Niagara: A History of the Falls (56 page)

But Lois Gibbs was no longer the compliant helpmate he had married. She had, without really understanding it, been thrust into the centre of the expanding women’s movement of the seventies and eighties. Like so many of her colleagues, she had thrived on her new independence. For her, activism had become a way of life.

She was convinced that the Love Canal story was not yet over. The federal government had tapped into its new Super-fund for disaster areas to compensate the homeowners. The administrator of that fund was charged with preparing an assessment of risk as well as a study of further land use. Neither had yet been done. The Niagara Falls city fathers seemed to think that once the original residents were out of the way, some of the boarded-up houses, especially in the outer rings, could be re-sold to other people, “innocent victims” glad of a bargain. That, she firmly believed, was madness.

She had learned that you
could
fight city hall, if you knew how, and she was anxious to use her own experience to help other communities with similar problems. She and her husband eventually split up, amicably. With her new-found energy Lois Gibbs set about organizing the National Citizens’ Clearing House for Hazardous Waste in a small community just outside Washington. She married Stephen Lester, a toxicologist who had helped in the Love Canal campaign and now works with her.

After the family left Love Canal, the children’s health problems, which Lois Gibbs had carefully and regularly monitored, began to disappear. She followed her son Michael’s epilepsy through medical tests. All traces vanished after six months; he went off his medication and has never suffered another seizure. She also kept track of Melissa’s blood count and watched it climb back to normal after she left the area. Melissa, too, required no further medication.

The new activist had plunged into the Love Canal controversy, not from any sense of civic duty, but simply to protect her young. For Lois Gibbs, her children’s recovery was payment with interest for that long, exacting battle.

Afterword

The fibres of history are tightly woven into the fabric of the two border cities that face each other across the majesty of Niagara Falls. They are opposites in almost every sense. It is as if each was fashioned by a different force and created by a different environment. Yet both are creatures of the great cataract that is their common parent.

Visitors driving in from the Queen Elizabeth Way on the Canadian side quickly spot the contrasting landmarks that define the character of each community. Even as their hearts leap at the sight of the ghostly spray rising from the Horseshoe, their eyes are diverted by the presence, in the foreground, of a gigantic Ferris wheel looming over an amusement park. As they continue across the Rainbow Bridge, they are entranced by a real rainbow curving above the luminous waters, but the first monument they encounter on the American side is the glittering blue glass office building of Hooker Chemical’s parent, Occidental Petroleum.

The carnival ride and the chemical headquarters emphasize each city’s priorities. Niagara Falls, Canada, draws the fun seekers; Niagara Falls, USA, is home to the lunch-pail crowd. In an odd reversal of national stereotypes, the Canadians have the guise of Barnum-like showmen, all glitz and sex appeal; the Americans are pure blue-collar – sober, stolid, industrious.

The American community never could compete for visitors with the sinuous sweep of the Horseshoe or the spectacular vantage point of Table Rock, nor did it try. Since the original cluster of shacks and mills adopted the name of Manchester, industrial progress has fuelled its ambitions.

The roots of the Canadian community go back to the town of Clifton and those hard-nosed entrepreneurs, Forsyth and Clark, Barnett and Davis, who exploited the mystery and glamour of the cataract to rope in the customers. Today, the old Front has been reincarnated, albeit with more legitimacy, in the neon midway of Clifton Hill.

In Niagara Falls, New York, there is nothing to compare with this crowded block of fast-food outlets, curio shops, sideshows, wax museums, and motels (complete with heart-shaped Jacuzzis). Since the early 1950s Clifton Hill has been growing and spilling over into side alleys and adjoining lots. A mild-mannered accountant named Dudley Burland controls the east side; the grandsons of Harry Oakes mine the other as assiduously as he mined Kirkland Lake. Here, the Gothic thrills that the Falls once provoked are counterfeited in milder form in Dracula’s Castle and the House of Frankenstein.

Visitors flock to the Falls expecting to be entertained – to be photographed against a backdrop of falling water, real or simulated, and to bring home to Toronto or Tokyo an artifact or curio that bears witness to their intimacy with a great natural spectacle. This has been true for more than a century, but life moves more quickly today.

There was a time when such literary travellers as Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher were content to spend hours, even days, gazing into the unfathomable heart of a cataract not yet marred by surrounding clutter. Although few visitors spend a week at the Falls today, the hypnotic attraction of those boisterous waters is as compelling as it was a century and a half ago. The tinny cacophony in the background cannot compete with the full-throated roar of the green flood frothing above the crest and hurtling into the basin below. For those who lean over the park railing, staring into the depths, or look directly into the deluge from the deck of the
Maid
, the experience remains transcendental.

On the Canadian side the tourists are entertained, on the American, they are educated. Within the curving contemporary architecture of the Schoellkopf Geological Museum, the saga of the cataract’s birth is told in sound and film. In the Robert Moses powerplant, with its spectacular glass-walled walkway, the drama of Niagara’s power development graphically unfolds. Each of its characters, from Porter and Evershed to Adams and Moses himself, receives his due. Hennepin is there, too, in Thomas Hart Benton’s vast mural.

The most conspicuous human symbol in the New York State Reservation is a larger-than-life statue of Nikola Tesla. In Canada, it is an effigy of Charles Blondin, teetering on a tightrope stretched across Clifton Hill. The two plants named for Sir Adam Beck no longer admit visitors; the emphasis on this side is on doom and daredevils. There are barrels everywhere: imitation barrels for those who want a souvenir photo showing themselves tumbling over a painted cataract, real barrels in which the impetuous and the foolhardy – Maud Willard, George Stathakis – met their fates, and counterfeit barrels such as the replica that Annie Taylor commissioned to stand in for the original that was stolen. (The Annie Taylor mannequin, slender and comely, is as spurious as the barrel itself.)

Others as rash as Annie continue to follow her example, heedless of the authorities on both sides of the river who can – and have – set fines as high as five thousand dollars. The barrel performers, like the tightrope walkers of an earlier day, have become commonplace, yet the parade goes on, with each striving to outdo the others. In 1984, Karel Soucek went over the Horseshoe and billed himself as the Last of the Niagara Daredevils. He wasn’t. The following year he lost his life in a plunge at the Houston Astrodome, and he lost his title to Steven Trotter, who, at twenty-one, made the plunge successfully as the youngest daredevil of all (ignoring Roger Woodward, who never claimed to be anything). Dave Munday in 1987 became the first Canadian to go over the Falls and live. Two years later, two of his fellow countrymen, Peter DeBarnardi and Jeffrey Petkovich, went him one better by stuffing themselves, face to face, into a single barrel, to emerge alive from their tandem journey. When barrel riding became banal, a white-water expert from Tennessee, Jessie Sharp, challenged the Falls in a kayak. He did not survive.

In a specially designed theatre, the Canadian film process known as IMAX concentrates heavily on daredevils. The great exploits of past heroes – of Charles Blondin, Joel Robinson, and Annie Taylor – have been brought eerily to life. The screen is so gigantic that peripheral vision vanishes, the past and present interlock, and the audience feels drawn
inside
the picture. More than most films, this one provokes the kind of nervous thrill – shocking yet exhilarating – that induced a rush of adrenalin in those who witnessed the real thing a century or more ago.

In a curious way, the IMAX production has itself become part of the history of the Falls because its actors had to undertake stunts almost as hazardous as those described in the tourist pamphlets. One cannot fake the Falls or build a replica on a back lot. No film director, no matter how brilliant, no production company, no matter how wealthy, can counterfeit what nature has made unique. The IMAX producers were aware that whoever played the part of Deanne Woodward would have to be flung directly into the furious current on the Canadian side of Goat Island only a few yards from the lip of the Horseshoe – a truly daunting prospect.

No professional stunter could be found to attempt the feat. Apart from Deanne Woodward herself, no human being had ever come within five yards of the cataract’s brink without being swept over the precipice. The speed of the water here is close to forty miles an hour. Finally, a twenty-four-year-old Toronto advertising woman named Jan Gordon, eager to break into films, heard about the production and volunteered. Attached to a fifteen-foot leash, she took the plunge and survived as the cameras (one fixed to a gigantic crane) rolled. For her work on the film she received close to five thousand dollars; more important, she got the job she wanted in the motion-picture business.

Once again past and present interlocked, as Deanne Woodward’s ordeal was recreated. Standing on the bank with a long, hooked pole in his hands, ready to pluck Jan Gordon from the current, was the last of Red Hill’s four sons, Wesley. Employed for fifteen years by the
Maid of the Mist
and now a park policeman, he has had no desire to engage in the ventures for which his father and two of his elder brothers were famous. He still pulls bodies from the river as they did, at $150 a corpse, and has served as an adviser on every recent motion picture about Niagara.

For the IM AX production Wes Hill helped to replicate a deed that many considered impossible: Joel Robinson’s 1861 trip through the Whirlpool Rapids aboard a fragile sidewheeler. For this a sturdier craft was built, heavily reinforced with steel and driven by two powerful Chrysler 318 engines. Even so, it required scores of men hauling on a thousand-foot hawser to keep the boat from breaking loose in the Whirlpool and hurtling down to Lake Ontario. The sequence was the most difficult and hazardous the production team had ever experienced and confirmed Robinson’s reputation as one of the great figures in Niagara history.

Today such risks are properly confined to the movies. It was once a terrifying experience to clamber down the swinging Indian ladders to the bottom of the gorge. Nowadays, protected by shrouds of yellow plastic, visitors are whisked by elevator to concrete-lined tunnels bored in the cliff face. There, secure from the tempest that all but sucked the breath from Timothy Bigelow in 1805, they experience the thrill without the peril.

If the hazards are gone, so is the spontaneity. The tourists are channelled in clearly defined routes from one vantage point to the next. In 1854, Isabella Lucy Bird scrambled down alone to make her way out to a big rock near the water’s edge and to gaze in solitude at the young moon casting its pale light on the shimmering waters. It is hard to imagine anybody doing that today. The margin of the river has been shored up and the crowds – 250 times as large as in her day – conspire against any private contemplation.

Table Rock is long gone. Its name has been preserved in Table Rock House, a park restaurant. The old site serves as a reminder of the remorseless retreat of the cataract, which has moved back at least the length of a football field since Miss Bird “did” the Falls.

The art lover will search in vain for the vantage point from which Frederic Church created his celebrated canvas. It cannot be found because it never existed; Church painted the ideal, not the reality. And now even the reality has been much altered by nature and by man. The waters have long since gnawed their way past the spot from which Church made his preliminary sketches. Framed against the onrushing flood, the silhouette of a derelict scow occupies the foreground – the same scow from which Red Hill rescued two marooned mariners. On the bank above stands the pillared powerplant that Edward Lennox designed for the Electrical Development Company and from whose roof Hill’s breeches-buoy was strung. Sealed but not abandoned, the building is to be restored as a museum by Ontario Hydro.

Not far away in Queen Victoria Park, on the site of the old military chain reserve, stands a memorial to Sir Casimir Gzowski, who helped save the gorge for the people. The park is not quite what Lord Dufferin visualized when he talked of preserving the land “in the picturesque condition in which it was originally laid out by nature.” The commissioners have long since opted for what Dufferin dismissed as “the penny arts of the landscape gardener.” The park, with its edged borders and cropped lawns, derives its ambience from the British colonial style, not the untamed natural beauty of the Canadian wilderness. Supported by fees from souvenir shops and restaurants, the park commission spends $12 million a year just cutting the grass.

The past is well posted on both sides of the river. A guidebook is hardly necessary to find Thomas Barnett’s original museum of curiosities – now grown to 700,000 exhibits – or the Oakes Garden Theatre, Prospect Point, and Bloody Run. One landmark, however, frustrates discovery. No sign points the way to Love Canal; no guidebook locates it on a map.

It can be found on the southern edge of town, and it is known today – the part of it that has been declared “habitable” – as Black Creek Village, “A Modern Community,” in the sales phrase of the Love Canal Revitalization Agency. The visitor happens upon it suddenly – so suddenly he may not know he has arrived. At first glance, 102nd Street with its row of modest homes looks like any other residential avenue. But something is wrong; the street lacks resonance. Why are there no cars parked in the driveways? Why no children on bicycles, no mothers wheeling baby carriages down the sidewalks? Why are the front yards empty of life – no bent figures weeding gardens, no homeowners pushing lawn mowers?