the path squeals with delight. The Falls and its rapids are forgotten as the women form a tight circle and begin petting her. Ollie accepts their affection with somewhat dutiful cheer. Every time she behaves pleasantly with strangers, she gets a green bean.
Free Niagara was a well-organized movement led by a group of well-connected public men. What was at stake at Niagara Falls, in their eyes, was not simply landscape, but the future of the United States. People had been complaining about human incursions on Niagara for years. Landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church—a distant Olmsted relative—won great acclaim for his painting of Niagara in 1857, the same year Olmsted and Vaux submitted their plan for Central Park. In his oversized canvas, Church had famously zeroed in on the Falls, giving them monumental stature, but part of why he did so was to edit out the ugliness of the surrounding scenery. Church frequently raised the issue of Niagara’s fate at New York’s swank Century Club, where Olmsted, Dorsheimer and Richardson were also members. In fact, by many accounts, Free Niagara began not with Olmsted’s walk in the woods, but with brandy and cigar-stoked conversations more than 400 miles away.
The Century Club, on 15th Street, was called by Mark Twain “the most unspeakably respectable club in the U.S.” Its policy of accepting men based on intellectual, civic or artistic merit as opposed to mere wealth he wryly called “too thundering exclusive.” Exclusive it was, but while merit was officially monarch, there was no shortage of the wealthy and powerful within the club’s walls. In the Century’s parlor, library and billiards room, New York City’s rainmakers shared their club chairs with a handpicked coterie of artists and literati. Church joined in 1850, John Jacob Astor in 1856, Olmsted and Vaux in 1859, and J. P. Morgan in 1862. Peter A. Porter, the Colonel, was a member until he died in the Civil War. Among the burled walnut bookcases, tufted leather sofas and Persian rugs, the idea of the State Reservation at Niagara was nursed from infant suggestion to full-grown movement. It was not the only public work to be hatched at the Century—the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Sanitary Commission also supposedly began in the club’s cozy drawing rooms.
The men of Free Niagara came to be called the “reservationists,” because they advocated establishing a free public reservation at Niagara. Their strategy for achieving this somewhat unprecedented goal was sophisticated. They worked personal contacts with politicians while attempting to sway the public with a carefully planned series of newspaper articles, pamphlets and lectures bemoaning the rampant greed and bad taste that were ruining the Falls. They funded this campaign by forming a group, the Niagara Falls Association, and soliciting membership dues from prominent citizens nationwide. Eventually, their views were summarized and presented to the governor in 1880 through a special report of the New York State Survey, with a petition signed—thanks to Olmsted and other signature-gatherers—by a Who’s Who of leading citizens, including the vice president, the secretary of war, every Supreme Court justice, eight senators, two governors, eight university presidents, an archbishop, and such prominent public figures as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Jay. The letter accompanying the petition described the situation at the Falls:
Their eastern bank was once rich in verdure and overhung with stately trees. In place of the pebbly shore, the graceful ferns and trailing vines of the former days, one now sees a blank stone wall with sewer-like openings through which tail races discharge; some timber crib work bearing in capitals a foot high the inscription “Parker’s Hair Balsam”; then further up stream more walls and wing dams. Overlooking this disfigured river brink stands an unsightly rank of buildings in all stages of preservation and decay; small “hotels,” mills, carpenter shops, stables, “bazaars,” ice-houses, laundries with clothes hanging out to dry, bath houses, large, glaring white hotels, and an indescribable assortment of miscellaneous rookeries, fences and patent medicine signs, which add an element of ruin and confusion to the impression of solid ugliness given by the better class of buildings.
The photographs accompanying the description were labeled things like “Disfigured Banks: Village Shore of Upper American Falls” and “Disfigured Banks: Repulsive Scenery Approaching Goat Island Bridge.”
The term “disfigured” comes up again and again in the reservationists’ writings, as if Niagara were a body injured—as so many American bodies had just been—in violent battle. Reading their fervent pleas, written when the devastating effects of industry on the environment were only vaguely understood, you can’t help but feel the overwhelming urge to heal a nation that had just been torn apart by war. Restoring Niagara was like restoring the innocence and idealism that had been slipping away since the start of the nineteenth century. It was going back, as so many people wanted to do, to the principles and promise that gave birth to the young United States.
For Olmsted, restoring the scenery was critical to recovering that vision. The moral uplift inherent in nature was only inspired by the right kind of landscape. Niagara’s scenery was doing the opposite.
Since the Civil War, a new class of tourists had been coming in increasing numbers to the Falls, and Olmsted disapproved of their taste. They were giving the Falls a perfunctory glance—sometimes from a carriage no less—and then indulging in the town’s panoply of “degraded” amusements. Chief among these was Prospect Park, at the north end of the American Falls, which Olmsted and the reservationists heaped with scorn. Jonathan Baxter Harrison, hired by the reservationists to write letters to prominent newspapers, called Prospect Park “a poor circus with a cheap celebration of the Fourth of July.” Thomas Holder’s popular guidebook of the same year sees Prospect Park in a very different light. Holder assures us that at the park “every conceivable aid of science has been used in preparing the means of passing time pleasantly, a handsome Art Gallery and Pavilion, Theater, Ball Rooms, and Restaurants, forming features of the menu, while the beautiful Electric Light, thrown through colored glasses upon dancing fountains of water, give at night a magical effect seldom witnessed elsewhere.”
The reservationists disagreed. They hated the theater and art gallery; they thought the restaurants low and tawdry, and the nighttime dancing obscene. They reserved special contempt for the artificial lights. There’s more than a whiff of snobbery in all of this, but Olmsted really believed that the nation’s future was at stake: he deplored Niagara’s little park for its lack of high purpose, not its travesties of wilderness. Much influenced by the Romantic-sentimental view of nature as a kind of living, breathing sermon, Olmsted and Vaux designed parks for nature worship. In a telling essay from the same time called “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” Olmsted claimed that parks were replacing churches as sites of spiritual regeneration. When the Excise Law closed grog shops on Sundays, park attendance went up; church attendance did not.
Olmsted’s landscape designs, like his books and his Sanitary Commission, were driven by his zeal for social reform. But he was no revolutionary. His ideals of both behavior and beauty hearkened back to longstanding principles of gentlemanly life. His appreciation for nature was strongest in places where gently rolling hills, open grassy fields and pleasing prospects evoked the pastoral grounds of English country manors. It was an elevated aesthetic taste—those eighteenth-century landscapes had been created, after all, to prettify peasant realities for the landowning English aristocracy. But to Olmsted, who was both a democrat and a snob, the aristocrat’s taste was the right taste, and ought to be taught to the common man. Just as his friend Charles Loring Brace argued that all children, even those of the lower classes, must be taught to read, Olmsted aimed, as Tom Yots puts it to me at the rapids, “to raise the opportunities for people—no matter who they were—to be in the landscape.”
Olmsted’s best parks are so naturalistic they are often perceived as nature itself, slices of preserved wilderness, neatened up and made more user-friendly. In fact, they are massive engineering projects, carefully designed, constructed and maintained. Central Park feels like a nicely tended piece of New York’s precolonial environment, but it’s really New York’s largest art object, a monument built from the ground up by 4,000 laborers who blasted out rocks, built watercourses, installed drains and moved 5 million cubic yards of soil to create natural-seeming rolling hills, meadows and woods where there was only flat swampland before.
Based on the theory and practice of earlier English landscape designers, laid out according to eighteenth-century theories of the picturesque and the pastoral, Olmsted’s parks are highly artificed works of design expertise. He considered himself an artist; plants and trees were his paints. In fact, he constantly feared that posterity would overlook the extensive work that went into his landscapes. This has certainly happened at Niagara Falls. Widely credited with “preserving” Niagara after the Porters could no longer do the job, Olmsted would more rightly be hailed for having rebuilt it in the picturesque mode.
“The Canadians originally had their carriage road farther back,” Maureen Curry tells me. “Olmsted was the one who convinced them to put it closer to the edge, and his reasoning was that it would keep carriages off Goat Island.”
Maureen, a cheery brunette in a Fair Isle cardigan, has driven up from Buffalo to meet with me. She’s an environmental educator with the State Parks Office, and the person they nominated when I called and asked for someone to talk to me about the Olmsted legacy at Niagara. I’m sort of expecting Maureen to be a little defensive; just about every single person I’ve talked to has some criticism for State Parks and how they handle the Niagara Reservation. Complaints about the state’s failure to preserve the Olmsted legacy have gotten louder since park concessions were outsourced to global hospitality and food service vendor Delaware North, famous for managing such natural wonders as the Wheeling Island Racetrack and Gaming Center, the Phoenix Park ’n Swap, the Toronto Blue Jays’ SkyDome, and the service plazas on the New York Thruway. But to my surprise, as soon as I raise the topic of Olmsted’s design philosophy, Maureen launches into a critique of her own.
“Olmsted didn’t want there to be statues and monuments in the State Reservation,” she tells me. “He said they would be as appropriate as stocking Goat Island with wolves and bears! And yet, here we are today, one hundred years later, filled with monuments and statues.” I’m familiar with the wolves-and-bears quote: Tom Yots read it to me as we stood at the giant bronze statue of Nikola Tesla in front of the Cave of the Winds visitor center. Delaware North seems to have heard it too and misinterpreted it: they have stocked the State Reservation with information officers dressed up, for some reason, as big yellow bears.
Maureen enumerates the many ways the current reservation differs from Olmsted’s ideal: he didn’t want any plantings or gardens—now there’s the Great Lakes Garden at the main visitor center, and more landscaping throughout the park. Olmsted didn’t want a second bridge marring the view of the upper rapids from the pedestrian bridge; a second bridge has now been added for cars. He wanted to keep concessions off Goat Island; now there’s a snack bar at the Cave of the Winds and a giant restaurant and bar at Terrapin Point. Most dramatically, Olmsted only reluctantly agreed that carriages might be allowed on Goat Island, but he insisted on keeping all carriage roads at least 50 feet back from the riverbank. He wanted people to be forced to get out of their carriages and walk to the edge of the Falls. Furthermore, he wanted all of Goat Island threaded with beautiful paths and frequent benches, to encourage leisurely walking and quiet contemplation. There are no walking paths through what remains of those woods today. A trolley circumnavigates the island, dropping tourists at the various viewpoints.
Large parking lots occupy both ends of Goat Island now. It isn’t possible—fortunately—to drive around the island and view the Falls from your car, but it is possible to park, run out to the nearby viewing platform, and snap a few pictures before hitting one of the three souvenir shops on the way back to your car. The Niagara Reservation—tourist materials now refer to it as the Niagara Falls State Park—is today one of the top two revenue producers in the New York state park system. I point out to Maureen that this is funny since Free Niagara is in fact a free park.
“Well,” she says, for the first time showing a slight amount of hesitation, “the park—ing lots.” Those $10 parking fees, it seems, add up. And the Niagara Reservation has a special arrangement inside the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation that allows them to keep a percentage of their revenue, instead of having it all go back into the general state parks kitty. Which means, far from encouraging people to walk more, the state park is actually invested in making it easier for them to drive onto the Niagara Reservation. Along with trolley fares and leases to park concessionaires, it’s how they make their money.
But that’s not as relevant, according to Maureen, as the fact that people simply don’t want to be inconvenienced at all when coming to see the Falls. In the basement of the administration building, we hover over a foam-core-mounted aerial view of the entire reservation, and Maureen talks wistfully of Olmsted’s visions of slow strolls and quiet reflection in the woods. People were actually upset, she tells me, when State Parks shrank the parking lot at the back end of Goat Island to let more woods grow in.
“We’re gradually becoming a society that doesn’t understand the outdoors,” she tells me. “I think we’re a society that has to change our perspective on how to enjoy nature.”
How to enjoy nature is exactly what Olmsted was trying to teach the public. Environmental preservation at Niagara is often framed as a return to the values and principles of Olmsted. Like the Porters, he’s considered nature’s savior. But Olmsted’s park designs weren’t homages to nature; they were social engineering using nature as medium. He was interested in the landscape mainly for what it could help him do.
In 1883, after much public campaigning and behind-the-scenes string-pulling, the Free Niagara movement finally triumphed. New York governor Grover Cleveland—a Buffalonian who loved fishing on the Niagara River—signed a bill to allow the state to use eminent domain to acquire private lands and create a reservation around the Falls. The lands recommended for purchase by the State Survey—in consultation with Olmsted and the Niagara Falls Association—were Goat Island, Bath Island (now Green Island), the Three Sisters, and a long, thin fillet of land along the river from above the Falls to the Suspension Bridge. Two years and many letters and lectures later, the state legislature made available the actual funds. Olmsted and Vaux were appointed to plan the first state park in the United States. When the reservation opened to the public with great fanfare, the Niagara Falls Gazette crowed, “The spirit of the wilderness has come back to Niagara.” In helping the state choose nature over industry, Free Niagara had proved that the public right to enjoy nature should trump business’s right to despoil it. Or had they?
Within one year of the creation of the State Reservation, a group of businessmen formed the Niagara River Hydraulic Tunnel, Power and Sewer Company and received a state charter to divert water from just above the reservation. One of the directors of this company (later called simply the Niagara Falls Power Company) was Charles Lanier, the treasurer of the reservationists’ Niagara Falls Association. The other one, Edward Dean Adams, was the Niagara Falls Association’s eighth member. On the power company’s list of capital stock subscribers was Thomas V. Welch, a state legislator who helped push through the bill creating the reservation and had then been made superintendent of it. Welch’s business partner, Michael Ryan, a former state assemblyman who was also active in Free Niagara, became a vice president of the Niagara Falls Power Company. And one Thomas Evershed was listed as the power company’s engineer. In his capacity as state surveyor and engineer, Evershed had been the one to survey the land around Niagara Falls for New York and recommend the boundaries for the state reservation.
Once a young man with big ambitions, Evershed had trained as an engineer and self-trained as an artist. In 1849, he had set out for California to strike it rich in the Gold Rush, but like Olmsted, he saw his gold dreams turn to dust. He returned to New York, married and became a state engineer. He dabbled in art, but his lifelong career was as a loyal public servant, working as an engineer mainly on the Erie Canal. By the time of Free Niagara, the white-whiskered Evershed, a precise, hardworking and modest man, was nearing the end of a long but not particularly distinguished career designing ditches and modifying locks. His life’s work, canals, were yesterday’s technology, already being replaced by trains. Following the creation of the Niagara Reservation, plans for harnessing Niagara’s power were bouncing around in newspapers. It was clearly the big thing to be done. For Evershed, age sixty-nine, it was one last chance to make a mark. In 1886, he published a letter in the Lockport Union critiquing another plan. “If the people of Niagara County wish to indulge in a scheme for the management of water-power,” he declared in a tone uncharacteristically grandiose, “let me point out one.”
Evershed laid out a plan to generate 200,000 horsepower of motive force from the waterfall. It called for blasting out a huge tunnel to divert water from the upper river to a location downstream, away from the beauties of the Falls, channeling it through a number of individual wheel pits to run machinery above. Conveniently, the reservation outlines he had recommended to the state did not include riverfront above the upper rapids, where water would be diverted in his plan, or below the Falls, where the wheel pits for his factories would stand. His power plan was completely compatible with his park.
Evershed’s original map is now in the New York State Archives at Albany. One rainy Tuesday, I drive up there to look at it. At the Maoishly named Cultural Education Center, I fill out several pages of paperwork that make the entrance procedures at the American Antiquarian Society feel as loose as air travel in the nineties. After sharing a host of personal information and handing over official ID, I’m handed two single-spaced, double-sided sheets of paper—“Rules of the Research Room Part A” and “Rules of the Research Room Part B.” Only after I’ve made a good show of perusing them am I told that my table awaits.
Evershed’s map is exquisite. Every building is labeled with elaborate, curlicued text, every jut and whorl of the riverbank lovingly inked. The Terrapin Rocks are outlined with precision. Even the librarian, all business upon my arrival, has to stop and admire its beauty.
The State Reservation as Evershed mapped it begins in the north just before the Suspension Bridge. It encloses all of Prospect Park, eats up every riverfront lot upstream of the Falls (most are owned by various Porters) and engulfs a hotel, a pulp mill, a machine shop, a silver-plating works, a stable, a gristmill and Tugby’s Bazaar, a giant souvenir emporium. It ends at the boundary of a piece of land owned by the Niagara Falls Hydraulic & Manufacturing Canal Company, owners of the original hydraulic canal.
Early historians claim Evershed was motivated by a desire to ensure “protection of the natural beauty of Niagara.” But at some point he also began harboring a desire to capture the tremendous amounts of power to be gleaned from the Falls. The map makes it clear that as Evershed planned the state’s acquisition of land for scenery’s sake, the power developers’ interests were, literally, where he drew the line.
Once the reservation was delineated, the men of the Niagara Falls Power Company got to work. But they needed financial backers—preferably those “eastern capitalists” the Porters had unsuccessfully wooed earlier. In 1889, members of the tunnel company met with Edward A. Wickes, an agent for the Vanderbilt family, to form the Cataract Construction Company, a corporation to be the power company’s financial arm. The Vanderbilts already had a stake in Niagara: as owners of the Michigan Central Railroad, they had supported the reservationist cause. Now they threw their financial weight behind power development. So did J. P. Morgan, the powerful banker, another member of the Niagara Falls Association.
Evershed’s plan laid out a means of producing more power than the nation had ever seen generated from a single hydraulic source. The problem was, who would use it? There weren’t enough factories at Niagara Falls to use up that much energy. The minds of the power-brokers quickly turned to transmission—how to get Niagara’s power to places like nearby Buffalo, where it could be sold. Engineers came up with fantastic schemes. One called for building a monster steel driveshaft that would extend from Niagara all the way across New York, as if the Empire State were a massive machine and Niagara Falls its piston. Local factories could simply strap a belt to the shaft and go. Another plan suggested connecting New York and Chicago with a giant pneumatic tube that would run through Niagara, where turbines would inject it with compressed air: the Falls pumping away like the nation’s heart.
But the way of the future, it seemed clear, was electricity. Getting the waterfall to make electricity was simple: Jacob Schoellkopf had installed a Brush electric generator on the hydro canal in 1881 and used it to power streetlights in Niagara Falls. But no one had transported electricity from one place to another without losing massive amounts of it. The Cataract Construction Company cabled the world’s foremost electricity expert, Thomas Edison, in Europe, asking if long-distance electricity transmission was feasible. Edison’s reply was confident: “No difficulty transferring unlimited power. Will assist. Sailing today.”
Still not convinced, the power brokers kept their options open, even as workers began blasting out 300,000 tons of rock for an 18-by-21-foot tunnel, 160 feet below ground. The Niagara Falls Power Company formed a blue-chip committee of scientific experts, the International Niagara Commission, to canvass the world in search of the best method for generating and transmitting power. Convening at the exclusive Brown’s Hotel in London, the five distinguished scientists, chaired by eminent Scottish physicist Lord Kelvin, issued invitations to select groups to “submit projects for the development, transmission and distribution of about 125,000 effective horsepower on the shafts of water motors at the Falls of Niagara.” Prizes were offered. Eventually, fifteen European and five American competitors threw their hats into the ring. Eight prizes were awarded, four for pneumatic plans and four for electric ones. Unfortunately, none of the winners was perfect. The power developers still didn’t have a plan they could use.
In the end, it wasn’t the homegrown Edison who came up with the method for transmitting electricity long distances, but his rival genius, Nikola Tesla. An eccentrically brilliant Croatian with sleek black hair, sparkling black eyes and impeccable sartorial taste, Tesla had invented a motor that used alternating current in 1888. Hoping to secure his future—he had already been bilked out of promised money for some engineering upgrades he had done while working for Edison—Tesla filed a series of patents pertaining to his motor.
George Westinghouse, the tireless inventor and patent mogul, immediately saw the value of Tesla’s patents, and bought them all. (Sadly for the perpetually broke Tesla, he paid a fraction of what they were really worth.) Westinghouse had been looking for a way to break Edison’s monopoly on electrical innovation, and this was it. He had earlier declined to submit a plan to the International Niagara Commission’s contest, but in 1892 he notified the gentlemen of the Cataract Construction Company that he had the answer to their problem. Using Tesla’s technology, the Westinghouse scheme “stepped up” electrical impulses, sending high voltages over wires quickly, then stepped them down again when they reached their destination. As a result, much less electricity was lost. Coleman Sellers, president of the Niagara Falls Power Company, visited Westinghouse’s factory for a demonstration.
Lord Kelvin still thought using alternating current would be a “giant mistake.” But Westinghouse was transmitting power already at smaller operations in Oregon and Colorado, and in 1893 he lit the entire World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago using Tesla’s technology. The famous White City at Chicago’s World’s Fair demonstrated in miniature how transmission at Niagara would work. The directors of the Cataract Construction Company were finally convinced. In November 1896, Tesla’s high-voltage AC transmission and polyphase motor brought Niagara Falls power to Buffalo and changed the course of American history.
The giant statue of Nikola Tesla that looms outside the Cave of the Winds visitor center today is as little like Tesla as can be imagined. Dressed in academic robes, the bronze Tesla broods over an open book, although his flesh-and-blood counterpart usually got his ideas while rambling around outdoors in morning coat and spats, or while in the middle of nervous breakdowns. Entire generating apparatuses would appear to him as three-dimensional visions, every detail worked out. Tesla was a quirky, driven, nervous genius; his bronze avatar is ponderous and grave, undisturbed by the children and tourists constantly climbing into his lap to pose for pictures. But even true to life, he’d be exactly the sort of monument Olmsted’s plan was designed to avoid.
As the power company was digging its tunnels and casting about for its technology, the “re-naturing” of Niagara’s parkland got under way.
One year after the Evershed plan was released, Olmsted & Vaux submitted a plan for improving the Niagara Reservation. In it, Olmsted sneered at the “artificial improvements” that had been made at the Falls previously—things like the flowerbeds, fountains, pavilions, decorative bridges, artificial ruins, “specimens of pseudo-rustic work and of pseudo-wild gardening” to be found in the current Prospect Park. He harped on the artificial illumination of the Falls at night. The public, he sniffed, may clamor for such “decorative detail,” but they should be ignored. Ultimately, public taste would improve through “civilized progress,” and nothing would be worse than to give in to current low desires and turn the reservation into “an affair of the sumptuous park and flower-garden order.”
The plan, according to the heartily approving park commissioners, admitted “nothing of an artificial character not absolutely essential to the proper enjoyment of the Reservation by the people.” The word “proper” was significant. All those morally uplifting strolls could damage the grounds, so the plan set out suggestions for keeping people to the walks and not trampling plants, kicking off topsoil, or wearing down rock outcroppings. Olmsted was adamant that all concessions must be banned from the reservation. Even picnicking should be off-limits, allowed only in a special area near the entrance. Picnicking, snacking and drinking were not conducive to serious contemplation. No doubt he would be appalled today to see his own ponderous face emblazoned on an interpretive sign inside the Cave of the Winds snack bar and ice-cream stand.
Olmsted & Vaux’s recommendations were meant to keep the landscape pristine, once it had been rebuilt. “We are far from thinking that all that is required to accomplish the designed end is to ‘let Nature alone,’” they wrote. In fact, nature might not always get it right: “Inconsistencies, discordancies, disunities and consequent weaknesses of natural scenery may result, even at Niagara, from natural causes.” These natural causes included landslides, rockfalls, erosion, even ugly trees. The plan the landscape firm submitted took care to prevent, and when necessary, correct, such blights. Thus, they recommended a host of improvements to nature: sloped viewing platforms, balconies built out from the rock cliffs, “rip-rap walls” of rubble to prevent riverbank erosion, a protective roof over the Cave of the Winds walkway, trees planted in artfully “natural” configurations and gates and turnstiles to control crowds. They added an equal number of recommendations meant to disguise the necessary artificial elements: an elevator to replace the incline railroad, disguised paths to replace stairways, vines and creepers to hide retaining walls and low-profile fences, bridges and walls.
Far from a “return to wilderness,” this carefully designed park was devised to create an impression of nature through artificial means. The New York Tribune published an editorial praising the choice of Olmsted and Vaux as Niagara’s new designers. Their art, it declared, would not hesitate to reshape nature: “If need be it can make a rugged cliff more bold, and shadows deeper and more mysterious as readily as it can add a fresh grace and delicacy to the foliage upon the trees and undershrubs.” The landscape architect, no less than the landscape painter, could add a bit here, clean things up there, inject drama or create a unified effect where necessary. Church had eliminated factories and hotels from his famous painting of Niagara; why shouldn’t Olmsted disguise his paths and railings?
This was “improvement” to nature, just as the Porter brothers’ fish pond and tower had been. It just worked with a new aesthetic: one that banished man. Like his urban parks, Olmsted’s plan for the Niagara Reservation focused on hiding all evidence of the human hand, blocking out “unnatural” buildings and roads and obscuring the industrial uses of falling water. The new reservation took the factories and power plants out of the picture, even as it quietly protected the business of what was now a state-backed private industry, the power company. The park design convinced the public that industrial abuse had ended, when in fact it was only getting under way. When the mills were right there, at least you could see and smell what was pouring out of their tailraces. Now the mills on Goat Island were leveled, the diverted water buried in a hidden tunnel. With electrical transmission in place, new factories could be built outside the milling district. And the industries that would soon arrive to take advantage of Niagara’s cheap power—the aluminum smelters, electrochemical companies, silicon, chromium, tungsten, molybdenum and carbon-titanium manufacturers that would soon fire up their furnaces—would produce a far more toxic breed of by-product than what had poured out of paper plants and sawmills. The despoiling of the Niagara didn’t stop; it just went underground.
With industry moved out of view, the park commissioners began to institute Olmsted’s vision. Fences, tollhouses and about 150 buildings were leveled, including mills, shops, bathhouses, homes and a dancing pavilion. Millraces were filled up; the old incline railroad was demolished. But it wasn’t just a case of removing the artificial. Things had to be built as well. The commissioners graded and sodded land, drained swamps and planted trees. They added restrooms, lights, elevators, sewers and three and a half miles of macadam roads. The principle behind all of this, according to reservation commissioner and historian Charles Dow, was simple: “Back to Nature.”
The early commissioners were true to Olmsted’s vision of artificial wildness; they took care not to “gardenize” when they planted flora, and they kept the park free of the memorials and monuments Olmsted deplored. But Dow admits that “sometimes it has happened that the return to nature has, in reality, been an improvement upon nature.” The end result was “such charming improvements upon nature as Prospect Point, Hennepin View, Dow View, and the Loop Pond.” At all of these places, wooden platforms and stairs were removed, and replaced by artificially elevated landfill and natural-looking rock. “Nature,” Dow declares, “has been so admirably simulated that beauties which are in reality the product of human skill seem always to have existed.”
As all this nature simulation was proceeding, industrial interest in the Falls spiked. Dow expresses puzzlement at the “remarkable activity” around power development that began in 1886, noting that it would be “interesting to speculate upon the psychological causes of this sudden accession of commercial interest in Niagara.” He suggests the Free Niagara movement, by bringing the region into the public eye, may have touched off the stampede of industrialists eager to exploit the Falls. He does not point out that many of those very industrialists were key figures in Free Niagara all along.
In Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, Olmsted writes of his visit to Eaton Hall, an estate partly shaped by famed English landscape designers Humphrey Repton and Capability Brown. The gorgeous grounds inspire the young Olmsted to effuse rhapsodically on the art of the landscape designer: “What artist so noble,” Olmsted muses, “as he, who with far-reaching conception of beauty and designing power, sketches the outline, writes the colours and directs the shadows of a picture so great that Nature shall be employed upon it for generations, before the work he has arranged for her shall realize his intentions.”
Nature here is the landscape artist’s handmaiden. The artist makes the design, then uses nature to fill it in. Although Olmsted is almost always touted as a devotee of the natural, nature for him was a means and not an end. It was a tool, to be wielded in the service of art and the public good, but a tool nonetheless. In this, he was in agreement with the industrialists who arrived at the Falls at the close of the nineteenth century, eager to exploit its massive motive power. Both were intent on the “designing power” of Nature. But where Olmsted saw a paintbrush, they saw a piston.
The park played into their hands further by helping to create the division of purpose—over here is nature, over there, behind that hedge, is industry—that enabled the full industrial exploitation of the Falls to begin. The hack fares, admission fees and small-time cons that had beleaguered tourists were nothing in comparison with the money to be made now. And the small shop owners, cabdrivers and con men who had made money off the place were chased out of town and replaced by Morgans, Astors and Vanderbilts. Over the next sixty years, industrial incursions on the Falls would increase exponentially, ushering in a new era of rampant energy consumption and industrial pollution. And in keeping with the spirit of Free Niagara, the elaborate disguise of those incursions would keep pace. Olmsted and his companions had inaugurated a new era at Niagara: the era of fake nature, an artificial wilderness designed to hide all evidence of design. Their park, while beautiful, solidified an opposition between “natural” and “man-made” that misrepresents our relationship to nature, obscuring the very real, increasingly critical role we play in the ecosystems of which we are part.
In separating how it looks from how we use it, Olmsted unwittingly made it possible for industry to go to work destroying the environment at Niagara more fully than ever before. As the twentieth century dawned, the power-brokers took over management of Niagara. The massive changes they brought about would bring the Falls completely under human control and would reshape the landscape in more dramatic ways than even the Porters could have imagined. The twentieth century would see Niagara’s transformation from nature’s masterpiece to ours.