WHENEVER I’M IN NIAGARA FALLS, I like to jog around Goat Island when I wake up. The rapids are louder in the quiet of morning, and the Falls rainbow is brighter with the sun at your back. Sometimes it reaches all the way from the Canadian Horseshoe to the American bank in an unbroken pastel arch, the Falls grinding away in the mist behind it as if their only purpose is to keep it suspended there. I’m a wimpy runner, so after one lame, iPod-driven circuit of the island’s main road, I head to the Cave of the Winds Snack Bar for my reward: a cup of coffee with nondairy creamer.
If I stay at the once-glamorous, now-decrepit Hotel Niagara, which recently sold for $4.6 million (the starting price of a four-bedroom condo in the former Manhattan Project headquarters), I jog down Rainbow Boulevard. I pass between the boarded-up Art Deco United Office Building and the boarded-up Turtle, a bankrupt Native American cultural center. I cut through the parking lot of the nondescript Comfort Inn, cross four lanes of traffic on the Robert Moses Parkway, and enter the Niagara Reservation.
More often, I stay at the Howard Johnson Closest to the Falls, which recently changed its name to the Howard Johnson Closest to the Falls and Casino. From there, I run down Main Street, crossing in front of the toll booths on the Rainbow Bridge. I continue past the derelict Rainbow Centre Mall and its titanic parking ramp, together devouring a whole block to my left. I dodge sections of missing sidewalk as I pass the former Occidental headquarters building known as the Flashcube. Having sat empty for years, it is now emblazoned with a hasty banner: Hot Food—Internet—Gifts—Souvenirs. I pass the tethered passenger balloon that goes up and down from a vacant lot, ignoring the blaring heavy metal music played by its high-school-aged operators, and make a right at Smokin Joes Family Fun Center, a garish, makeshift arcade squatting in the derelict Wintergarden arboretum. I trot past the haunted house (for sale), the putt-putt golf course (closed), and the random assortment of low-end souvenir shops (Dutch Candy Factory! T-Shirts! Beer to Go!).
This is the landscape that greets visitors when they arrive in Niagara Falls, New York. Most tourists know Niagara will be tacky, but they don’t expect it to be seedy. Luckily, it’s easy to make for the border, because all the main roads in Niagara Falls funnel you toward the Rainbow Bridge, as if the mortified little town wants to hurry you right on through to Canada before you notice anything else.
People who hear that I’m on my way to or from Niagara say either “Oh, I’ve never been there,” or “I can’t believe how much better it is in Canada!” When I confess that I actually prefer to stay on the American side, I get blank stares. For one thing, I point out, it’s cheaper. That’s because instead of looking out your hotel window at the Falls, slowly changing colors like a lava lamp, you’re looking out at the back of a bar called Kold Ones, or at a construction site, or a couple of abandoned shopping carts, stuck together as if mating. If you’re lucky, the well-known local panhandler known as Birdman will pedal by with his macaw, Sundance, on his shoulder. Sometimes, I explain how I got the big gash on the side of my car when I was driving down a street in Niagara Falls and had to pull into a dirt parking lot to gawk at a mural on the side of a boarded-up bar. It was of the genre known to art historians as “dogs playing pool,” though there are variants, the best known being “dogs playing poker.” The Niagara variant may be sui generis: instead of aiming for the eight ball or grimly inspecting their hands, the dogs are sitting morosely at a bar while another dog—a yellow lab maybe—is pole dancing. The pole-dancing dog is wearing a G-string stuffed with bills. I was so taken by the mural the first time I saw it that I backed around a post and scraped off a long carrot-peel of paint.
There’s something downright impressive about the desolation of downtown Niagara Falls, New York. If city planners had set out to lay waste to a town, they couldn’t have done a better job.
One day in the Local History section at the Niagara Falls Public Library, I ask Maureen Fennie for all the town’s development plans. At first, she just laughs. Then, as she often does when I’m there, she sighs and goes away. A little while later, she comes back pushing a library cart laden with boxes. She parks it next to my table and throws me a look that says Good luck.
The boxes overflow with scrapped plans: manifestos for progress, maps of strategic areas, schedules of phased transitions. There are wonky plans with bar graphs, dull plans with page after page of maps, vivid plans with soaring architectural renditions set off by curlicues of greenery. One strategic plan from the early eighties has squiggly little drawings and is written in the style of a bad picture book. “The metaphor for Niagara Falls is obvious,” it enthuses. “It’s the rainbow! The rainbow is a natural phenomenon that only happens with the Falls.” Whatever else these consultants were, they weren’t meteorologists.
The stack of binders is overwhelming. More things, it seems, have failed to happen at Niagara Falls than have happened. If you could somehow gather the collective effort and brainpower spent on dashed illusions and turn it toward remaking the town, Niagara would be a showplace. And why shouldn’t it be? It sits at the brink of a world-famous natural wonder. At least 8 million people a year visit the American side (more than double that descend on Canada). In one shiny presentation book after another, consultants, city planners, architects and developers all profess themselves flummoxed by Niagara’s failure to live up to its potential. After several hours going through it all, I’m surprised the little town hasn’t packed itself into a barrel and thrown itself over the Falls.
The failure was not thinking small, that much is clear. The history of planning at the Falls, beginning with the Porter brothers’ dreams of waterwheels and international resorts, has aimed at nothing less than heaven on earth. With the waterfall’s harnessing in the 1890s, utopia began to look literally in reach. With nature subject to human will, the world could be remade in our image. William T. Love was not the only one with visions of a futuristic supercity at Niagara, powered by electricity and heralding a brave new world of productivity, cleanliness and man-made beauty. King Gillette—inventor of the safety razor—dreamed up a scheme even more far-fetched. His city, Metropolis, described in his 1894 book The Human Drift, was meant to house the entire nation—with the exception of a few farmers and miners. Living in giant, climate-controlled apartment blocks, connected to their workspaces with glass-enclosed walkways, the citizens of Metropolis would no longer fear the whims of nature. In fact, nature too would be perfected—carefully landscaped parks and gardens would offer up a more regulated beauty, with no end other than human pleasure.
One planned utopia was actually built, and still remains in Niagara Falls. The model workers’ town Echota, built at the turn of the century, was meant to prove that harnessing the waterfall for humanity would not only benefit the power-brokers, but would lead to a workers’ paradise too. As nightmarish, coal-driven factories gave way to cleaner, modern, electric facilities, so too the roiling chaos of industrial cities would be replaced by sparkling, wholesome planned communities.
Romantically declared to mean “town of refuge” in Cherokee, Echota was designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1891. The Niagara Falls Power Company set aside 84 acres off Buffalo Avenue, walking distance from the factories. They hired civil engineers to lay out roads and utilities. The engineers designed a tile drainage system for the swampy land and built dikes to protect the residential area from regular flooding at nearby Gill Creek. They drew up a neat neighborhood of tree-lined sidewalks and electric-lit streets. At its center was a wide boulevard, with room for two electric rail lines connecting it to downtown Niagara Falls and Buffalo. There was a school, a firehouse, a store, a community center, and the first installment of dwellings: sixty-seven attractive Shingle-style homes drawn up by star architect Stanford White. In single, duplex and triplex arrangements, White’s yellow and white homes had attractive Georgian elements: gambrel rooflines, bay windows, columned porches. Every house was equipped with central heat, water and gas, as well as what the Ladies’ Home Journal enthused were “the best modern appliances for household convenience.”
For a few years, Echota gleamed. More homes were built. The neighborhood was held up as an emblem of a new and improved society, moral reform inspired by architecture, what theologian Reinhold Niebuhr dismissed as “the doctrine of salvation by bricks.” He was in the minority. Most people loved the idea; magazine articles profiled the town and its planners; reporters turned up to document its milestones: the first family moving in, the first baby to be born there. “How fortunate,” crowed the Daily Cataract, a Niagara newspaper, “is the dweller in this charming corner of the earth!”
It didn’t stay charming for long. The power company decided to resign as landlord in 1910, and put all the homes on the market. The Depression caused the housing stock to deteriorate. Absent the eyes of the world, the infrastructure was allowed to decline. In 1958, Robert Moses and his Power Authority decided that one of their water conduits needed to traverse the area. Seventy-four homes were picked up and moved to a new development called Veteran Heights. After the conduit was finished, new Echota homes were built to replace them, tiny, postwar boxes that reflected the neighborhood’s fallen value. Workers with good jobs were now moving to the up and coming neighborhood of LaSalle, with its newer homes, schools and parks. Echota was undesirable; the very proximity to the factories originally considered an asset was now a drawback. Smokestacks belched pollution over the area, and outfall pipes dumped sludge into Gill Creek. The trees died and the water turned toxic. Housing prices dropped, and the neighborhood lost its identity. Eventually, people driving by saw only some run-down houses on potholed streets, against a backdrop of chemical plants and power lines. It couldn’t be further from utopia.
One day downstairs at the public library, waiting for the Local History department to open, I flip idly through a book of current real estate listings. One of the Stanford White homes is up for sale. The price is $12,000.
Echota was based on a sweeping social vision that began with industry. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, city planning for Niagara Falls proceeded on the understanding that the factories were customer number one. As one planner put it, “while the tourist interests of Niagara Falls should be more carefully served, the industrial interests are of even greater consideration.” Industry needs workers, which meant that city planning focused on making Niagara Falls a nice place to live.
Once the factories began to leave and jobs grew scarce, keeping workers happy became less important. That began happening even in the postwar boom years. Some factories headed out West, where the federal government was building dams on the Columbia River, making even cheaper power than Niagara’s. Others were simply looking for places with lower wages and lighter state tax regulations. Many downsized after they lost their wartime contracts. The 1956 landslide that destroyed the Schoellkopf Power Plant was the last straw. Alcoa, Hooker, Union Carbide, International Paper, DuPont and Bell Aerospace closed local factories and laid off workers. Between 1956 and 1963, the city of Niagara Falls lost nearly 12,000 manufacturing jobs.
The sense of urgency that set in drove the Power Authority project. But even as they knocked themselves out trying to get manufacturers back, it was becoming clear to local city planners that industry alone was not going to keep Niagara Falls afloat anymore. The forward-thinking were already turning their eyes away from industry—and the community that supported it—and toward visitors. Throughout the power project, they continually wrote letters to Robert Moses, asking for clarification about his plans for the city of Niagara Falls. Was he planning for an increase in visitors?
Moses regularly assured them that his improvements would benefit tourism. But his focus was on arterial transportation. Moses, for all his brilliance, was a shortsighted man. For him, getting visitors to come to town meant building roads they could come on. It was partly the mania of the automobile age, and partly Moses’s personal blindness to quality-of-life issues beyond infrastructure. He thus planned and executed only one major “improvement” to the city of Niagara Falls: the Robert Moses Parkway, an expressway sweeping through the city center and past the Falls, following the gorge rim to the new international bridge at Lewiston. With the opening of the parkway, the Niagara Reservation, for which Olmsted and his cronies fought so hard, was separated from the downtown by four lanes of high-speed traffic. The park could now be accessed only by a pedestrian bridge.
Even had they foreseen the devastating effect the Robert Moses Parkway would have on their city center, the people of Niagara Falls probably could not have stopped it. Robert Moses was, after all, the man who declared of New York City that “you have to hack your way through with a meat axe.” And Niagara Falls had its own meat-axe wielder, Mayor E. Dent Lackey.
Lackey was elected in 1963, the year the first sections of the Robert Moses Parkway opened. An ex–Methodist minister with a habit of referring to his enemies as “those goddamn sons of bitches,” he had a foul mouth and an intuitive understanding of spectacle: he was known for leading city parades on a white horse. Lackey was determined to remake Niagara as a tourist mecca. He helped form Niagara Falls Urban Renewal, a public agency authorized to issue tax-exempt, limited-liability bonds and to acquire land by eminent domain.
Niagara Falls Urban Renewal unveiled its master plan in 1965. Most of the city center—a mish-mash of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century stores, motels, restaurants, factories and theaters—was slated for demolition. In its place was the Rainbow Center: a completely new downtown anchored by a $40 million, 130,000-square-foot convention center intended to make Niagara Falls “the trade show center of the world.” The convention center would be linked to the state park by the Falls Street Mall, a park-like pedestrian walkway lined with brand-new shops, restaurants, clubs and entertainment spots. Behind the convention center was a sprawling “International Garden,” and more gardens were planned for Goat Island, which would be extended all the way to the Grand Island Bridge with fill from the power plant.
“The city that walked on one leg—industry,” declared Mayor Lackey, “will now walk on two—industry and tourism.”
The Rainbow Center plan included offices, educational facilities, libraries and affordable housing. But after the federal government, which had agreed to foot half the $26 million bill, held up groundbreaking by asking for clarification on a number of points, an amended plan was issued. In it, the downtown became more focused on the commercial and civic center. Residents were taken out of the picture.
There were only glimmers of dissent. A French architect and city planner called the renewal scheme “a crime.” And a Niagara Falls Gazette staff writer named Marthe Lane Stumpo wrote an impassioned plea for preserving at least some of the city’s historic architecture, as had been done successfully in cities such as New Haven, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Stumpo pointed out that renovating old buildings was cheaper than building new ones. Furthermore, it gave a town character, and reminded tourists of its historic past. It would be tragic to tear down Niagara’s Victorian buildings, she declared, only to discover “they were a priceless asset to our community.” Her piece was printed in the “Family” section.
Just four years earlier, in 1961, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. A devastating critique of the dominant orthodoxy of city planning, the book declared that what was called the rebuilding of cities was in fact “the sacking of cities.” At the root of the problem, according to Jacobs, were the utopian dreams of city planners. The most influential city planning movements, from Ebenezer Howard’s turn-of-the-century “Garden City” to the soaring high-rise metropolises of Le Corbusier, depended on sorting and separating urban people and functions. And the sorting was based not on an understanding of how cities were actually used, but ideals of how they ought to be used. Paternalistic and moralizing, such utopians favored community centers over bars, game rooms over street gatherings, families strolling in parks over spontaneous dance parties. Like Olmsted’s park layouts, their development plans aimed to control how people—especially poor people—lived their lives. In prescribing “correct” activities, they were blind to lived experience as it was already being lived. Life follows life, Jacobs declared, and to plow it under and attempt to replace it with a sanitized ideal was nothing less than murder.
Jacobs’s book neatly identifies every single thing wrong with the Rainbow Center development scheme. She promoted mixed-use districts, preferably with more than two functions, to ensure the presence of people at different times of day. The revised Rainbow Center focused on visitors and their schedules only. Jacobs demanded that districts mingle new buildings with old; Rainbow Center began by razing everything old. She dispensed scornfully with the notion that parks were an unqualified good, pointing out that if not woven into the city’s fabric, they would cause blight as fast as a superblock. The Rainbow Center plan, embracing the parkway that divided the parkland from the city, created a giant landscaped dead zone at the edge of the gorge. Jacobs’s list of planning disasters reads like a synopsis of Niagara’s plan: traffic arteries, parking lots, massive single elements out of scale with the streetscape. “To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem,” Jacobs wrote, “capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.”
Jacobs’s book provided a rallying point, but many city planners already had the same idea. In New York City, the tide had turned against modernist planning’s slash-and-burn approach to the urban jungle. Theorists like Lewis Mumford and Charles Abrams had begun to advocate the kinds of community values Jacobs espoused, turning against Robert Moses and his meat axe. The six-year fight over Moses’s plan to ram a highway through Washington Square Park, in which Jacobs played a key role, had ended with defeat for Big Bob the Builder. Congressional hearings were held in 1959, and in 1960 the reign of Robert Moses began to crumble as he was forced to resign from the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance. But it was too late for Niagara Falls.
On a snowy November morning in 1968, Niagara Falls proceeded to mount and stuff itself. Bells were rung, Mayor Lackey arrived by helicopter, speeches were made, the color guard stood at attention, and the first building was loudly brought down. The demolition proceeded apace. By 1971, the Washington Post reported that “great gaps punctuate the five-and six-story skyline, vacant lots are scattered all over the place, and bulldozers and earth movers are banging and thrashing around wherever you look.” Journalists compared the appearance of Niagara Falls to Berlin after the bombings.
Dan Wiest, the retired Union Carbide worker, came to Niagara Falls in 1950, when the town was at its peak. In the heady years after World War II, when patriotism, progress, prosperity and sex all came together at the Falls, no one could imagine that a mere two decades later the city center would be a ghost town.
“I lived downtown on Prospect Street, at the Cascade Hotel,” Dan tells me. “You’d walk up Falls Street during the day, and it was just full of people. There were souvenir shops, two big theaters; the place was hustling. The urban renewal project killed all that.” I ask him if he can remember some of the businesses from downtown.
“Oh sure. On Main Street, there was a bowling alley, DiFazio’s, a small place. They set the pins by hand. There was a big Sears and Roebuck. There were the two theaters: the Cataract and the Strand.” Falls Street, he says, was always crowded with both cars and people before they closed it off to traffic. Somehow, taking cars away took the pedestrians away too.
“It just died, that’s all,” he says simply.
Dan’s take is not unusual. Niagara locals who lived through urban renewal see it as a case of municipal citycide. A recent article in the Niagara Falls Reporter listing causes for the city’s woes put E. Dent Lackey and Niagara Falls Urban Renewal at number one. The Niagara Gazette agreed, declaring in 1999 that urban renewal was the second most important story of the century (the collapse of the Schoellkopf Power Plant was number one). Residents who lived in pre-urban-renewal downtown, the paper declared, “speak as if it were the Emerald City.”
The Rainbow Center plan was supposed to spark a firestorm of private development, and at first it seemed like it might work. The city opened its convention center, designed by Philip Johnson’s firm, in 1974, amid a wave of excitement about other projects. The Black American Museum and Cultural Center was announced in 1973. The Wintergarden, an indoor arboretum hailed as an architectural triumph and featured in Life magazine, opened in 1977. The Native American Center for the Living Arts completed its nifty turtle-shaped building in 1978. There was a $10.5 million Niagara Hilton, a $1 million addition to the local Holiday Inn, and plans for a twenty-five-story rotating hotel, called the “rotel.” The Carborundum Company even built its new corporate headquarters downtown, with a Carborundum Center and Crafts Museum on two of its floors.
The problem was, the new downtown was no longer a downtown. The past’s small-time shops and restaurants had made for a lively street life. Residents headed for Sears mingled with tourists browsing through souvenir shops. Restaurants served both visitors heading for the Falls and residents coming out of a movie. The new downtown, in contrast, was nothing more than a conventioneer’s extended lobby, a collection of superblocks appended awkwardly to a waterfall. More attention had been paid to architectural showmanship than pedestrian practicalities. Hotels turned their backs on the park. The giant convention center was not knit into the streetscape. Even the admired Wintergarden was badly sited, creating a barricade across Falls Street, the main thoroughfare to the Niagara Reservation. Visitors had a hard time finding the Falls. And there was no one to point the way: residents had been moved to the outskirts. Office space, Carborundum notwithstanding, was scarce. Locals had no reason now to go to the city center, and they didn’t. Vast stretches of downtown remained vacant, adding to the deadness and creating a vicious circle of neglect. With a shrinking tax base, city finances floundered; at several points in the seventies, Niagara Falls came close to default.
It was easy to blame the parkway: by 1974, Mayor Lackey was calling it “that damned Chinese wall.” But the parkway was part of a larger vision of urban renewal that was harder to kill than the famous Moses momentum. Even in New York City, the top-down, superblock approach lived on post-Moses. The year the Rainbow Center plan was released, 1965, a plan for Lower Manhattan was presented that cleared away acres of housing and markets and piers and small shops to expand on the massive superblocks of the planned World Trade Center. In the wake of renewed interest in Lower Manhattan development, that plan was recently reissued. I bought a copy and was amazed to see that the neighborhood where I live—west of City Hall and north of the Trade Center—was assumed unsalvageable by sixties planners. Had the city not run out of cash in the seventies, no doubt the now-landmarked streetscape of low-rise lofts, restaurants and shops called Tribeca would be gone, bulldozed and replaced by lifeless, cookie-cutter towers.
After urban renewal, things went from bad to worse. Niagara’s two biggest advantages had always been that everyone wanted to go there and everyone could go there; it was within a day’s drive of the majority of the American population. In the late seventies, both things changed. First there was the energy crisis: as the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 was followed by the Iranian Revolution and a second energy crisis in 1979, skyrocketing gas prices took a huge bite out of the tourism market. And then there was Love Canal. The ecological disaster brought the eyes of the nation to the region in exactly the wrong way. Now, even if folks had the money to drive to Niagara Falls, they might think twice about doing so.
What happened next has a desperate feel to it. With manufacturing all but gone, and its reputation for natural beauty tarnished, the city’s development plan devolved into luring shoppers to town. It’s as if the city planners could only focus on one thing: the clang of a cash register. “Tourist destination” came to mean “mall.”
In the early eighties, the city poured massive amounts of development money into converting a parking ramp less than a block from the Falls into the Rainbow Centre Mall. It opened in 1982, with great fanfare, and did well at first, as droves of Canadians came across the border to get low-tax deals. A new development group called Niagara Venture was made the city’s master builder in 1982, announcing plans for another mall along with a hotel, an indoor amusement park and a water park. Four years later, Canadian developers announced plans for a Niagara Falls megamall like the famous one in Edmonton, the largest mall in North America. The Niagara mall was to be called Fantasyland.
The name was appropriate. One by one, the mall schemes collapsed. The Fantasyland developers backed off when the state withdrew its offer of $400 million in financial incentives. They built their 4.2-million-square-foot Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, instead, where household incomes were higher; it’s now the world’s most-visited mall. Master developer Niagara Venture faced charges of unpaid lease payments and water bills, and the city foreclosed on its malls and water park in 1992. By the nineties, even the Rainbow Centre Mall was struggling, and the last retail businesses there were shuttered in 2000. An Off-Track Betting shop limped on until 2005. Today the building sits empty, a looming cement pile between the Niagara Reservation and downtown.
In the meantime, the city continued to decline. The Black American Museum and Cultural Center evaporated. Niagara Falls mayor James Galie, citing rising energy costs that made it expensive to heat, began to talk about demolishing the Wintergarden. The Turtle struggled with insolvency for years, closing its doors in 1996, after IRS agents confiscated some of its artifacts and auctioned them off to recoup back taxes. Wampum belts, prehistoric stone tools, pottery, beadwork and art went on the block. Elwood Green, the center’s executive director, told reporters “I guess people have to get their information about Indians from Pocahontas and The Indian in the Cupboard.” The city foreclosed on the building shortly thereafter. Since then, it has sat there, an empty shell.
Bob Baxter suggests I meet him at the Power Vista, the Power Authority’s visitor center. It’s an odd choice: although it’s a public space, the Power Vista has a hushed, authoritarian feel. Soaring ceilings and gleaming floors give it an aura of despotic grandeur. Besides, Bob has a reputation here. Several administrators pass us in the lobby, and they give Bob stiff smiles, their greetings crackling with icy pleasantness. He stops to chat with each one, seeming to savor their discomfort.
Bob is conservation chairman of the Niagara Heritage Partnership, a group of locals with a different plan for Niagara redevelopment. They want the natural landscape of the Niagara Gorge restored as much as possible. The way to make that happen, they claim, is to remove the Robert Moses Parkway from the gorge rim.
The Robert Moses Parkway is still a sore spot in Niagara County. Planners all agree that putting the parkway along the riverfront downtown was a lousy idea. Local rumor has it that even Robert Moses admitted as much in private, when he came back years later and saw what it had done. Another rumor claims that Moses built the parkway in the first place because he was trying to punish Niagara Falls for the endless obstructions they threw up to his power project. It wasn’t a mistake; it was revenge.
In the late seventies, urged on by Mayor Lackey, State Parks removed the small stretch of parkway that ran through the Niagara Reservation, demolishing the pedestrian bridge that had connected the parking lots and the riverfront. When you drive into Niagara Falls on the Robert Moses Parkway now, it takes you right by the upper rapids, but as it curves around the river’s elbow at the Falls, it turns into the slower, two-way Prospect Street. Prospect Street ends at the entrance to the Rainbow Bridge. Fifty feet beyond the bridge, you pick up the parkway again, to be swept north along the gorge rim past Devil’s Hole State Park, over the top of the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, and on to the Niagara Escarpment, where it jogs inland to descend the escarpment’s steep face. It passes between Lewiston and Model City as it heads north, toward Lake Ontario and Fort Niagara.
The Niagara Heritage Partnership wants the state to remove all four lanes of the parkway from the Rainbow Bridge to Lewiston—the part that hugs the gorge rim below the Falls. They want the 6.5 miles of roadway replaced with a network of hiking paths and bike trails. Wildflowers and native scrub could bloom on spots now covered by mown grass. Ground-nesting birds and toads would come back. People could bike along the gorge at the top or hike along it at river level and enjoy its natural beauty.
Bob Baxter and I cross the glassed-in pedestrian bridge over the parkway and ride an escalator down to the Power Vista. He leads me outside, onto the deck, and waves a hand at the gorge.
“It’s an untapped tourist resource,” he declares, fumbling for his cigarettes and fixing me with watery, intense eyes.
I haven’t known Bob for ten minutes, and already I’m worried about his health. Bob chain-smokes, and he’s older than I expected. He has a single gray curl in the middle of his forehead, a perfect tube where he could stick a cigarette for safekeeping, and he seems like the kind of person who might do that. His outspoken, occasionally impudent writing style has given the Niagara Heritage Partnership a distinct voice for their crusade. In one magazine article, he declared that to see nature in Niagara’s current landscape, “you’d have to be a one-eyed contortionist with a good imagination.” When a group protesting high-powered boats on the Niagara River unfurled a banner that said Jet Boats Suck at a media event, the Niagara Heritage Partnership trotted Bob out to deny involvement. He did, but he began his official statement by saying “Jet boats DO suck.” His campaign to remove a big hunk of parkway has earned him a lively batch of enemies. One surly local reporter pilloried him in print for getting food stuck in his beard when he eats.
In person, he’s just as sardonic, with a speaking style you might call “salty.” “There goes the goddamn jet boat,” he growls when a craft full of screaming tourists roars by on the river. “What a piece of crap.”
Bob has lived his whole life in the Niagara region. He ran wild in the countryside as a kid and worked construction on the power plant project as a youth. He held assorted jobs in local factories, often quitting if they wouldn’t give him the first day of hunting season off. In those days, there was always another job. Sometimes he worked in tourism.
“Oh, we all used to drive tour buses for summer jobs,” he tells me when I ask him about it, “me and all the losers that were my friends. Niagara Falls Boulevard was where all the information booths were set up, the ones taking kickbacks for sending tourists to certain businesses. They had big signs and arrows to lure the tourists inside. There was one guy who got a police cap and a little whistle—he would jump out in front of cars and direct them into his parking lot. We called Niagara Falls Boulevard the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” He laughs his raspy laugh.
The Niagara Heritage Partnership plan for parkway removal is controversial, although at first blush it’s hard to see why. No one denies the stupidity of a four-lane, high-speed arterial that cuts off private real estate and public parks from their best natural asset. Communities to the north of Niagara Falls are well served by alternate routes, and the parkway itself is underutilized. But the off chance that the parkway might bring a couple more tourists to Fort Niagara, or shave a few minutes off a Lewiston resident’s morning commute seems to torment local politicos. A group of politicians and residents north of the Falls even formed what they call the Parkway Preservation Committee, aimed at keeping the road open.
The problem is, parkway removal is not, at heart, an economic strategy; it’s an environmental one. What the Niagara Heritage Partnership wants is a return to nature. What the state wants is a return on investment. The question is whether the two are compatible.
Ernest Sternberg thinks not. “I’m not sure this is the place where you try to have an indigenous natural environment,” he tells me. “As an environmentalist, I’d rather see ten times the acreage preserved somewhere more remote, and see this place—not necessarily taken advantage of—but given a little freer hand in what they do there.”
Sternberg is a professor of urban and regional planning in the architecture school at SUNY Buffalo. In 1997, he published a paper called “The Iconography of the Tourism Experience” that uses Niagara Falls as an example of failed planning. Good tourism planning, he argues, must understand the themes inherent in its destination, and must “stage” those themes in a coherent narrative. In other words, it has to figure out what the story of a place is, and tell that story through the experience of going there. Not only has Niagara Falls failed to come to terms with its themes—Sternberg proposes “ecosystem,” “terror” and “freak” as themes that might be used—but it tells its story wrong. Because of the abundance of parking, its climax, the close-up view of the Falls, is reached too quickly. In the days of the Porters, you arrived at your hotel, walked across the bridge to Goat Island and wound your way through wooded paths to get your first glimpse of the Falls. Today you drive into the parking lot, cross the street, and there it is. Or you drive around, lost in the confusing streetscape of the drab little town. Experiencing Niagara today is like hearing a story retold by a four-year-old: it either distracts you with seemingly irrelevant tangents, or it blurts out its conclusion with no buildup.
As an example of tourism planning that successfully lays out a cohesive narrative experience, Sternberg cites Disney. Disney’s park environments are famously “imagineered,” in company parlance, to move people expeditiously through a prepackaged experience, extracting money from them at every narrative pause. What Disney codified is a tour not unlike that developed by the Porters and other early entrepreneurs, the commercial approach to tourism that Olmsted & Vaux’s plan was meant to replace.
Sternberg brings out a dilemma that always rears its head in thinking about Niagara and about tourism. People come to Niagara to experience nature, a form of contemplation that’s considered an uplifting experience. But on vacation they also expect to be entertained. A waterfall, however beautiful or sublime, is not inherently entertaining, especially if you can’t ride it. It’s hard to imagine that removing parking lots and restaging the pedestrian experience will make the Falls more entertaining. After all, the Canadians did this. But they also added something else: a carnivalesque entertainment district. For many, this sideshow has become the main attraction.
Canadian Niagara is constantly held up as an example of successful development, a shame stick used to smack Americans into better planning. “The Land of Oz!” a developer told USA Today in 2003, pointing to Canada’s skyline. The Canadian development plan, articulated in a 1998 report by consultants Urban Strategies, divided Niagara Falls, Ontario, into distinct areas serving specific functions and markets, and established land-use regulations for preserving those distinctions. It proposed ways of connecting park areas to the rest of the city, recommended introducing a people-mover, established built-form controls for the skyline, and urged unified approaches to city entry points, landscaping, circulation systems, streetscapes, parking and signage.
Ontario’s plan brings a feeling of consistency to the chaotic jumble of tourist development. High-end hotels are grouped in the Fallsview area, mid-range family hotels cluster around Clifton Hill, and budget hotels hang out at the edge of town. The riverfront downstream is lined with upscale bed and breakfasts. Parks Commission attractions are clearly designated with the tagline “the Authentic Falls Experience.”
But the most important part of the plan was the near-abolition of parking anywhere near the Falls. Cars are banished to a giant parking lot upstream; people-movers shuttle tourists between their cars and the various commercial areas. Once this change was effected, the cluster of franchise restaurants, souvenir shops and attractions perched above Queen Victoria Park took off. Today this streetscape of flashing signs, themed buildings, wax figures and brand names is thick with pedestrians. The sideshow has moved to center stage. In fact, 47 percent of the tourists coming to Canadian Niagara, according to a 1998 visitor study, never visit a Falls attraction.
If, as Jane Jacobs argued, life follows life, Ontario proves that tourist development follows tourist development. This was confirmed in 1996, when a five-firm consortium called Falls Management opened the 100,000-square-foot Casino Niagara. With the arrival of high-stakes gambling, Canadian Niagara’s conversion from natural wonder to Vegas-style fun park was complete.
The opening was huge. Seven thousand people crammed themselves into the casino, located in a former mall, while the Americans looked on with horror. They had spent more than twenty years trying to get gambling in their own town: Niagara Falls state senator Earl Brydges first proposed a state constitutional amendment to legalize gambling in 1972. Such an amendment requires ratification by two successive legislatures to go to a public vote. This had repeatedly failed to happen. And now Niagara Falls, New York, had to stand idly by as the Canadians began raking in $40 million a month. It was briefly proposed that the Americans could benefit too—by building a giant parking lot for gamblers headed to Canada.
A year after the Canadians opened their casino, Niagara Falls, New York, signed a memorandum of agreement with its latest developer-savior. In exchange for guaranteeing to attract $140 million of private investment, a group called Niagara Falls Redevelopment Corporation was given control of 200 acres of downtown, including the rights to manage the Convention Center, the Wintergarden, the Splash Park, parking ramps and the Rainbow Centre Mall, all operations on which the city was losing cash. Local newspapers were abuzz. They gave extensive coverage to the man behind the consortium, Eddy Cogan. Cogan (who died in 2003) was a Toronto real estate dealmaker known as “Fast Eddy,” or “Canada’s Donald Trump.” A roguish, handsome man famous for throwing lavish parties in the eighties, Cogan was credited with having transformed Toronto in the boom period that began in the fifties. He lost nearly everything when Toronto’s real estate market collapsed in 1989, and spent the nineties rebuilding his fortune. Niagara Falls was his last big dream.
After running ads inviting the public “to view Niagara’s future,” Niagara Falls Redevelopment presented its plan in January 1998. Over 1,000 people packed the Convention Center theater and adjoining pub, where the meeting was shown on closed-circuit television. The crowds were so heavy police had to close off the area. The slide show met with spontaneous rounds of applause. And no wonder; it looked great. The plan—this one was named “the Big Idea”—called for removing the entire downtown section of the Robert Moses Parkway and reconnecting Niagara Falls to its waterfalls. It set aside a stretch of Buffalo Avenue for low-rise, high-end resort development along the river above the Falls. It doomed the Observation Tower at the Maid of the Mist landing, but proposed preserving and renovating the Art Deco United Office Building, the Rainbow Centre Mall and the Flashcube formerly known as Occidental. In the area around the Convention Center, the plan laid out an entertainment district with movie theaters, live music venues, restaurants, shops, attractions, a high-rise hotel and a casino.
There, of course, was the rub. Casino gambling had yet to make it to a statewide referendum, and even if it did, there was no guarantee it would pass. The plan, Cogan assured the city, was “not dependent” on the casino. But it would be a whole lot better if it had one. Three months later, he told the Niagara Gazette that the casino element was “critical.” “We’re not dealing with purity,” he declared. “We’re dealing with reality.” By June, he was announcing that if the state would not agree to gaming, “I’ll build a box mall, I’ll cry and I’ll leave town.” If that happened, he told the Gazette, “Niagara Falls will be Mexico North, instead of a world class tourist destination.”
The casino had gone from being the icing on the cake to being cake, icing and plate. At a planning meeting where local residents were allowed to ask questions, a little girl approached the mic and asked developers what impact their plans would have on the children of Niagara Falls.
“Do you play blackjack?” one of them quipped.
At first it looked like “the Big Idea” might succeed in spurring further development. In 1999, a private company announced plans to build an underground aquarium called AquaFalls at the Flashcube. New York governor George Pataki hailed the $35 million project as “the most significant private-sector investment” in Niagara Falls in the last fifty years. Inspired by the successes of cities such as Baltimore and Chattanooga, where aquariums were the centerpieces for themed urban renewal plans, the city and county provided tax abatements and direct assistance. Never mind that Niagara Falls already had an aquarium that was struggling to meet its visitorship goals.
AquaFalls was scheduled to open in the summer of 2000. It didn’t. Developers dug a two-story-deep hole next to the Flashcube in 1999 and promptly ran out of money. An initial bond offering failed. Investors grew even more skittish when Ripley’s revealed plans to build a giant aquarium on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, as part of its Great Wolf Lodge and Indoor Waterpark. AquaFalls developers bailed. The hole sat empty, a conspicuous gap in the main tourist area, collecting water when it rained.
Plans for theme parks, convention centers, aquariums and malls all have one main goal: drawing visitors to the region and getting them to leave some money behind when they go. They are not about life—the life of the city, the life of the environment, even really, the lives of tourists, outside of that magic moment where they take out their wallets. Nowhere is this urge more obvious than in a casino, a machine literally guaranteed to make more than it spends. As Niagara Falls Redevelopment reneged on promise after promise—backing out of a millennium New Year’s party, snarling itself in legal arguments over asbestos removal in the United Office Building, wrangling control of the Convention Center from the city then refusing to market it, and finally suing the city over its failure to hand over the shuttered Splash Park—Eddy Cogan obsessed about two things: the airport, which he wanted to redevelop for commercial traffic, and the casino. In an interview with the Niagara Gazette in January 2000, he harped on them again and again. “No area turns around with local money,” he declared. Niagara’s future depended on getting tourists into town quickly, and just as quickly getting their quarters into the slots. Every other aspect of a vision that had caused locals to burst out in applause had slipped over the brink and vanished.
In 2000, fed up with the lack of results, Mayor Irene Elia told Niagara Falls Redevelopment to “put a shovel in the ground” by July or be sued by the city. The group announced it would renovate the Turtle. As of this writing, it has not.
One afternoon at the Niagara Falls Public Library, I’m photocopying a picture of Niagaraphile Paul Gromosiak, and the man himself strolls in. In real life, he’s smiling, just as he smiles up from the Buffalo News story, where he lofts a model he made himself. The article is part of a little packet I’ve assembled from the library’s clippings file. It starts with “Historian Envisions Grand Museum,” and ends with “Historian Throws in Towel on Museum.” The pages in between trace the rise and fall of Gromosiak’s vision for the Niagara Historical Center, a world-class Falls interpretive museum.
The real Gromosiak, a little balder than his 2-D counterpart, is wearing shorts and walking with a jaunty bounce. The Niagara Historical Center couldn’t be further from his mind. He has a new idea now: the Niagara Experience Center. It’s a world-class Falls interpretive museum, this time centered on geology.
“I’m all excited, like it’s Christmas Eve,” he cries in his slightly high-pitched voice. “I just got a letter from Warren Buffett! Well, not Warren Buffett, but his representative.” Paul pulls a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and hands it to me. Buffett’s representative is writing to say that the Niagara Experience Center sounds like a noble thing, but Mr. Buffett is unlikely to make a significant contribution to it.
“What do you think?” Paul asks me eagerly.
“It doesn’t look like they’re handing you a big chunk of money,” I say cautiously, not wanting to burst his bubble. Apparently, this is not possible.
“I know, but they think it’s a good idea!” he cries.
An older lady sitting at one of the library tables compliments Paul on his recent appearance in a PBS documentary. In it, he gives a tour of his home, a minishrine to Niagara filled with educational diptychs and models of unbuilt projects from previous big dreams.
“I have a disease called Niagara Falls,” he tells her, beaming like an Oscar-winner.
The Niagara Experience Center has made it a little further down the path toward reality than Paul’s last project.
“We all felt that ultimately it’s about the Falls,” Nick Winslow tells me on the phone. “You can talk about the history, the industry, all those things, but people really do want to get close to it. It’s no accident that all the top attractions are things where people are trying to get as close as they can. Also, that is something we felt the Canadian side did not do particularly well.”
Winslow is working with BRC Imagination Arts, the company brought in to design the Niagara Experience Center.
“You have the foundation of this incredible park—the first state park in America—and there ought to be a seamless transition from that into the city itself, and the capstone should be the Niagara Experience Center. It celebrates the history, the drama, the natural wonder, the industrial past and the present of this place.”
Nick talks fast, unfolding a clear vision: a gleaming interpretive center, with displays telling stories about the Falls: the geology, the power development, the Underground Railroad. There are indoor and outdoor gardens, a tourist information center, an artificial lake with nighttime illumination, and—the star attraction—a combination 3-D movie and thrill ride on which tourists soar over an Omnimax projection of the Falls with their legs hanging free: Niagara Falls, the roller coaster.
“In Canada it’s all glitz and neon,” Nick says. “We thought we ought to be the antithesis of that.”
Planners on the American side of Niagara have consistently imagined using authenticity—cultural, historic, environmental—to differentiate themselves from Canada’s middlebrow mall of attractions. There’s a smattering of carnival on the American side—a dusty, outmoded wax museum, a poorly attended 4-D theater, the new balloon ride—but New York’s planners have always shown more excitement for the highbrow: history museums, cultural centers, geology museums, interpretive trails and parks. It makes sense from a market perspective: differentiate New York’s attractions from what you get in Canada. But there’s something emotional behind it too: a desire to reclaim what’s been lost. Nostalgia for the lost city and its landscape are at the heart of every plan that has captured the town’s imagination. Focus groups with residents frequently yield persistent terms like “gaslight district” and “Village of Niagara.” Planners may consider Canadian Niagara the Land of Oz, but the residents of New York’s Niagara just want to get back to Kansas.
The past is what’s really at stake in the struggle over the Robert Moses Parkway too. It’s not just about six miles of asphalt. It’s about what part of America you want restored. Parkway advocates still cling to the vision of Robert Moses: a strong, industry-based economy with solid infrastructure—highways and parks—all in service of the hardworking taxpayer. Main Street crowded with commerce, kids playing on well-kept playgrounds, a new car every three years.
The Niagara Heritage Partnership, on the other hand, wants the return of the American wilderness. They claim their parkway removal plan is compatible with emerging trends toward heritage and cultural tourism. They insist new visitors would be drawn to a renatured gorge: not track-suited slot junkies but affluent ecotourists and Boomers who might spend big for some organic salmon and a nice local wine instead of swinging through McDonald’s on their way out of town. But they can’t promise those ecotourists—there’s not enough data—and to their minds, even without them, parkway removal would be a success. It would bring back the grasses, the trees and the birds.
One day, Bob Baxter drives me to a flat mesa north of the power plant, where unusable rubble from its construction was dumped. We stand on top of a blunt, artificial hill, and he describes what the area beneath looked like when he wandered its woods as a boy. He tells me how he used to hunt for rabbits here, how the leaves would flicker with sunlight and his dogs’ barking would echo off the escarpment. Now the trees and streams he loved are buried under twenty feet of spoil. As he talks, his eyes grow pink.
Usually, I listen to painful stories with blank concentration. Looking at Bob’s watery eyes and long, disappointed face, suddenly it’s all too much. He glances off, struggling, and I surprise myself by abruptly turning away. I walk to the edge of the dirt square and stare at its grassy shoulder. There’s a wood-shaving path here, winding its way through Queen Anne’s lace and over the edge of the spoil pile. A green sign planted at a rakish angle says Wildlife Habitat Area: Please Stay on the Trail.
In 1993, Baxter published a book of poems called Looking for Niagara. The title poem is a dreamlike boat ride through Falls history. In one stanza, he lists famous writers who came to the Falls:
and Dickens broke off a piece of its rock
thinking he could take it home with him.
Well Charlie, I want that rock back.
Chris Schoepflin stops his car in front of a red sandstone church near Main Street: Sacred Heart. He tells me it was his childhood church.
“This church will probably be closed by the time your book comes out,” he says. There’s a chink in the armor of his voice, the slightly false note you hear in a kid trying to be tough.
Chris has a boyish face, but he’s no kid. He’s the president of USA Niagara Development, the latest group convened to revive Niagara’s downtown. He seems to have his finger on the pulse of every project in town. “Is that sod?” he murmurs to himself as we pass a crew working along Rainbow Boulevard. “It’s a little late for them to be putting in sod.”
He wears a slate-gray suit with a tie the exact same color. We start off our meeting with excellent steak subs on fresh-baked rolls at a local place called Viola’s. “I don’t take people to Como’s,” he told me when I arrived at his office, a bright windowed room in the former headquarters of the Carborundum Company. The Como is the most famous restaurant in Niagara Falls, and Chris likes introducing people to Niagara’s lesser-known treasures. He was born here, and after lunch he takes me for a drive around the Falls, starting with a cruise down Willow Avenue, where he grew up. His parents still live in the same neat clapboard house with a brick front porch, not far from the Italian-American restaurants of Pine Avenue. He shows me where you used to get really good pizza, and the park where he hung out in high school. Then we cruise through the Main Street neighborhood, the sorry spectacle of a boomtown gone bust. Main Street, Niagara Falls is a strip of boarded-up storefronts and foreclosure notices, signposted with the fading names of defunct stores: Kresge; the Gaslight Lounge; Hart to Hart Furniture; Slipko’s Food King. Two businesses are visibly open: the Center City Neighborhood Development Corporation and, across the street, an establishment that appears to be known only as Adult Videos.
“This is a viable crack neighborhood,” Chris says, that edge in his voice again.
USA Niagara was created in 2001 as a special subsidiary of New York’s Empire State Development Corporation, dedicated to “promoting economic development and tourism and leveraging private investment in Niagara Falls.” It issued the latest entrant in the cavalcade of city plans in 2002. Phase 1 called for developing the usual suspects downtown: the Flashcube, the Wintergarden, the Turtle, the Rainbow Mall, the pedestrian mall, the United Office Building. It called for repurposing the Falls Street Faire, an abandoned mall and indoor amusement park, and building a new casino.
USA Niagara bought the Falls Street Faire and turned it into a convention center. Expected to break even at best, it’s a loss leader, meant to spur greater private development. So far, it has worked: a Phoenix-based real estate development company has upgraded the run-down Holiday Inn next door into a 3.5-star Crowne Plaza. The $34 million project was the town’s biggest nongaming private investment in decades. There’s even a Starbucks on the ground floor. But the renovation of the hotel was not spurred just by the convention center; it also had to do with the building that looms right across the street from it: the Seneca Niagara Casino.
The casino is thus far the most-realized part of the USA Niagara plan. It has sailed through Phase 1 and right into Phase 2, even though the machinations to get it going were complex. In an almost comic inversion of history, New York State seized prime real estate downtown by right of eminent domain and sold it to the Senecas, including the much-vaunted previous convention center, for which the Senecas paid $1. The Senecas who made the deal were the Seneca Nation of Indians, located on the Cattaraugus and Allegheny Reservations, about 80 miles from the Falls. The two closer Indian nations, the Tonawanda Band of Senecas and the Tuscaroras, are traditionalists, and unfriendly toward casinos. They sent representatives to Washington to try to convince the Department of the Interior to block the Seneca Nation’s gaming compact, on the grounds that it would “undermine the cultural and religious values” of their own nations. Even for the less traditional Seneca Nation, who replaced their clan mothers and chiefs in 1838 with a democratically elected president, entering into a gaming compact was controversial. When a May 1998 referendum of tribal members produced results in favor of opening negotiations with the state, antigaming activists with scissors broke into president Michael Schindler’s office and threatened to cut his hair. He promptly nullified the vote and resigned his office, but changed his mind the next day.
The road was rocky and strewn with lawsuits, but the gaming compact was finally signed in August of 2002. The federal government approved both the compact and the land transfer, and the Senecas opened their temporary casino in the old conference center less than four months later, on New Year’s Eve. By the end of 2005, they had built a shiny new twenty-six-story hotel and spa to go with it. The Seneca Niagara offers both traditional table games like poker and blackjack, and slot machines. And it lures Canadians across the border with craps, free drinks, and smoking, none of which can be enjoyed in Canada’s casinos.
Chris doesn’t point out the casino as we tour downtown, but he doesn’t have to: the gleaming rectangular box, glowing at night with a multicolored geyser of lights, is the biggest thing on Niagara’s American skyline. Besides, Chris is a pragmatist: his job is to bring economic development to Niagara Falls, not to question the one financially successful venture to date. The Senecas now own 50 acres in downtown Niagara Falls, including the old Carborundum building where Chris works. The casino brings 5 million visitors a year to town. Even if 1 or 2 percent of them spent some money outside its walls, the difference would show.
Beyond the casino, the USA Niagara plan takes into account the city planning learning that followed in the wake of Jane Jacobs’s critique. Road projects are aimed at widening sidewalks and decreasing road width, creating greater coexistence of pedestrians and cars. Traffic circles are being built to calm traffic, and barriers are being removed where possible, including the berms that separate the downtown from the river along the rapids above the Falls. The new convention center has been designed to spur usage at different times of day. There’s a ballroom for nighttime functions, conference rooms for weekday events, and a convention hall expected to fill up on weekends. The pedestrian mall outside, which has been decrepit and unused for years, is being renovated and geared for street-level commerce. As for the Robert Moses Parkway, its downtown stretch is slated for removal.
“Nobody spends money driving forty-five miles per hour,” Chris says.
He’s noncommittal about the section north of town, the part the Niagara Heritage Partnership especially wants removed to enable the return of nature. “All of this gets figured out by the public in the public scoping process,” he tells me. “Hopefully a compromise solution will be figured out.” I can’t get him to express an opinion. Chris is a political appointee; he speaks with meticulous diplomacy at all times.
Like any development planner, he thinks in terms of product. He praises the Canadians for having “created a lot of product” on their side of Niagara. But rather than copy their strategy, he wants to “differentiate the product.”
“I almost look at it like a mall,” he says as we sit on soft chairs in the new convention center, its maze of empty meeting rooms set up and ready, as if hosting a convention of ghosts. Chris gets out a pen and turns over a piece of paper, drawing two squares on it. “This is the Niagara Falls State Park, and this is the Seneca Gaming Corporation fifty acres. And this is Falls Street.” He draws a line between them. “You have somewhere between eight and fourteen million people coming here”—he circles the Falls—“and five or six million going to the casino. It’s almost like having Lord & Taylor and Sears and Roebuck on each end, and our charge is in the middle.”
I like Chris Schoepflin. I like his suit and tie the exact same shade of gray, as if he’s making neutrality a vocation. I like the way he chats with the steak sandwich lady, and the catch in his voice when he tells me his childhood church is dying. I like what he says when I ask him how he keeps the faith in the midst of so much cynicism: “For me,” he says of Niagara Falls, “accepting its decline is not an option.”
But I walk away from him with an odd question bouncing around my head. Is tourism a business, like any other, a packaging of commodities to meet the market’s needs, real or perceived? Is Niagara Falls an anchor tenant in a mall—Sears to the casino’s swanker Lord & Taylor? Come see the softer side of the sublime? Nineteenth-century planners like Olmsted saw travel as a means of intellectual and moral enrichment. The Free Niagara movement that created the Niagara Reservation in 1885 won the public to its side by arguing that sublime landscapes were not simply places to be exploited, but sites of spiritual uplift, the pride of a nation and the birthright of its citizens. Such idealism would no doubt be laughed out of town today. But are we really ready to dispense with the notion that our connection to a place is somehow important beyond economic impact? Or that travel—in spite of many tourism theorists’ claims to the contrary—can ever be anything other than a commodity, a manufactured experience sold at whatever price the market will bear?
In city planning too, it seems the notion of public good has faded from view. Niebuhr derided the “doctrine of salvation by bricks,” but where is salvation meant to come from today? When I ask Chris to sum up USA Niagara’s vision, he puts it in straightforward economic terms: “The ultimate vision is to attract private development and to generate jobs and to create and rebuild the tax base based on the tourism industry, which is the second-largest industry in the great state of New York.”
In a way, he’s simply putting it in terms people might be able to believe. No one’s buying salvation here anymore. Everyone who talks about the difficulty of fixing Niagara Falls eventually mentions the cynicism of the town’s residents. Niagara’s long history of utopian dreamers works against it. Too many wizards have put on too many shows. The locals have had their fill of broken dreams. They’ve got their eye on the man behind the curtain.
“Many people have lost hope,” Bob Baxter tells me. “They don’t want to hear any more promises.” The sentiment echoes what Paul Gromosiak told The New York Times in 2001. “I think even if Christ would come here and say ‘I have come to save you,’” he said, “people would say, ‘Yeah, I heard that before.’”
At the time, Niagara’s mayor was a former nun.
Late one afternoon, I drive out Buffalo Avenue to its intersection with Hyde Park Boulevard. Three corners here contain industrial buildings. The fourth is Echota, the utopian workers’ town. The sky overhead is scored with power lines. A couple of smokestacks hang out like hoodlums just down the street. And there, incongruously, sit Stanford White’s houses, still remarkable, even in their dilapidated state, bankrupted turn-of-the-century gentlemen uneasily regarding their new neighbors, the featureless boxes the Power Authority built to replace the houses they moved in the sixties.
The original stone curbs and sidewalks are still here, grown over but largely intact. Some of White’s homes have been re-sided. Others, boarded up, look abandoned. Some lots among them are empty: in the late eighties, when residents complained that trees in the neighborhood were dying from air pollution, DuPont, whose plant is nearest, began buying homes and demolishing them to create a “buffer zone.” A few preservationists roused themselves to make a fuss, and DuPont desisted.
I park on D Street, near a post-White home with a detached garage on which someone has spray-painted the directive Fuck You. I get out and walk along Gill Creek. Seven and a half miles long, Gill Creek begins in the Tuscarora nation, swings around the Power Authority reservoir in a rerouting channel, passes through agricultural lands, a railyard and a golf course, glides through Hyde Park in Niagara Falls, where it’s impounded to form a recreational lake, then slips over a small dam to flow through the factory district and into the Niagara River. On the opposite bank here, the scrubby trees occasionally part to offer glimpses of Echota’s new next-door neighbor: the grassy Olin Industrial Welding hazardous waste landfill, capped after the soil and groundwater were contaminated with mercury and PCBs.
At A Street, I keep going, whacking into the brushy area between Echota and Buffalo Avenue. There, in the scrub, I come to a manhole cover stamped with the letters NFPC. Niagara Falls Power Company, the folks who built Echota. Just beyond is a stretch of what must be the old 1891 Gill Creek retaining wall, pride of its engineers.
How fortunate is the dweller in this charming corner of the earth! I sit down on the wall, feet dangling toward the creek. Someone has left a banana lying here.
The sun is moving toward the horizon. Crickets chirp; a seagull circles above. Framed inside a row of high-voltage transmission towers is the Seneca Niagara’s glass tower. Reeds line the creek banks; a beer bottle nestles in some cattails. A shopping cart lies on its side, half-submerged in the sludgy water. A squirrel with two racing stripes of mange down its back climbs onto the wall and walks by, glancing at me with passing interest. A minute later, I hear a plop and look up to see the squirrel dog-paddling across the creek. It crashes through the underbrush on the other bank and heads for the landfill. In its wake, an orangish fin breaks the water and ripples. The body of a largemouth bass hoves into view, lingering lazily just below the surface, as if aware the state has declared this stretch of Gill Creek off-limits for fish consumption. A heron the color of bluestone sails in and alights in the creek shallows, standing still as a hunk of garden statuary. There’s something peaceful about the scene. Eliminate the casino, the power lines, the landfill, the shopping cart and the mange on the squirrel, and it might be a vision of Niagara’s lost natural landscape. It might be the sylvan woods below the escarpment where Bob Baxter once whistled for his dogs, a brace of rabbits at his belt.
The Niagara Heritage Partnership vision is radical: it imagines a Niagara that’s better all around, pleasanter for residents, more interesting to tourists, and most importantly, thriving for its own sake, the way the Tuscaroras wanted their land simply to be, a desire that flummoxed Robert Moses. But of course it seems downright utopian to ask private developers to consider something other than profit. The casino, rising higher than anything else on the skyline and gleaming like a colossal one-eyed bandit, seems designed to refute the very idea. In spite of its 70-foot lobby waterfall, the Seneca Niagara has nothing to do with the Falls, and not much to do with Indians, whose culture turns up there as café theme and architectural motif. Presenting a blank cement wall to the seedy streetscape that flanks it, the casino turns inward to count its cash while, outside, the city and the state bicker over the spoils of the gaming compact.
Inside, on the gaming floor, winners pad across the carpeting to a sign that says Redemption. And so it was sold to the public: as Niagara’s last chance to save itself from the dirty shame of being what developer Eddy Cogan called “Mexico North.” “Casino May be Last Hope for Honeymoon Capital,” declared USA Today, reporting on its 2002 opening. Even Mayor Irene Elia, the former nun, had to support it. “As long as it is family oriented,” she told The New York Times resignedly, “with day care and other things.”
A Buffalo News article six months after the casino’s opening tabulated its effects good and bad. The casino had brought 2,000 new jobs and was on target to deliver $9 million to Niagara Falls, the city’s negotiated share of the slots revenue. Home sales were up around the casino, and city revenues from parking tickets had jumped by 400 percent. But the promised construction boom had not happened. And since 65 percent of the casino’s patrons came from Erie and Niagara counties, it wasn’t so much an influx of outside cash as a new means of taxing locals. Today some in the community suggest that even the rise in home sales has been detrimental to development: a flurry of land speculation around the casino’s opening drove prices up, setting the entry bar too high for the small entrepreneurs who might otherwise revitalize the district. So the blocks around the casino—with the exception of the Crowne Plaza—are still squalid.
The casino now competes with two Ontario enterprises: the second Canadian casino, the Fallsview, opened in 2004, featuring a 200,000-square-foot gaming floor, 368 hotel rooms, 10 dining and food facilities, and a 1,500-seat theater. In the lobby of that casino is a giant fountain made partly from architectural salvage from old power plants: it rears up like a time machine from an H. G. Wells novel, ready to zap passengers into the utopian future, or perhaps backward, to the moment when the harnessing of the Falls spawned visions of a gleaming, perfect world. The casino visitors, hurrying by on their way to the blackjack table or the slots, barely give it a glance.