IN THE SPRING OF 2006, I go see Niagara Falls get turned on for the tourist season. I drive for seven hours and get there a day early, on March 31. I head straight for the Three Sisters to get close to the river. I want to see what it looks like before they crank it up.
The best thing in New York’s Niagara Falls State Park, the Three Sisters form a miniarchipelago off the Canadian side of Goat Island. Sitting in the rapids above the Horseshoe Fall, the three little islands, named after an early settler’s daughters, are linked by picturesque stone bridges. I stop on the bridge to the First Sister and look upstream at the Hermit’s Cascade, a river ledge depicted on the island’s interpretive marker as a surging mini-Niagara. Today it’s a few freshets splashing over a flaky slice of rock.
Things perk up on the Second Sister and by the Third, the river’s in a frenzy. Even at low water, the Third Sister feels like what it is, a rocky outcropping in the middle of some of the world’s roughest rapids. Water rushes and swirls furiously around its edges. It’s loud. Just downstream, the river surges over the Horseshoe Fall and disappears. A misty abyss marks the spot.
I am not alone. A middle-aged couple, sneakered and stout, pick their way along the path. They regard the rapids with the dull resignation of people beaten into subjection by miles of Thruway. Dutifully, they take turns posing for snapshots before the man approaches me.
“Do you know where the really big waterfall is?” he asks.
“See that mist over there?” I say, pointing. His face falls.
“The Horseshoe Fall? We saw that.” His eyes go to the Canadian skyline. “I thought there was a bigger waterfall.”
“Come back tomorrow,” I say.
Of course, it’s an exaggeration to say Niagara Falls is turned off and on for the tourists. It is actually turned up for the tourists. In the Niagara Diversion Treaty of 1950, the United States and Canada agree to go halfsies on one of the world’s largest natural sources of hydroelectric power. They promise never to let fewer than 50,000 cubic feet of water per second go over the Falls, and they double that minimum to 100,000 cubic feet per second—about half the natural volume—between 8 A.M. and 10 P.M., April 1 to September 15. This is so that the 20 million or so tourists who flock to Niagara annually, most in the summer, don’t all walk away wondering where the big fall went.
But that’s unlikely. The man I meet on the Third Sister is unusual; most people are surprised to learn that half to three-quarters of Niagara’s water never goes over the Falls. Water diversions for hydropower are enormous, but their effect on the scenery is limited by massive engineering projects that keep everything looking the same. Even as one-half to three-quarters of the Niagara River is drawn off into four hydro tunnels and one canal, the waterfall spreads across basically the same crestline, looks the same depth, and shimmers with the same emerald green. The end result is an environment that elides any conflict between landscape enjoyment and resource expenditure. You see? it cheerfully declares: we can have our lake and use it too.
I imagine the spring increase of water as a kind of local festival: they’re turning the Falls back up! I call the New York Power Authority with visions of electrogeeks dialing up the water and watching it rip in a celebratory mood. Maybe champagne would be involved, or pizza. Donuts, at the very least. On the phone, however, Joanne Willmott, regional manager for community relations, assures me there’s little fanfare around treaty implementation.
“What if I buy the pizza?” I ask.
There’s a moment before her reply. The folks at the Power Authority are all openly suspicious about why I want to talk to them. The Niagara Project is undergoing a relicensing process—their Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license runs out as of 2007—and they appear to be a bit press-shy as a result, even though the press they get is mostly good. The Power Authority is one of the region’s economic engines, and in a place as depressed as Niagara County, criticizing an economic engine is like badmouthing God. In downtown Niagara Falls, near the bridge to Canada, sits a large square glass building. Formerly the corporate headquarters of Occidental Chemical but now popularly known as “the flashcube,” it currently wears a giant sign reading Say NO to NYPA Relicensing. Around town, I keep asking people who put it up. “A crazy guy,” they all say, shaking their heads. No one will tell me his name.
About 80 miles east of Buffalo, Niagara power makes an appearance. The giant transmission towers parallel the New York Thruway for miles as you zoom toward the Buffalo-Niagara region, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, metal linebackers striding across the Mohawk Valley with high-voltage wires in their stunted arms. By the time you get to outer Buffalo, the towers dominate the view five abreast, every two rows accompanied by a taller one, a Roman decurion marshaling his troops. They march alongside I-190 as you speed toward Niagara Falls, then veer off toward the industrial side of town as you enter the city limits. If you drive away from the Falls toward the city’s edge in any direction, you pass under lashings of high-voltage lines, scoring the sky as they take Niagara’s bounty to other, more prosperous parts of the world.
The transmission towers accompany me as I drive to their source on March 31. Joanne and I have arranged to meet at the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, a monster dam built into the face of the Niagara Gorge four and a half miles downstream from the Falls. The Moses plant collects all of the diverted water on the American side in a huge reservoir and runs it through thirteen turbines in the main plant and twelve more in the supplementary Lewiston Pump-Generating Plant, producing, at top capacity, 2.4 million kilowatts of nonstop electricity. The Power Vista—the Authority’s visitor center—is a huge, sunny room suspended over the river at one end of the looming plant. Kids scramble around its maze of displays while their parents try to explain electrons. There’s an outside deck, and when you go out onto it, the deep, low whir of turbines fills your ears. The air seems to buzz with voltage. Huge flocks of gulls wheel and scream over the churning water at the dam’s base, where fish, alive, dead or stunned from their trip through the turbines, are pushed to the surface on outgoing currents. Across the river, the Canadian dam hulks like an opposing giant. It’s impossible not to be awed.
Joanne has the friendly but cautious disposition of a public relations person. She seems especially eager to relieve me of my handbag. She deposits it somewhere mysterious in the back offices, then walks me to the Power Vista’s centerpiece, a vast miniature replica of the region highlighting the Authority’s intakes, tunnels, generating stations and reservoir. The Falls, in one corner, are represented by an inch-high clear plastic mold. Tiny white lights behind the plastic are meant to produce the illusion of frothy water.
At the side of the miniature landscape, Joanne introduces me to Norm Stessing, supervisor of operations, the man (in my mind) who can dial up Niagara’s deluge. He doesn’t look like a power king; he looks like a Norm. He’s medium height, stocky but trim and tanned, with even teeth and a quick, easy smile. His crisp shirt is tucked in perfectly. Norm grew up in the Niagara Region. In the late fifties, when the turn-of-the-century powerhouse was being replaced by the Robert Moses Power Plant, his parents would bring him to see the massive project underway.
Norm dives into explaining how his power plant works with the vigor of a high school physics teacher who really believes in those kids.
“Our generator capacity is one hundred thousand cubic feet per second,” he tells me, explaining the treaty implementation that starts tomorrow. “But during the day our stream share is about fifty thousand.” Before I know it, we’ve launched into a heady conversation about turbine efficiencies, pump storage, voltage step-ups and price differentials. Luckily, I’ve read enough to have a basic understanding, because Norm, pointing to the model switchyard and explaining how voltage gets there through a mile of underground tunnels, is like a twelve-year-old boy who has been given a really, really cool toy.
When Westinghouse and Tesla wired Niagara to Buffalo with alternating current, skeptics were convinced it would fail. The switch was thrown in Buffalo in the dead of night, in order to avoid public humiliation. To almost everyone’s surprise, it worked.
After that breakthrough, the electrification of America happened quickly. In 1910, 10 percent of American homes were wired for electricity. By 1930, 70 percent were. It’s easy to forget how radical a change electrification was. But if there’s a main difference between our lives and those lived in Edith Wharton novels, it has less to do with carriages and corsets than it does with turbines and megawatts. Electrification automated industry, deskilled labor, industrialized agriculture, depopulated rural areas, invented suburbs, and enabled a nonliterate mass media. Our fabulous modern lifestyle—Chicken McNuggets to America’s Next Top Model—all began with electricity.
The change was more than infrastructure; it was a nationwide behavioral modification. And it required reeducation. Americans had to be trained to stop fearing electricity and instead consume it, preferably—at least to the companies who generated and sold kilowatts—in large quantities. Major players General Electric and Westinghouse quickly decided to manufacture demand by inventing a lot of nifty electric appliances: irons, refrigerators, toasters. Just about anything done by hand or with gas, it turned out, could be made electric and sold to consumers as easier. But first they had to get average Americans to adopt what they called the “wedge” product, electric light, because it opened households to everything else. They had to sell the idea of electricity, and in this Niagara was key.
The Falls helped electricity get what marketing consultants today call “mindshare.” Average folks had only a vague notion of what electricity was. But they knew it was deadly; Thomas Edison had proven that. In the 1880s, striving to promote direct current over Tesla’s competing technology, Edison had famously staged road shows meant to discredit alternating current by using it to electrocute dogs. This can’t have made people eager to wire up their homes, especially those with pets. Nor did it help that New York State quickly saw a good use for high voltage, switching the murder penalty from hanging to electrocution in 1888, and dispatching its first killer in the Auburn electric chair two years later. (This one wasn’t Billy Jamieson’s chair; a few modifications had to be made by Stickley so the chair would stand up to the current.) Electricity really needed a spokesmodel, and when the Cataract Construction Company signed on to Niagara’s power push, the PR campaign had its mascot.
In the 1890s, as the Falls were being harnessed, a flood of articles about Niagara power hit newsstands. Harper’s, Nature, Collier’s, McClure’s, Blackwood’s, the Saturday Review and Cassier’s all printed articles describing Falls power projects and promoting the image of Niagara as unending bounty. Popular Science Monthly declared in September 1894 that “people in general have the idea that the Niagara water power is inexhaustible, and so it probably is, so far as human requirements go.” A booklet printed in 1895 to promote real estate speculation in Buffalo claimed that “enough force is contained in the flowing water of the Niagara to run the machinery of the world.” By 1903, Harper’s Weekly could crow that Niagara was turning out, as hoped, to be “an illimitable supply of cheap power.”
Niagara, promoters declared, would even free us from dirty coal, already understood to be a resource that would one day run out. Clemens Herschel, hydraulic engineer for the Niagara Power Project, declared in a special Niagara issue of Cassier’s that “all the coal raised throughout the world would barely suffice to produce the amount of power that continually runs to waste at this one great fall.” This was hyperbole. But his enthusiasm was not unwarranted: compared with coal, a hydroelectric turbine was cleaner, safer, more renewable, and easier to understand—a Constable waterwheel writ large. The Buffalo real estate booklet bragged that Niagara created limitless power “without consuming an atom of the world’s store of fuel, without destroying in the slightest degree the grandeur of the cataract and its environments.” Go ahead and buy that toaster, the message ran; we’ve discovered a source of endless clean energy. Niagara was America’s best-known site of natural splendor. Electricity would simply harness that splendor for man’s use.
Brand Niagara launched for real at the 1901 World’s Fair, the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. The theme was better living through electrification. Visitors were ushered into an electric utopia, featuring electric trolleys, rides, fountains and appliances; a working miniature power plant; and row upon row of electric incubators holding live premature babies, all of it lit by 200,000 incandescent bulbs. At the center was the Electric Tower, a skyscraper featuring a 74-foot artificial waterfall lit by 94 searchlights. On top of the tower was another searchlight, pointing toward the real Niagara Falls.
The famous “Spirit of Niagara” poster for the Pan-American Exposition—called “the most effective advertising poster of all time”—gives us a pretty good idea of how this electric heaven related to nature. With the Buffalo skyline in the distance, the Falls sweep down in a white froth. Emerging from the mist is a lithe nude goddess, head tilted, arms spread wide. Nature as powerful divinity has been supplanted by nature as yielding woman, offering herself for man’s use. Little regret was wasted on her subjection. Before the fair, Lord Kelvin was quoted in the Literary Digest gleefully predicting the day when men would turn Niagara off and on at will.
Here is what happens. Gravity constantly draws water into hydraulic tunnel intakes located in the river above the Falls. In the tunnels, the water travels underneath the city of Niagara Falls, paralleling the river’s course for four-and-a-half miles. But the river drops—not only in the 176-foot Falls, but in the rapids above and below them. By the time the diverted water reaches the power plant’s holding pool, or forebay, it is about 300 feet above the lower river. The higher drop means the water spins the turbines with more pressure, generating more power than it would at the brink of the Falls. The process is duplicated on the Canadian side, where power tunnels are supplemented by a canal. The Canadian tunnel intakes and power plants mirror their American counterparts across the river.
At the Moses plant’s forebay, the water can flow down through the main penstocks, where it spins the turbines and passes out into the lower Niagara River, or it can be pumped as much as 120 feet up into the 1,900-acre Lewiston Reservoir. The reservoir lets the Power Authority collect water at night, when tourists are sleeping and stream share is greater, and then use it for generation during daytime, when power demand is up. Since electricity deregulation, the reservoir also creates an opportunity to optimize financials. As prices vary throughout the day, the Lewiston plant can pump water into its reservoir during periods of low demand for electricity, then release water through the generator when demand is high. It’s a perfect example of buy low, sell high: the Authority spends cheap power to make expensive power.
All this is regulated by the Niagara River Control Center, an arm of the International Joint Commission that manages the Falls. Because rainfall, temperature and even wind direction influence the water level in Lake Erie, and thus how much water flows into Niagara’s strait, River Control measures the river hourly. As its volume varies, River Control calculates the amount each nation can draw down, and calls the power facilities—in the United States, the NYPA Energy Control Center in Utica—every hour to dictate their stream shares.
So on April 1, Norm explains, River Control will call Utica at 7 A.M. with a new stream share, reduced by the amount required to let 100,000 cubic feet per second go over the Falls by eight. Utica will call Niagara, and the workers in Norm’s control room will sit down at their computers and begin turning off reservoir pumps. Each shutdown decreases the flow of water out of the forebay, thus decreasing the flow of water into the tunnels from the river by 4,000 cubic feet per second. When the water coming into the forebay equals the Authority’s stream share, the water going over the Falls should be the amount required by the treaty, and tourists should be oohing and aahing at the sublime power of nature.
“You couldn’t really turn off all of Niagara Falls, could you?” I ask Norm, my enthusiasm for the brute strength of it getting the best of me. “If you and the Canadian plant both just sucked as much water as possible out of the river and ran it through your generators at top speed?”
“We don’t like to talk about it that way,” he says, cracking an involuntary grin, “but in fact, yes, we could.”
I pick up photographer Lisa Kereszi at midnight that night at the Buffalo airport. Bleary from a long day, I drive by her twice outside the baggage claim. I’ve only met her once, but after a barrage of alternately bossy and begging emails, I managed to convince her to fly up to Niagara Falls and meet me for the spring water turn-on.
Niagara power lines swoop above us as we speed out of Buffalo toward Grand Island. As we enter Niagara Falls, the chemical plants are heaving a thick fog into the dark night sky. I slow down so Lisa can get a look at the Power Authority’s giant tunnel air intakes. As we glide by the American rapids, I roll down the windows, and the roar fills the car. I love bringing people to Niagara for the first time.
It’s after one by the time we head for our rooms in the Howard Johnson motel. We are planning to meet at six-fifteen, so we can get to the Three Sisters early and watch the water rise. Lisa has discussed the best spots to photograph the change with people from the State Park. I set my alarm—or think I do, and collapse.
I wake up at six-thirty with Lisa banging on my door. Fifteen minutes later, we’re parking near the Three Sisters. The river volume has already increased dramatically. “Norm told me it wouldn’t start until seven!” I wail. We race across the bridge. The Hermit’s Cascade has gone from a lacy tablecloth to a billowing comforter, pouring over its small shelf with glee. Rock flats from yesterday are now rushing river, and a cascading minifall between the first and second islands has doubled in size. On the Third Sister, the previous day’s boisterous rapids have sprouted jubilant geysers. Everything is louder, faster, greener. Unfazed, Lisa starts taking pictures.
I park myself on a rock. Maybe the water is still rising, I tell myself. I choose a large boulder to stare at. Two Canada geese are holding their ground on top of it. Is the water getting higher? It’s hard to say—stare long enough and the volume seems to grow. I imagine pumps shutting down, gates upstream opening. The rapids seem to get more furious. White explosions shoot higher; the white ring around the rock boils harder. The geese turn around, looking perplexed. Geysers erupt around them. Finally one goose, then the other, lifts itself into flight.
The earliest power plants at Niagara quickly became tourist attractions almost as appealing as the Falls themselves. In 1892, the Cataract Construction Company hired the blue-chip firm of McKim, Mead & White, architects of the original Penn Station, to design their two powerhouses and matching transformer building. The resulting structures were architecturally splendid, with clean neoclassical lines, majestic proportions, and noble ornamentation, all clad in stone excavated from the tunnel. Scholar William Irwin calls them “a monument to modern American industrial and technological civilization.”
They were also a monument to the marvel of electricity. Once the powerhouses were open, guided tours took visitors inside the plants, where they could observe the cleanliness, order and relative quiet of the operation. The production of hydroelectricity wasn’t like the noisy, dirty factories of the Industrial Revolution—far from William Blake’s “dark, Satanic mills,” this was a sparkling industry for a gleaming new age. Visitors could ogle a scale model of the power project installations and take home explanatory literature. Guidebooks declared the tour a must-see attraction.
Some visitors liked the power plant more than the waterfall. H. G. Wells wrote an article for Harper’s after his visit in 1906. “The real interest of Niagara for me was not the waterfall, but the human accumulations about it,” he declared. “The dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more than the Cave of the Winds.” Not only did Wells think the power machinery made for better spectacle; he was unconcerned about its effect on the cataract. He was in agreement with Lord Kelvin: Niagara Falls would be more of a boon to man if it was turned off. “It seems altogether well,” he reported, “that all the froth and hurry of Niagara at last, all of it, dying into hungry canals of intakes, should rise again in light and power.”
“I’ve seen them turn it down to just a trickle,” Larry Siegmann tells us cheerfully. “If they get a boat caught in the rapids, they’ll lower the river in minutes so the boat grounds on the rocks and people can walk right off.” Larry is park manager at the Cave of the Winds attraction, still hugely popular in spite of H. G. Wells’s dismissal. Lisa has arranged for him to give us a private, early-morning preview of the newly enlarged waterfall. We meet him at the park office, and he takes us to the elevator that plunges 170 feet down through Goat Island’s rock. Two tourists try to get in with us, but he chases them away, explaining that the Cave isn’t open yet. This immediately increases my enthusiasm; I’m convinced we’re getting something special.
When it was actually a cave—the last dangerous overhangs were dynamited off in the fifties—the Cave of the Winds was reached by means of a long circular staircase. The elevator was built in 1927. At its bottom, the doors open and we walk through a tunnel onto the rocky sliver of riverbank between the Horseshoe and the American Falls. The jewel-green river contrasts with its dull brown banks. The water’s edge is rimmed with a dirty white cushion. Larry points to it.
“See all that ice? By Monday that will all be gone,” he says. The iceberg is already breaking up. The river level in the Maid of the Mist pool, just below the falls, will rise today by about 11 feet as a result of the treaty’s enforcement. The Maid of the Mist boats, across the way in Canada, have been pulled aground for winter. With water diversion at its maximum, the river is too low for the Maid fleet to sail. They will start up again in May.
Larry supervises the crews who build the Cave of the Winds’ decks every year and tear them down at the end of the season. Since the only way down to the gorge is through the surprisingly small elevator, the job has its challenges. Plywood won’t fit in the lift, so the decks are built with two-by-fours. The constant wet spray rules out power tools, so everything is done with saws and hammers. All equipment for the job has to be disassembled on Goat Island above, brought down, and reassembled at the river. Larry proudly points out a little forklift he took apart and rebuilt.
“One morning, I came out of the elevator and there was an eight-point buck standing there looking at me,” he tells us. “He was all banged up; he’d come over the Falls and survived somehow. The guys made a pet out of him, feeding him apples and stuff.” When management got wind of the buck, they told Larry to get him out of there. Larry thought about shooting the buck, but by then, the construction crew considered it their pet and wouldn’t let him.
“And there’s only one way out,” Larry says, indicating the elevator again. “We called the DEP, and they came out and shot him with a tranquilizer gun so we could put him in the elevator and take him up. He’s living not far from here now.”
He leads us toward the base of the American Falls. Along the railing and the rocky river edge stand thousands of ring-billed gulls. Larry waves an arm, and a few hundred of them rise and form a cloud just over the river’s edge, flapping their wings to hold steady in the fierce wind while loudly denouncing the imposition.
People come on the Cave of the Winds tour to get up close and personal with Niagara. And that means getting wet. Larry stops and gestures upward with a grin.
“We get folks who go right under it and dance around, like they’re taking a shower.” He shakes his head and grins in a way that says tourists do the darndest things.
The deck will eventually reach a point about 15 feet in front of the Bridal Veil Falls, the thin waterfall separated from the rest of the American Falls by Luna Island. It doesn’t yet reach that far, but the view is still impressive. Although the Bridal Veil is by far the smallest waterfall at Niagara, from this angle it’s awe-inspiring. A thick mist rises up from the talus at its base. Larry and his workers will build the decks to zigzag back and forth across the rocks, offering vantage points on the waterfall and spots where freshets of water flow over the tourists’ feet. The final platform, buffeted by mist and wind whipped up by falling water, is always called the “Hurricane Deck.”
As we walk back, the gulls continue to call us names. Thousands of them eye us warily from their spots on the breaking-up ice pack. Lisa takes photos of them.
“Once all that ice is gone,” Larry says, “those gulls will come onto the bank. They lay their eggs here. Then they get really aggressive. They used to lay their eggs on Strawberry Island upstream, but they blocked that off so they can’t go there anymore. Now they come here.” He’s referring to a Power Authority project. Because water fluctuations for power drawdowns interfere with fish-spawning areas and habitats for ground-nesting birds, NYPA covered a number of islands upstream of the Falls with “gull exclusion” devices to help preserve what habitat remains. Larry’s normally cheery face falls briefly.
“The more man changes things, the worse they get,” he declares.
Niagara is not the tallest waterfall in the world. It’s not the tallest waterfall in the United States, or even in New York State. Drive a couple of hours east and you can visit Ithaca’s Taughannock Falls, taller by 45 feet: two and a half hours north of New York City, Kaaterskill Falls is about the same height. As for volume, Niagara is sixth in the world, and at least twelve of the world’s waterfalls are wider. But stand at the brink of the Horseshoe for a few minutes and you’ll hear someone say That’s a lot of water. Niagara’s narrow width accentuates the feeling of volume. One-fifth of the world’s fresh water crowds itself into the narrow strait between Lakes Erie and Ontario, rushing—half of it anyway—over 4,000 feet of brink, year in, year out, with little seasonal variation. The impression you get from the resulting hypnotic downrush is less about size than continuity. That’s a lot of water, and it just keeps coming.
In our plugged-in modern lifestyle, we like to think of electricity too as continuous. Flip a light switch, plug in a laptop, and a stream of electrons rushes out. Blackouts shock Americans because they undercut the illusion of an unending, ever-ready resource, a waterfall of power right there in the wall. Early hydro promoters played up the connection. “After all is said and done, very few people ever see the falls,” declared Thomas Commerford Martin, president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1896: “Now the useful energy of the cataract is made cheaply and immediately available every day in the year to hundreds and thousands, even millions of people, in an endless variety of ways.”
In this view, electricity isn’t an imposition on the waterfall; it’s the distribution of that natural resource to the general population. Your electrical outlet is your own private Niagara, just waiting to be turned on.
Toward the end of Mack Sennett’s 1926 silent Keystone comedy Wandering Willies, the bad guy drops a piece of paper. The heroine picks it up, reads it, and gasps in shock. She shows it to the hero. He too is appalled and together they race off after the villain. What did the paper say? According to film lore, the intertitle giving the paper’s content was rewritten several times: one version had the heroine crying “He was stealing my diploma as winner of the beauty contest!” Another had her saying “This proves he is the president of the Kidnappers Corporation!” The final intertitle, according to film critics, proved the zany, nonsensical quality of Sennett’s Keystone Kops: “Look! A mortgage on Niagara Falls. We must stop him before he shuts off the water!”
But in 1926, the notion of a landgrabbing villain turning off the Falls would not have read as nonsense. Controversy over water diversions raged throughout the early twentieth century, beginning almost immediately after the reservation was established. Between 1886 and 1889, four companies, including the Niagara Falls Power Company, were granted charters to take unlimited water from above the Falls without compensating the state. The park commissioners objected that this was defrauding the public. In giving these monopolistic private companies unlimited rights to river water, they claimed, New York was pouring nature’s splendor into the pockets of greedy robber barons.
What made it even worse was that by the turn of the century, a handful of private corporations dominated the power industry. Electricity development is capital-intensive: building hydroplants and coal-fired generators takes cash, and lots of it. The small power companies quickly consolidated in a flurry of corporate mergers.
In an era when vertical integration was becoming an economic byword, power companies offered up a perfect example of such efficiency, controlling the generation, distribution and utilization of electricity. Power was, as magnate Samuel Insull put it, “a natural monopoly.”
The park commissioners objected vociferously to giving this monopolistic clique unlimited access to Niagara. The state responded by trying to disband the commissioners and transfer management of the park to the board of fisheries, game and forests. But then the press and high-minded public advocates took up the cause. The federal government got involved, and in 1902, the River and Harbor Appropriation bill included the creation of a six-person International Waterways Commission, to be divided between U.S. and Canadian appointees. In 1905, this commission recommended that the nations grant no new water rights until further study of their effects. President Theodore Roosevelt took a stand, announcing in a message to Congress that “nothing should be allowed to interfere with the preservation of Niagara Falls in all their beauty and majesty. If the State cannot see this, then it is earnestly to be wished that she should be willing to turn it over to the national government.” The humor magazine Puck ran a cartoon in 1906 titled Save Niagara Falls—From This. It shows a completely dry Niagara, surrounded by factories, snack stands, advertisements and carnival attractions. Visitors are riding a carousel called The Whirlpool, sledding on a luge-like track down the dry Falls and lining up at a stand to buy “Genuine Niagara Water” in jugs.
In Canada at this time, a grassroots movement had arisen demanding public takeover of the power industry. In June 1906, the “Beck Law” came into being, an act creating the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, a publicly owned utility charged with managing province water resources. Adam Beck, a leader in the public power movement, was appointed its chair. The birth of Ontario Hydro, although it left American-owned power companies in Canada in private hands, was widely hailed as a victory of the public interest over private capital.
In the United States, where public utilities were increasingly seen as creeping communism, the fight to save Niagara Falls turned instead to limiting the rights of private companies. Representative Theodore Burton introduced a congressional bill limiting diversion in 1906. Hearings were held, with developers testifying that their proposed drawdowns provided far more benefit to the public than a pretty waterfall. General Electric’s counsel declared that curtailing their diversion rights would deprive western New Yorkers of jobs: they were just undertaking a huge power and navigation project named, after its originator, Love Canal.
The Burton Act was passed in 1906. A temporary measure to limit diversion, it was replaced in 1909 by the International Boundary Waters Treaty, which granted power plants on the American side 20,000 cubic feet per second, and those on the Canadian side 36,000, little more than was already being diverted. The press hailed the treaty as a guarantee that Niagara’s beauty would be preserved. Secretary of War William Howard Taft, concerned that government not infringe on trade, grumbled to Representative Burton that he was “sorry that you had to put in the words ‘scenic grandeur.’”
But scenic grandeur was exactly the point. The public outcry had made it clear that, just as with Free Niagara, the public valued beauty. Understanding this, the power companies got right to work. Before the ink was dry on the Burton Act, they wanted more water, but it was clear the public wanted to keep Niagara pretty. To most people, that meant limiting water diversions. Industry spin doctors hatched a sophisticated PR campaign. If they couldn’t change people’s minds about the importance of scenic grandeur, they would reinterpret what that meant. And so they set out to convince the public that keeping Niagara pretty meant taking more water away.
In 1918, John Lyell Harper, vice president and chief engineer of the Niagara Falls Power Company, wrote The Suicide of the Horseshoe Fall, arguing that, because of heavy water flow, the Falls were wearing themselves away into a string of paltry rapids. In 1923, he built an operating scale model of the Falls and used it to demonstrate how natural recession would inevitably ruin the cataract. The Army Corps of Engineers agreed. In 1926, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover told a Chicago audience that Army Corps surveys proved the Falls were “slowly cutting a deep gash in the rock escarpment and that unless measures are taken the waterfall probably will become a turbulent rapids.” Niagara should be preserved, he declared, “if for no other reason, for the sake of the thousands of honeymooners who go there.”
The following year, a pamphlet issued by the Buffalo, Niagara & Eastern Power Corporation posed the question “Why is the Horseshoe Fall eating itself to ruin?” The answer, according to power company engineers, was clear: there was too much water! Silly nature. Only bigger drawdowns could save the Falls. Preservation now meant less water, exactly the opposite of what it meant twenty years earlier.
Furthermore, the pamphlet declared, Niagara benefited everyone by providing the cheap, dependable power needed for the “many electro-chemical products which are being manufactured at or near Niagara…and bestowed upon mankind.” This host of goodies was bestowing something else upon mankind: a cataract of toxic waste. The American power plant’s first customer was the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, later the aluminum giant ALCOA. They were soon joined by dozens of other companies that were beginning to use electricity to catalyze chemical reactions, including Carborundum, Mathieson Alkali, Acheson Graphite, Oldbury Electro-Chemical, Roberts Chemical, Hooker Electrochemical, and Union Carbide & Carbon.
By 1925, Niagara Falls was a leading center for the production of abrasives, graphite and graphite derivatives such as electrodes and anodes, dry cell batteries and a wide range of ferro-alloys, metal compounds made by mixing iron with metals such as zirconium, chromium, manganese and silicon. It was also a major producer of sodium hydroxide, a caustic used in everything from soap-making to petroleum-refining. Sodium hydroxide production produces vast amounts of the byproduct chlorine, and new industries sprang up to utilize that waste substance. Niagara Falls became the first municipality in the nation to chlorinate its water, leading to a breakthrough in public health. The number of typhoid, dysentery and cholera cases dropped precipitously. The region also led the way in the invention of chlorinated chemicals: pesticides, plasticizers, fire retardants, chlorinated solvents and chlorinated organics like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, used in electrical transformers) and mirex, a highly toxic flame retardant and insecticide.
The problem with all of these chlorinated chemicals, of course, was that even as they used up the byproduct chlorine, they created problems of their own. Extremely stable in the environment, chlorinated chemicals are not only toxic, but they’re almost impossible to get rid of, especially without proper disposal. With almost no environmental legislation in place, chemical wastes were unceremoniously dumped in the Niagara River, spread on empty lots or poured into wells near the factories.
As industry ramped up and jobs multiplied, public distaste for diversions abated. During the Depression, with jobs scarce, it wasn’t unusual to hear repetitions of Lord Kelvin’s excitement about turning off the Falls. A reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1934 asked the managing editor of the Niagara Falls Gazette if honeymooners would keep coming to Niagara forever. The editor declared they would, “that is, if Niagara doesn’t dry up.” When pressed to explain, the Gazette editor declared, “I would rather have the great factories fed by these waters than to have the tourists that the falls bring, and I would be willing to see the falls dry up entirely if it would bring us the wealth and population that a dozen more factories would put in here.”
He wasn’t the only one. As economic instability grew, interest in the area’s natural beauty waned. The preservationists responded by focusing more and more narrowly on the waterfall. A 1931 report of the Special International Niagara Board anatomized its aesthetic value in painstaking detail, calculating how much of its beauty depended on volume, width, height, clarity and color, going so far as to point out that the “actual volume” of the waterfall was not critical to beauty, though the “impression of volume” was. The report estimated how much water could be removed while maintaining the emerald green, the seeming depth and velocity. Charts, graphs and a special set of color chips were adduced. The report concluded by recommending reshaping the riverbed to raise the water level just above the fall, boosting the appearance of volume. The report was shelved until the 1950 treaty and its subsequent power plant building boom necessitated remediation. But the theoretical transformation of Niagara from sublime natural wonder to engineering feat had begun. Nature would be saved by technology. Or at least the part of it people came to see would.
Why were Niagara preservationists so worried about the waterfall’s beauty? They gave the usual reasons: it was an uplifting spectacle, the birthright of every American. It was also, increasingly, a moneymaker. In 1924, New York State consolidated authority over all of its state parks in one body, the State Parks Council, headed up by Robert Moses. Moses (about whom more later) lost no time in driving out the aged park commissioners and quietly undoing Olmsted’s vision. Gravel paths were paved. Roads were widened. Parking fees were added. The Tuscarora women who had sold beadwork on Goat Island since the early 1800s were phased out, making way for the state’s own souvenir stands. The Niagara Reservation grew more commercial as the cataract shrank.
At the same time, the dark undercurrents of cheap power were beginning to make themselves known. The American riverbank was once again lined with ugly factories. A thick, chemical haze hung over town. Disposing of electrochemical byproducts was an increasing problem. And in 1935, twenty workers filed suit against ALCOA. They were dying of the lung disease silicosis.
At the Power Authority, I asked Norm Stessing how much electricity an average household uses today. About 1,000 watts, he said. There might be stretches of time—when everyone’s asleep, or at work, say—when a home is drawing only 100 watts—only the fridge is running, or the air-conditioning. But in the evening, when you add in lights, fans, television, computers, microwave, hot-water heater, dryer, and cell phone chargers, just for starters, that home draws a lot more watts. Averaged out over twenty-four hours, it’s an ongoing kilowatt. I asked if that number is on the rise. Norm and Joanne nodded vigorously.
“I remember when it was five hundred watts,” Joanne said.
The United States gets about 7 percent of its electricity from hydropower. Most people are surprised by that, because hydro is still the smiling public face of electricity. The Power Authority has visitor centers at several hydro plants. There are no visitor centers at nuclear or coal-burning power plants. The largest nuclear power plants today surpass Niagara’s 41/2 gigawatt rating (combining the Canadian and U.S. plants), and the largest coal-fired plants are drawing near it. Yet, in the Northeast blackout of 2003, a widely circulated rumor held that the massive loss of power resulted from a lightning strike at Niagara. When he told me this, Norm bristled, as if personally offended. He did not, he declared, lose power for a single second. How much that helped was pretty clear, even in the dark.
It’s easy to forget that electricity—70 percent of which in the United States comes from burning fossil fuels—takes an environmental toll, because we don’t see the plants that make it. Our power arrives in the socket clean and odorless, and even with recent price hikes, it’s still relatively cheap. We may be turning down the heat, and packing extra insulation into attics to lower gas bills. We may be buying hybrid cars faster than Toyota can make them. But conserving electricity seems to have gone the way of macramé and free love. Offices today are air-conditioned to a meat-locker chill. The watt-hungry tech sector is building data centers that push local grids to the limit. And home use is skyrocketing. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article on the supersizing of home appliances, with a picture of a fridge 6 feet wide. My neighbors leave their air conditioner on when they leave town in the summer, so their cats won’t get too hot.
What if we had to look at a waterless Niagara as a testament to our greed for watts? Toward the end of the interview, I asked Norm if there were people who say we should turn off the Falls completely. After all, compared to burning coal, hydro is relatively benign. If we can’t conserve, shouldn’t we maximize power’s cleanest sources? Norm and Joanne glanced at each other, and I sensed I had crossed the line into things the Power Authority didn’t like to discuss.
“There are some people who say that,” he said, “but they’re not serious.”
What about the reverse, I pressed. Are there people who want the Power Authority to stop diverting water and return the Falls to their natural state?
“Oh sure,” he said, shrugging. “There are always people who think that.”
“They should let it rip,” declares Paul Gromosiak. “If I had my druthers, that’s what they’d do.” A locally famous Niagara historian and author of such books as Nature’s Niagara, Daring Niagara, and Zany Niagara, Gromosiak is an affable, white-haired man with the face of a Norman Rockwell schoolboy. He has worked as a chemist and taught junior high, but his true calling is as the region’s reigning Niagaraphile. He grew up in the town of Niagara Falls, and has been haunting the waterfall and its environs since his age matched his face. Lisa and I meet him, as he suggests, at the visitor center of Niagara Falls State Park on the afternoon of April 1. As we sit down in the café, he opens up a 6-foot-long scale model of the Niagara Gorge showing the area’s geology in 3-D detail that would warm the heart of any junior high science teacher. He made it, he tells us, himself. He sits with his back to the park and lovingly points out the spots along the gorge where you can trace the waterfall’s historic path.
Outside, the real Niagara rumbles on. It has swelled to full tourist volume, but Gromosiak is not impressed. He liked it better before the treaty.
“I used to go to Goat Island and sit on my favorite log and think,” he tells us. Before water diversions ramped up in 1961, the entire island was said to tremble with the force of the pounding water. Gromosiak says he remembers that.
“The ice coming over the Falls would hit the water below with a sound like cannon fire,” he says wistfully. Now the Power Authority has installed an ice boom across the mouth of the strait at Buffalo, to keep ice from clogging the hydro intakes.
“They say it’s a natural wonder, but they’re lying,” Gromosiak says, shaking his schoolboy head.
The WPA Guide of 1940 marveled that Niagara Falls was attracting 1.5 million visitors a year. But the town was also full of industry: they report that “the main industrial district borders the river above the falls and from the smokestacks along Buffalo Avenue constantly rise the fumes of industry.” With the coming of the war, this booming factory district went into overdrive. The government was buying munitions, metal for airplanes, vehicles and arms, and petroleum and lubricants to keep them running. They were buying leather, fabric, paper, medicines and disinfectants. From 1941 to 1945, Hooker, DuPont, Union Carbide, Olin Mathieson and other local industries focused on providing the building blocks of war. And they added new products to their output: dodecyl mercaptan for making synthetic rubber, hexachloroethane used in smoke screens, arsenic trichloride used to make the war gas lewisite. Hooker operated the Niagara Falls Chemical Warfare Plant, which made, among other things, impregnite, a chemical used to make clothing impervious to chemical warfare.
Disposing of wastes became an almost intractable problem. Landfills popped up everywhere. Some factories paid workers $50 a drum to take waste home with them: what happened to it after that was not the company’s concern. Fly-by-night haulers were hired to get rid of barrels as best they could.
“Every old-timer in town will tell you the same stories,” Maureen Fennie tells me at the Niagara Falls Public Library. “Unmarked trucks coming in the middle of the night, dumping things in empty lots.”
After the war, with troops returning home and housing running short, land for waste disposal got even harder to find. Three chemical companies bought tracts of land along the Niagara River above the Falls and began dumping waste along the riverbank. A 1953 master’s thesis noted approvingly that this was not only helping the disposal problem, but “also acts to fill in low land along the river’s edge and in time may render the property salable for building purposes, or for future plant expansion.”
Far from being seen as a problem, waste was a sign of prosperity. An article in the Saturday Evening Post of October 30, 1948, described the “chemical-saturated haze which settles over the city when the air is heavy” at Niagara Falls. This toxic smog, the magazine assures us, “is sniffed happily by the industrially minded. Less materialistic residents move to the outskirts, away from the stench.” Rather than trying to cut back on wastes, industries sought to ramp up production. For this, they needed more power. They got their wish in 1950, when the new diversion treaty was signed, raising the U.S. stream share from 20,000 cubic feet per second to 50,000. (The United States somehow convinced the Canadians—in whose country 90 percent of the water plunges over the brink—to divide the stream share equally between the two nations.)
With the new treaty in place, Canada moved quickly to utilize its new water allowances, starting work on the Adam Beck plant seven miles below the Falls. In the United States, progress stalled with a bitter public debate over who would control Niagara power. Private power companies once again tried to commandeer the Falls. They would likely have succeeded, but now they had a new opponent: Robert Moses, the famed “power-broker” who reshaped New York City. Niagara has been transformed throughout its history by powerful, autocratic men determined to leave their mark. Moses was perhaps the pinnacle.
New Yorkers love to hate Robert Moses. In one of the world’s best walking cities, he built tunnels and bridges (all the ugly ones are his) to bring in more cars. He uprooted hundreds of thousands of people to build highways but ignored public transportation. He mowed down the corner stores and small buildings of poor communities to build soulless housing projects. He did add nearly 650 parks to the city, but few of them were near poor neighborhoods. He built Jones Beach, a stunningly beautiful spot, but made it inaccessible to public transportation. He built community swimming pools, but fought to keep them segregated. A one-man wrecking crew who held multiple public offices and was known as “Big Bob the Builder,” Moses wasn’t just autocratic, but vengeful: when community activists and preservationists thwarted his plan to build another bridge between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan’s Battery, Moses punished the neighborhood by taking down the Battery Park Aquarium and moving it to Coney Island.
However, compared to what he did at Niagara, Robert Moses was a saint in New York City. He sent the city budgets of Niagara County’s towns into a spin by removing the old private power companies from their tax rolls and replacing them with his tax-exempt Authority. He created an artificial boom with his massive project and made no provision for the economic aftershocks when it was done. He drove a knife into the heart of the struggling downtown by ramming a parkway through it, dividing its urban center from the Falls. He reshaped the riverbank, rebuilt Goat Island, tore down homes and relocated churches, all with little regard for what anyone else thought. Could he do it? Yes he could. At least until he ran up against Niagara’s Indians.
Robert Moses had first turned his eye to Niagara in 1926, when he began wresting control of the Niagara Reservation from the park commissioners. When he came back in 1956, he had just been appointed commissioner of New York’s Power Authority. Authorities—essentially private corporations granted special rights and privileges by the state, but free of state supervision—were Moses’s favorite way of getting things done without any pesky taxpayer backtalk. He was head of several, including the Triborough Bridge Authority in New York City. In Niagara, he controlled the two agencies, State Parks and the Power Authority, that together could reshape the entire Niagara frontier.
At the Power Vista, the story of the power plant construction is bathed in the rosy glow of corporate boosterism. The massiveness of the project is the main theme, as if the only bar to its completion was size. In fact, the Power Authority faced obstructions at every turn, and Moses toppled them one by one. His papers include bullying letters to town councils, county boards, lawyers, unions, CEOs, realtors, railroad heads, contractors and editors who were standing in his way or just speaking out against him. “I have been involved in quite a few public enterprises with the usual conventional, outrageous and also comparatively innocent pressures,” Moses declared in a public statement in 1958, “but nowhere in my experience has there been so much of this as on the Niagara Frontier.”
The first to be removed were the private power companies. Moses wanted the new power plant at Niagara to be built and operated by his Authority. The private power developers were screaming socialism at the thought of a public authority taking over Niagara’s water. Moses, as was his style, began a vicious PR campaign, but then, ironically with the help of nature, he won that fight. In 1956, a landslide destroyed the Schoellkopf Power Plant, by then the United States’ only operating hydro facility at Niagara; the old McKim, Mead & White powerhouses had been taken out of service in 1926. Nothing better could have happened for Commissioner Moses. Facing a serious power shortage, New York State took less than a year to pass the Niagara Redevelopment Act giving Moses the authority to build his plant.
The next obstructions to be toppled were the local communities that resisted, among other things, the open canals Moses wanted to use to bring the water to the power plant. Moses issued press releases, appeared on radio programs and created glossy brochures. He canceled dinners and official appearances to embarrass local politicians who weren’t helping him enough. He continually threatened to stop the whole project and throw several thousand workers off the job. At the same time, behind the scenes, he pulled strings and made threats.
Eventually, Moses would be forced to cover his canals. But the most difficult battle was still to be fought, and it was with a highly unlikely enemy—the Indians. Around 700 Tuscarora Indians lived on a 6,249-acre reservation on the escarpment just above Lewiston, about five miles downstream of the Falls. Moses, seeing a chance to get his hands on some cheap, “unimproved” land that wasn’t on the tax rolls, decided to build his power plant’s reservoir on the Tuscarora Reservation. He announced his plan to appropriate 1,383 acres of Tuscarora land and began the job of surveying.
The standoff between Robert Moses and the Tuscarora Nation has the feel of Niagara history repeating itself. It was not, in the end, about 1,383 acres. It was about two different ways of viewing the environment. Like the explorer La Salle, Moses arrived at the Niagara frontier with dreams of technological mastery in the service of greater use, and was stopped short by a completely baffling Indian worldview that seemed to have no interest in using the land for profit, and no interest in letting him do so. Like La Salle, Moses bulldozed his way across this worldview, pretending to be conciliatory while doing exactly what he wanted. He too left his name plastered all over the landscape.
The New York Power Authority’s Niagara Power Project is being relicensed as of 2007. As part of the relicensing process, the Authority had to gain support from regional “stakeholders.” Every stakeholder group submitted a statement about the project’s environmental impact on their community. Most of the statements are written in the dull, bureaucratic language of public documents. The Tuscarora statement is completely different. Swift, pointed and emotional, it makes one thing abundantly clear: the Tuscaroras are still mad.
“One of the things we wanted was an official apology from the Power Authority for what Robert Moses did years ago,” Neil Patterson, Jr., a Tuscarora, tells me. They didn’t get one. Neil, a compact young man with intense brown eyes, is director of the Tuscarora Environment Program, a community organization designed to help the Tuscaroras form strategies for protecting and restoring their cultural and natural resources. I visit him at the program’s office, an addition built onto the side of his house on the Tuscarora Reservation. We sit at a round table that holds a bowl of apples, a quarter of a Wegmans chocolate cake and a bottle of 7-Up. People work at desks a few feet away, and Neil’s father walks through occasionally.
“The idea outside,” Neil says, meaning not on the reservation, “is power. But you can’t control and own everything on your land or even in your house or car. That’s a Western idea.”
The notion that not everything in the world can be mastered—or bought—is what Robert Moses hit like a wall when he arrived at Niagara Falls ready to commandeer some “unused” land from the Indians. In March 1957, nine months before he even had his official license from the Federal Power Commission, Moses sent surveyors onto the Tuscarora Reservation to “take soil samples.” One of them happened to knock on the door of Chief Clinton Rickard, one of the founders of the Indian Defense League. Rickard called a council. Although they were assured there was no question of taking their land, the Tuscaroras smelled a rat. They decided to refuse all access to their reservation.
Unlike most Indian reservations, the Tuscarora Reservation is not land held in trust for the Indians by the federal government, but is owned outright by the Tuscaroras. Originally from North Carolina, the Tuscaroras were forced out after a series of land skirmishes with white settlers in the early 1700s. A man named John Lawson, surveyor general of the colony, sold some Tuscarora land to a group of German settlers. The Tuscaroras captured Lawson and executed him. The colonists of neighboring South Carolina sent aid, a small force of settlers with a large contingent of non-Tuscarora Indian allies, and the Tuscaroras were defeated. They packed up and headed north, where the Oneidas took them in as refugees.
In 1722, the Tuscaroras were officially made the sixth nation of the Haudenosaunee. The Senecas, who became their official protectors, gave them some land near Niagara Falls. The rest they purchased from the Holland Land Company. It was because of this purchase that the Federal Power Commission, in granting a license to develop Niagara power to the Power Authority in January 1958, agreed that Moses had condemnation rights on the reservation. The Tuscaroras retained a lawyer, and asserted that later treaties with the United States guaranteed them the right to keep what land they had.
In February, Moses sent the Tuscaroras an open letter, highhandedly asserting that “the treaties you talk about have nothing to do with your reservation in Niagara County, as you must know.” He expressed his desire to proceed with friendly negotiations, but declared, “we must go ahead in any event.” Moses offered the Tuscaroras $1,000 an acre. He was offering adjacent Niagara University $50,000 an acre. The Tuscaroras protested that they were not interested in selling at any price. “We will keep our land, and the Power Authority can keep their money,” declared Chief Elton Greene, the primary Tuscarora spokesman.
Moses resorted to his usual tactics, beginning with assembling a “dossier” on the Tuscaroras. A January memo to his general manager William Chapin asked, “Do we have the basic facts about the Tuscaroras—for public consumption apart from the rhubarb about condemnation and pre-revolutionary and pre-state rights of the noble red men? I mean acreage they have, living conditions, land, cultivation, how much we take, how much we offer, what they could do with cash, what they work at, etc. I don’t want a lot of mawkish sentiment manufactured by the sob sisters and other SOBs. It would be a hell of a thing if we had to move the reservoir to cemetery and taxable farmland.”
By April, he was still looking for dirt but he was also trying to come up with cheap ways to get the Tuscaroras to back down. He wrote another memo to Chapin:
I would like to hire somebody—an authority, of course—to give us briefly some information about the Tuscarora Indians—to wit:
Origin tribe, etc.?
Record—anything destructive?
How long at Lewiston?
What did and do they now—hunting, fishing, farming, weaving and arts?
Would a small Indian museum at Lewiston serve any purpose—attract visitors, sale of Indian stuff or what not? Would Tuscaroras take any pride in it, make or sell anything? Do they have any genuine relics for exhibition?
Clearly unaware of the Tuscaroras’ history with surveyors, Moses sent his men back onto the reservation in April 1958. Power Authority surveyors arrived on the reservation and began driving stakes into the ground. The Tuscaroras rolled up in a line of twenty-two cars and—according to a letter Moses sent that day to the superintendent of State Police—lit the stakes on fire. The surveyors left and came back the next day with a drilling rig, 32 sheriff’s deputies and 30 state troopers. One hundred and fifty Tuscaroras, men, women and children, formed a blockade in front of the equipment. There was some pushing and shoving, but no serious violence. Nonetheless, three Indians, including Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson, a young, militant activist, were arrested.
Anderson, a veteran of World War II and Korea, had become intensely interested in issues of Native American justice when he was refused a GI loan to build a home on the Tuscarora Reservation. A round-faced, charismatic man with a stocky physique, Anderson was an activist and a natural leader, taking part in sovereignty actions not just on Tuscarora land, but across the United States and Canada. The Power Authority found his activism unsavory: in their slick, commemorative 1960 book about the project, they pointed out that Anderson “holds no position of authority among the Tuscaroras,” and claimed that he “seeks the limelight, travels about the country citing ‘injustices’ visited upon the Indians by the U.S. government.”
Mad Bear Anderson may have been something of a hothead—his grandmother gave him his nickname for being quick to anger as a child—but his approach to the Power Authority was strictly nonviolent. Nonetheless, following Moses’s lead, the press treated the Tuscarora actions as if Pontiac’s Rebellion was breaking out all over again. “Redskins Go on Warpath!” screamed the Chicago Tribune. The next day, in a story titled “Indians Whoop Up Cold War; Halt White Invasion,” they called the protest an “Indian uprising, punctuated by prairie fires and pow-wows.” The New York Times titled its story “Tuscarora Braves Repel Surveyors.”
Moses seemed completely incapable of understanding the Tuscarora position. After the first protest, he sent a memo to Chapin.
If the Tuscaroras are proud and want recognition I am for giving them, not substitute land which would be almost impossible to acquire and of no use to them, but the following:
Reservoir name to be “Tuscarora Reservoir.”
Bronze Indian Memorial Statue at Reservoir by distinguished sculptor, design to be agreed on.
Indian Museum adjacent to Power House building.
He concluded that he might even go so far as to raise the price per acre to $1,500, “for the benefit of the more mercenary braves.”
Throughout the conflict, the commissioner continually expressed his conviction that the Tuscaroras were merely holding out for more money. Everything, in Robert Moses’s mind, had a price. What flummoxed him was that the Indians didn’t want to sell land they didn’t seem to be using. “Much of your land is presently uncultivated and unused,” he wrote the Tuscaroras, assuring them they would be much better off with the money, which could be used “for scholarships for your children and for community improvements, or used to acquire and develop other land.”
He harped on the notion of use again and again. When the Tuscaroras suggested he replace their acreage with new land, he sneered. “We cannot as a basis for settlement,” he declared, “acquire and convey to you other adjacent privately owned land which you do not need and which is needed for other constructive purposes.” For Moses, as for nineteenth-century advocates of Indian removal, the Indians’ failure to do anything with the land proved they didn’t deserve it.
The Tuscaroras were unimpressed by offers of statues and symbolic names. They remained so when Moses pulled out plans for a “community center” on the reservation. Even in his plan for the center, Moses expressed his scorn for the Tuscaroras, noting to his chief park designer that the Indians weren’t likely to take good care of the building. “No use giving the redskins something they won’t take care of,” he sniffed.
Moses was impervious to outside intervention. When Eleanor Roosevelt wrote New York governor Averell Harriman to ask about the disparity between Niagara University’s settlement and that offered the Indians, she received a stiff reply from Moses. “This is the first time it has been suggested,” he huffed, “that in harnessing these waters we have operated on the basis of religious bias or prejudice against a minority.” He then fired off a memo to his general counsel declaring that “the Indian counsel and various frontier jackals have apparently steamed up the braves and squaws to believe they can make a killing by reference to University prices.” The Indians’ lawyers, he guessed, would be thrilled with “a phoney story that Tuscarora land and University land look just alike to them.” Never mind that the university land and Tuscarora land did look just alike; they were contiguous.
Moses’s intolerance for differing views extended from the ex–first lady all the way down to second-graders. When twenty elementary schoolchildren at P.S. 31 in New York City sent him letters protesting the taking of Indian land, he returned them with a cold letter to the principal. “Obviously these children were completely misinformed, and no effort was made to tell them what is really going on,” he fumed. “This is the way to bring government into contempt and to create a youth problem.”
Robert Moses was not a man to brook opposition, even from nature itself. This was the man who filled New York City’s marshes with garbage and turned them into parks. He dredged sand from the ocean floor to build beaches and moved the Bronx River 500 feet when it got in the way of his highway. He harnessed the St. Lawrence River, building an artificial lake on the U.S.-Canadian border and stocking it with fish. But even then he wanted more control. In a staff memo on a new fish hatchery, he fired off a series of questions for the engineers: “What kind of fish? Muskies? Located where? How do we keep the bastards from staying on the Canadian side?”
Now the man who wanted to micromanage muskies was harnessing Niagara Falls, and no one was going to stand in the way of his dominion, especially not a group of Indians who, inexplicably, just wanted to coexist with their land. It took him nearly three years, but he won. Instead of a lieutenant with an iron hand, Moses had the Supreme Court. On March 7, 1960, the court voted 6 to 3 to allow condemnation of the Tuscarora land. Justice Hugo Black wrote an eloquent, emotional dissent.
“It may be hard for us to understand why these Indians cling so tenaciously to their lands and traditional tribal way of life,” he wrote. “The record does not leave the impression that the lands of their reservation are the most fertile, the landscape the most beautiful or their homes the most splendid specimens of architecture. But this is their home—their ancestral home. There they, their children and their forebears were born. They, too, have their memories and their loves. Some things are worth more than money and the costs of a new enterprise.”
Not to Robert Moses. By the time he was done, the Power Authority had excavated almost 10 million cubic yards of earth and more than 24 million cubic yards of rock. The power plant bearing his name came online in 1961, a mere three years after the massive project began. To decorate the powerhouse with sufficient grandeur, Moses commissioned Thomas Hart Benton to paint a 7-foot-high mural showing Father Louis Hennepin being guided to Niagara Falls by Native Americans. The mural hangs over the escalator in the Power Vista today. It looks exactly as Moses imagined it in February 1958. “I don’t want any phoney, primitive, abstract or other freak stuff,” he wrote in a memo to Chapin. “Maybe we should have T. H. Benton do something about Father Hennepin with assorted Indians (not Tuscaroras).”
Indeed, the Tuscaroras are not in the picture. Today the giant berm of the reservoir cuts across their reservation. It looks like the cold, disinterested back of a sleeping giant. Some of the Tuscaroras climb it to fish in the reservoir.
Robert Moses did not, in the end, take as much land as he originally wanted, he didn’t need that much. But according to Neil Patterson, Jr., some of the people who lived through the land acquisition are still so upset they can barely speak of it. I ask him if it’s harder for an Indian to be removed from his home than it is for a non-Indian.
“Absolutely,” he says, without hesitating. “We don’t sit on the land and build a big house. We’re tied to the land. We’re as important to it as the deer or the trees. This land was fought for, tooth and nail; we gave up land in North Carolina for this land. So it’s a double loss.” He speaks with a kind of steady calm that only adds to his intensity. “Six thousand two hundred forty-nine acres for an entire nation,” he tells me. “A language, a custom, a way of life. The people of the U.S. have millions of acres. People on the outside have all the room in the world and they still encroach on our land. They took about six hundred acres—between nine and ten percent. What’s nine or ten percent of the land in the U.S.? That’s like the eastern seaboard. It’s not right. It’s not logical. This is the only place we have.”
The Tuscarora Environment Program put together an oral history of the power project and its impact on the community, and submitted it as part of their comments for the FERC relicensing. Nearly forty people were interviewed for about three hours each.
“It’s not opposition to the license but an attempt to set the record straight,” Neil tells me. “We like the idea of hydropower; it’s fairly noninvasive. But there’s a responsibility to look at other things: how water-level fluctuations in the river are affecting the reproductive ability of fish, for instance.” He also believes the Power Authority should spend more resources looking at other renewable sources of energy.
“We want them to recognize that they’re not in the business of providing power so people will use it,” he says. “They’re in the business of using it responsibly.”
In 1959, Robert Moses read a speech by his friend James Duncan, chairman of Ontario Hydro. He sent a copy to Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Moses was trying to convince Rockefeller to let him build a nuclear power plant.
“Throughout the world,” Duncan’s speech declares, “a high per capita consumption of electricity and a high standard of living go hand in hand.” He notes with approval that the citizens of Ontario use more electricity than almost anyone in the world, and explains that this is what keeps rates low. “With direct competition between electricity and natural gas in some areas, however,” he warns, “Ontario Hydro and the municipalities must take steps to ensure that they hold on to their customers and maintain a steady rate of growth in consumption.”
Encouraging people to consume means making sure they don’t see any ill effects resulting from their consumption. But this was exactly what was going to happen at Niagara. According to a report by the International Joint Commission, once all the new power plants were running under the 1950 treaty, the river above the Falls would drop by 4 feet, the flow over the American Falls would shrink to next to nothing, and even the great Horseshoe would dwindle, its flanks going completely dry at times. There were other problems as well: ugly stretches of dewatered flats above Goat Island, riverbanks exposed by lowered water, severe diminishment of the American Falls, and thinning of the Horseshoe near Table Rock. Something had to be done.
As the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant was being blasted out downstream, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the HydroElectric Power Commission of Ontario, working with the Power Authority and State Parks, addressed the waterfall. Two working models of the Falls were built, one by each nation, and plans were drawn up for a massive engineering project to guarantee “a very satisfactory scenic spectacle” during the day, at 100,000 cubic feet per second, and “an impressive scenic spectacle” at night, with water flow reduced by half.
The works undertaken by the Corps of Engineers and Ontario Hydro are still in place today. The most visible is a large International Control Works in the river just above the Falls, a partial dam with eighteen sluice gates that open and close to enable precise changes in water flow over the brink, directing more water to thinning areas and less to those that look good. They also built weirs—submerged dams—upstream to raise the river level above the Falls and at the edges of the Horseshoe, so that water would spread out to the edges and create “an unbroken curtain shore to shore.” They excavated 94,000 cubic yards of rock from the flanks of the Horseshoe, lowering the riverbed 4 feet to further encourage an unbroken crestline. While they were at it, the Corps blasted off overhangs, scaled and graded the earth at Prospect Point to make a natural-feeling slope and added the 280-foot-high Prospect Point Observation Tower. They reshaped the American riverbank with excavated earth—generously donated by Robert Moses’s power project—and added 8.5 acres of land to Goat Island’s eastern end, enough for a helicopter pad, parking lot, concession stand and roadway.
By the time Robert Moses cracked a bottle of champagne on his new power plant in 1961, engineers had completely rebuilt Niagara Falls—and it looked better than ever.
The Canadians too were ramping up efforts to beautify Niagara. They completed a parkway in 1931 that ran the entire length of the river, using fill and grading to build roadbed. They blasted off the remains of Table Rock—a jutting ledge that formed a popular but treacherous viewpoint—and reshaped the cliff around it in 1934. They completed the Oakes Garden amphitheater and ornamental gardens on the bluff across from the American Falls in 1937. In the fifties, as part of the binational remediation project, they had 3,000 acres of parkland set aside along the river, 2,000 of which were maintained as formal gardens and parks. Their staff of 600 summer gardeners operated a conservatory to provide the park’s 200,000 plants. The operation of the International Control Works beginning in 1957 alleviated their “spray problem” at Table Rock; too much mist was scaring off visitors to the scenic tunnels behind the Falls. The control structure redirected water to reduce spray, and attendance jumped 22 percent.
As the waterfall remediation proceeded, the landscape was being transformed in additional ways. In 1957, the Niagara Falls Board of Education had a meeting. Four years earlier, Hooker Chemical had deeded some land to Niagara Falls; the city had built a school on it and wanted to subdivide the rest. Hooker attorney Arthur Chambers came to the meeting to stop them. No basements, water lines, or sewers should be built on the site, he told the school board, because “you’re apt to hit something we buried there.” Wesley Kester of the Board of Ed remarked to the Gazette, “There’s something fishy someplace.”
Indeed there was. The following year, as Robert Moses squared off with the Tuscaroras, it was reported that some local children who used the ditch near their school as a playground had been burned by mysterious substances in what was called “Hooker’s dump” or Love Canal. The never-finished canal had been used for years as an unofficial landfill. Throughout the forties and fifties, during the massive chemical output of the war effort and the Cold War that followed, residents had seen trucks, sometimes dozens in a single day, pull up to the canal and dump mysterious barrels into the ditch. Neighborhood residents watched army personnel with sidearms and gas masks unloading drums into the canal. Children who followed the olive-drab trucks were chased away. Caustic gases sometimes filled the air after dumping, and at night, spontaneous explosions in the canal were common. During this time, locals continued to use Love Canal as a swimming and fishing hole. At least until the fish died and the water began to burn their skin.
In November of 1964, with the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant up and running, Niagara Falls fire chief Edwin Foster wrote a letter to the city manager. He had seen someone using construction equipment to cover something fuming and noxious at the Love Canal dump. “Upon my arrival at the Hooker dump,” he wrote, “the wind was blowing from a westerly direction and the area was permeated by the odor of chemicals and fumes emitting from a pile of chemical wastes.” After seeing and smelling the unknown substance, Foster was convinced it “could be a detriment to the health and well-being of residents in this area.” He suggested that the “proper authorities be notified and remedial action be taken.”
The city declined to take remedial action. The state, when notified, also refused. But in 1966, more remedial action began on the waterfall. A Niagara Falls Gazette editor named Cliff Spieler—he would later become the Power Authority’s director of public relations—began running a series of articles decrying the imminent “death” of Niagara Falls. Once again, Niagara was threatened by the force of its own water. Spieler lined up political supporters, and within a year Army Corps engineers reduced the flow over the American Falls by three-quarters to “find ways to preserve the scenic splendor of the falls against the ravages of erosion and rock slides.” They drilled core samples and inserted miniature cameras into the rockface to examine its interior, and used sandblasting and water jets to map fractures in the rock. In 1969 they turned the American Falls off completely to continue the work. With a cofferdam blocking the water, they installed sensors to detect rock slippage, and an alarm system to alert park police to impending rockfalls. They drove bolts into cracks in the rock and braced up Goat and Luna Islands with dowels, cable tendons and drains to reduce water pressure. In 1973, as more and more residents at Love Canal were fruitlessly complaining about noxious odors and oily sludge leaking into their basements, the International Joint Commission distributed thousands of surveys to tourists asking how the viewing experiences of the Falls might be enhanced. They were offered the options of having the rocky talus removed from the base of the American Falls, having flow increased over the American Falls, or having the water raised in the Maid of the Mist pool to hide the rubble. The fourth option, chosen by only 30 percent of respondents, was to do nothing.
Nothing is what they did at Love Canal, until the situation was desperate. Pesticides, chlorobenzenes and dioxin, among eighty-two identified chemicals, began leaking into nearby basements and surfacing to contaminate playgrounds. Residents developed nervous and blood disorders, and miscarriage and birth defect rates in the neighborhood rose to appalling levels. A baby was born with two rows of teeth, another with three ears. Finally, in 1978 a housewife named Lois Gibbs began a door-to-door survey to prove that residents were sick and to insist the government take action. Her efforts made the plight of the neighborhood’s working-class families a national issue, and the environmental justice movement was born.
The story of Love Canal is fairly well known, made famous in 1979 with the airing of the ABC News documentary The Killing Ground. The struggle is credited with creating Superfund, a federal program organized to clean up the nation’s worst toxic messes and collect costs from polluters afterward. EPA took Love Canal off the National Priorities List in 2004, and now cites the location as a positive example of regulatory-driven cleanup.
What isn’t usually discussed is how, throughout the seventies, as complaints about Love Canal reached higher and higher levels, a government that was willing to spend up to $10 million clearing ugly rocks away from the base of the Falls fought tooth and nail against every dollar spent evacuating a neighborhood that was killing its residents. Love Canal was less than a mile from the Niagara River. The toxic brew was leaking into the river and going over the Falls, but it couldn’t be seen by the tourists. In 1979, as President Carter finally declared Love Canal a federal disaster area and began evacuating the first of 950 families, a psychic predicted that a rockslide at Terrapin Point would swamp the Maid of the Mist as it carried a boatload of deaf children. The area was closed, boreholes were drilled and more meters were installed to give warning of imminent rockfalls. Four years later, the Corps of Engineers blasted 25,000 tons of rock and removed 60 trees from Terrapin Rocks, where walkways once extended out to the Porters’ precarious tower. Erecting a diversion dam to push water away from the American end of the Horseshoe Falls, they filled in the sporadically watered flank with made land, carefully shaping and grading it into Terrapin Point. They built an 835-foot retaining wall to keep water off the point and create a new, manufactured American edge for the waterfall. Combined with 100 feet of fill on the Canadian side, these remedial works eliminated 400 feet of the Horseshoe Falls, including all of the waterfall that was in the United States. The iconic Horseshoe now sits entirely in Canada.
They stabilized what was left with rock bolts, and relandscaped the spot. It all happened in less than half the time it took for sick families to be moved from Love Canal.
Paul Gromosiak was there for all of it. He worked for Hooker Chemical as a young man, and later, when Love Canal was making the nightly news, he was teaching at a middle school in that very neighborhood. Children who lived near the canal sometimes asked him if they were doomed to die. But well before Love Canal, the town of Niagara Falls had environmental issues. When Paul was growing up, he tells Lisa and me, his mother, like other Niagara Falls housewives, would go outside every morning and wipe a layer of sooty, greasy scum from the railing of the family’s front porch. Everyone knew it came from the chemical and metallurgical plants, but no one really minded. Those plants employed the town’s workers.
Toward the end of our interview, I ask Gromosiak how it makes him feel that water is diverted from the Falls. He seems surprised by the question, and takes a moment to think about it.
“Insulted,” he says at last. “I’m not getting a chance to see what I should be seeing: the full flow that would cause this natural wonder to do what it should be doing, cut out a gorge. The natural world doesn’t stay the same; it changes all the time. Look at us: do we look the same as we did twenty years ago?”
I assure Gromosiak that I do, in fact, look the same as I did twenty years ago. He laughs.
“I like change,” he tells me. “Change has natural beauty. It’s unpredictable. There could be a big rockfall right now, and I would be so honored to be here for it. Erosion is a bad word to some people. We’re so afraid of the natural world. But we’re still at nature’s mercy. And I hope we always will be.”
After we leave Gromosiak, Lisa and I drive east on Buffalo Avenue, the street where many of the chemical factories once stood. Only a few remain: less than a mile from the Falls sprawls the massive complex of the Occidental Chemical Corporation, the folks who bought Hooker. Factory buildings line both sides of the road, storage tanks and pipelines and smokestacks and a couple odd bathyspherelike structures whose purpose I can only guess, all of it threaded with electrical transmission towers. We continue east, with the river on our right. The street numbers go up as the houses grow smaller. An unassuming little marina appears: Niagara Boat Docks. Just beyond it we can see a huge mesa, raised in that telltale landfill form, landscaped, fenced, barbed-wired, and dotted with exhaust pipes. At its edge sits a playground, kid-free. I pull into the small parking lot and park at a fence posted with the address, 9829 Buffalo Ave.
“What is that?” Lisa asks.
“That,” I tell her, “is Love Canal.” Technically, it’s Hooker’s 102nd Street landfill, the less-publicized riverbank end of William T. Love’s canal. We contemplate it in silence. Like Love Canal, which continues across the expressway, its fake mountain shape ominously suggests a landscape pregnant with monstrosity. How did we end up here? I think of Norm at his power plant, proudly talking about turbine upgrades, and H. G. Wells rapturously describing Niagara dynamos as “human will made visible.” I think of my own giddy thrill at the Power Vista, hanging over the edge of the deck to admire the massive penstocks. Who wouldn’t be awed by the prospect of harnessing such a giant organic machine? Niagara full-force is a fantastic natural spectacle. Niagara turned off is another kind of spectacle, just as fantastic, and just as natural, since we too are part of the natural world. Somehow, it’s the in-between Niagara, the harnessed waterfall pretending to be untouched, that leads to the landscape we’re parked at now. Because if we don’t admit that the things we do to make our lifestyle possible even have a cost, how can we ever know when that price has become too high?
In their book The Bottomless Well, Peter Huber and Mark Mills argue that increased energy efficiency only leads to increased usage: the fewer watts our appliances use, the more appliances we buy. Wastefulness, they argue, is thus a form of efficiency. Why bother to use energy-saving lightbulbs if it just means you’ll turn on more lights? But what Huber and Mills ignore is the fact that we go to great lengths to disguise and ignore our wastefulness. We may ramp up consumption to match what we believe to be supply, but in part that’s because we are blind to supply’s real cost. We don’t conserve, because we don’t think we need to. The effects of waste, like so many of history’s unsavory scenes, are carefully swept out of sight.
We get out of my car and walk to the playground. The jungle gym is shaped like a ship and topped by an American flag. A light rain is falling, but the flag is flying high, because it’s not an actual fabric flag. It’s a fake flag, made of stiff plastic so it stands there, always unfurled, always undulating in just the right way. It’s pointing in the direction of the Falls.
I think about the painter Thomas Cole, who once called waterfalls “the voice of the landscape.” Here, looking at the neatly landscaped dump, it’s hard not to think that Niagara’s sparkling, carefree roar is an outright lie. Or at least a great big fake. But the Falls landscape, in its funny way, seems to recognize that too: the more toxic it became underneath, the more spectacularly gorgeous its surface grew. From the fifties on, Niagara would not simply grow more artificial: fakery would increasingly become its very theme.