Niagara: A History of the Falls (47 page)

It was at this point, with the controversy at its height and nothing done on the Niagara River, that Dewey appointed Robert Moses to head the New York State Power Authority. The tough new chairman wasted no time before attacking the private power companies, employing the blunt and colourful language for which he was famous. “The record shows that the worst possible procedure from the viewpoint of public interest would be to turn over the waters of the Niagara to the five utility companies,” he wrote to Edward Martin, chairman of the Senate Public Works Committee in 1954. The argument that Niagara power was “divinely preempted for private enterprise” was so much “chatter,” Moses said, for “the history of private exploitation of the Niagara frontier in New York State is one of outrageous effrontery that finally was cured by aroused public opinion.… [The] companies … ignoring the lurid past history of callous exploitation have conducted a campaign of skillful vilification.” Moses shrewdly harped on the probability that giving in to the private utilities would cost votes. Any party, he said, that advocated private exploitation of Niagara’s power would be thrown out of office in New York.

Bolstering Moses’ argument was the obvious contrast with the Canadian venture. While American politicians continued to bicker among themselves, Ontario Hydro was about to open the first phase of Beck 2. “My vocabulary,” Moses wrote, “does not extend to the statesmen who find in our sorry record only material for slogans about ‘the American way’ and ‘the matchless spirit of free, private American enterprise.’ The Canadians talk less, act faster, and have a better scale of values.”

By the end of June, little more than three years after the turning of the first sod, Beck 2 started to produce power. At two o’clock on the afternoon of August 30, the Duchess of Kent officially opened the new power station, which had a capacity of 1,828,000 horsepower. The cost had risen to about $300 million. This was Robert Saunders’s big moment – and also his last triumph. The following year the ebullient Hydro chairman was killed in a plane crash.

A month before the official opening, the Niagara River served notice that, in spite of man’s attempt to harness its waters, nature was still in control. On July 2, 1954, 185,000 tons of rock comprising most of Prospect Point crashed into the gorge with a mighty roar, largely eliminating the famous vantage point and carving a great wedge-shaped section out of the American Falls, altering its crest line. This catastrophe accelerated plans to stabilize the Falls and restore the crest by narrowing and deepening the Horseshoe on the Canadian side and building a series of control gates a mile upstream to help regulate the flow of both cataracts.

The embarrassing truth was that the United States was being forced to buy much of its hydroelectric energy from Canada. Without a new powerplant, it could not yet make use of its share of Niagara’s waters granted by the treaty. With both Beck plants operating, Ontario Hydro was happy to take all the water it could get.

And still the political squabbling continued. Bills that failed to make their way through the committee process one year reappeared in different form the next and were again set aside. Intergovernmental rivalry added to the delays. Washington wanted the job done by the Federal Power Commission (FPC). New York wanted to go it alone.

Moses, who visited Beck 2 in July, 1954, was even more convinced after what he saw that New York should undertake the project. As a park man, he was impressed by the way Ontario had integrated its park system with the hydroelectric development. “The Canadians are away ahead of us,” he announced. “They did the job as it should be done; they put the first emphasis on conservation. Power is only one phase of that.”

The ponderous legislative process inched along at a maddening pace. In January 1956, the Senate Public Works Committee approved a new bill proposed by Senator Herbert Lehman of New York that would turn the job over to Moses’ State Power Authority. Lehman’s bill finally went to the Senate in May and passed by a vote of forty-eight to thirty-nine. But before it could go to the House for approval, nature again took a hand. On June 8, 1956, with a mighty crash and a roar, the cliff supporting the Schoellkopf Power Plant, now part of the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, gave way. Most of the structure tumbled into the water, depriving the United States of its main domestic source of hydroelectric power from the river.

3
The river takes over

At five in the afternoon, Bob Frombemad and his wife were strolling through Ontario’s Queen Victoria Park, pushing a baby carriage, when it happened. They heard a strange noise coming from across the river – rumbling and grumbling at first, then a thunderous roar. Looking across at the Schoellkopf plant, they stared in disbelief. The top of the gorge began to shake, and for several moments it seemed that hundreds of tons of rock hung in the air as if suspended by wires. Then the entire mass – four hundred feet across and forty feet thick – tumbled down, crushing the roof of the powerplant below. Sherman McKensey, driving through the park along the lip of the gorge, saw it from a different angle. To him it sounded as if a bomber had scored a direct hit. At first there was only a small shower of rocks; but then the entire bank seemed to crumble, and the shower became a cascade.

Inside the plant, Donald Kline, one of the operators on duty, heard a roar that made him think of a jet plane taking off. The workers had been told of dangerous seepage from the cliff above and had been warned to keep a sharp lookout. Now, Paul Batheu, hearing and feeling the rumbling, rushed to a telephone to warn the operator at the switching station on the top of the cliff.

At that moment, the plant’s windows began to pop. The floor heaved alarmingly. A huge crack opened in the end wall of the plant. In less than thirty seconds it widened to a two-foot gap. The building split open. The ceiling began to fall. Kline and Batheu, with thirty-eight other workers, dashed through the building as a blast of water hit one of the generators, blowing it out “like a piece of paper.” Thirty-nine men reached the door on the downstream side as the foundations gave way and most of the plant slipped toward the river. One man, Richard Draper, was blown directly out of a window to his death. The rest escaped and, with the elevator out of order, clawed their way 350 feet to the top of the cliff.

Two-thirds of the Schoellkopf station was a twisted mass of steel. It was a devastating blow, not only to its owner, Niagara Mohawk, but also to the entire community. Power from the Falls was already in short supply because of the delay in building the plant at Lewiston. Now, more than ever, the United States would have to depend on a foreign company to fuel the factories along the Niagara River.

It must have seemed to Robert Moses that the long political battle would shortly end in his favour. With the collapse of the Schoellkopf plant, the power shortage in the northeastern United States had grown desperate. The Niagara Mohawk Company called off its attack and urged Congress to pass Senator Lehman’s bill; Moses had quietly assured the company that when the American plant was built, the firm would receive a fixed share of the power produced. William E. Miller, the short, fiery congressman in whose district the plant would be built, had also come round as a result of the Schoellkopf collapse. He had fought vigorously on behalf of the private utilities, but now he, too, was prepared to help steer the bill through Congress.

The House Public Works Committee gave its backing to the bill, but a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats, which controlled the Rules Committee, refused to clear it for a vote. The original $300-million cost for the project was now estimated at $405 million, and, as the
New York Times
complained, “we are back where we started six years ago.”

All of Moses’ problems had been caused by that irritating clause in the international treaty, giving Congress the right to approve the project. But was it valid? Moses asked the courts to decide. That took six months, but in June 1957 the Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the clause did
not
apply. It turned out that the FPC had always had the right to license what was now a $600-million project. More than six years had been wasted over a rider that had no validity! Political foot-dragging had doubled the cost.

The new parkland at Niagara was still at the top of the Moses agenda. He was proposing a $750-million face-lift for the American side of the gorge to include a new parkway, built on fill, that would begin at Grand Island and run, eventually, all the way to Fort Niagara on Lake Ontario. There would be a new bridge at Lewiston, a new park system, and an expansion of the original state reservation, including improvements on Goat Island.

In Congress, Republicans and Democrats hammered out a compromise bill that would sell half the power developed by the project to private enterprise and the other half to municipalities, co-operatives, and other power users. Everything seemed in place for quick Senate approval, but it didn’t come. Civil rights was now a more important issue than public power, and the Senate plunged into a long debate that delayed the bill’s passage. At last, on August 21, 1957, the exhausting wrangle was over. The president signed the bill and Robert Moses’ problems seemed at an end.

They weren’t. The FPC was bombarded with a series of complaints from the city of Niagara Falls, Niagara County, and the town of Lewiston. Moses had planned seven thousand feet of open cut to carry the water from above the Falls to the reservoir behind the powerplant. The local governments insisted the cut be covered, and so the FPC was threatening to give no more than a conditional licence to the New York State Power Authority until the matter was resolved.

Moses had planned an elaborate dinner and ground-breaking ceremonies for September 12. He had to scrap them. The FPC hearings dragged on for nine weeks. In November, the city of Niagara Falls gave in. The other two complainants did not. Moses issued a propaganda blast in the form of a glossy forty-eight-page brochure supporting his position. He followed that on December 3 with one of his typically provocative public attacks in which he called the FPC “spineless” and charged that the deputy counsel to the commission was “more interested in his vacation than in putting an end to stultifying delays.” The delay, he declared, was costing western New York power consumers at least $100,000 a day.

In the end Moses had to give in. He got his licence from the FPC in January on the condition that the entire seven thousand feet of canal be covered, at an additional cost of $25 million. The following March – eight years after the international agreement was signed – the New York State Power Authority finally began construction of the main powerplant at Lewiston.

4
The fighting Tuscarora

Robert Moses was all work. He rarely attended the theatre, didn’t care for bridge, indulged in no hobbies. His biographer, Robert Caro, called him “America’s greatest builder,” but Caro was no admirer. He depicted Moses as a man with a hunger for power that was never slaked, and one who was also malicious, spiteful, and arrogant. Moses actually seemed to enjoy expressing his contempt for those he felt were considerably beneath him – a class that included almost everybody.

He didn’t just defeat his opponents. He tried to destroy them, and often succeeded. Revenge was always sweet for the power broker. He never forgot a slight, and that was one reason why he was feared. He was not above using the meanest of epithets to bring down his rivals, smearing them as Commies, pinkos, or Bolshies. He kept dossiers on those with whom he had to do business against the day when he would need inside information to bring them to heel.

Moses was a burly two-hundred-pounder with heavy-lidded eyes and a face dominated by a powerful nose. He thumbed that nose at presidents, governors, and fellow park commissioners. “Nothing I have ever done has been tinged with legality,” he liked to say, and, “if the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” His was the law of the
fait accompli
, especially when it came to condemning buildings or wooded areas for his beloved highways. While others sought injunctions, Moses put his bulldozers to work before the fact. He did not always wait for legal confirmation of his projects. “Once you sink that first stake,” he said, “they’ll never make you pull it up.”

He was an elitist, who cheerfully shifted the Northern State Parkway three miles south to accommodate the baronial estates of men with such names as Whitney, Morgan, Kahn, and Stimson. But he wouldn’t move it an inch when a farmer, James Roth, protested that it would split his property in two. Moses had built overpasses for the powerful so that they could reach their golf courses, but he refused to do so for Roth who, understandably, wanted access to half his land.

The acknowledged overlord of the state’s park system and longtime commissioner of New York City parks, he had no interest in building for the lower classes. He cared only for those who drove automobiles – hence his practice of building expressways and thru ways. By banning public transportation from the state parks he made them virtually inaccessible to the poor. Similarly, in the city he limited access to parks by rapid transit and made them impossible for buses to reach by building the overhead bridges too low.

Those with dark skins – blacks and Puerto Ricans – were beneath his notice. Because he felt that blacks were inherently “dirty” he made it difficult for buses they chartered to get permits to enter such city parks as Jones Beach. Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor and an old acquaintance of Moses, was shocked to realize that underlying his strict policy of park cleanliness lurked a deep distaste for the masses. “He doesn’t love people,” she told Robert Caro. “It used to shock me, because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people.… He’d denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. ‘I’ll get them! I’ll teach them!’ He loves the public, but not the people. The public is just
the
public. It’s a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons – just to make it a better public.”