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The beautiful rainbow is dead, and gone are the birds that sang through it.
–Thomas Gold Appleton, “Niagara”
It’s a crisp mid-winter’s morning. The sun has just begun to nudge itself over the horizon. In the distance, a lone gull rides a swift breeze across the slate-gray sky.
You’ve tread across wide banks of snow, trudged through waist-high drifts. Every branch of every tree is lacquered with a heavy coat of clear, glowing ice. A meandering cadence of cracks and snaps echoes through the frozen air.
Suddenly, a furious gust of arctic wind explodes from out of the gorge. Icy bursts of spray slap at your face. For a few seconds you are awash in white, lost in time and space. The roar of the cataract throbs to the shifting pulses of the wind. Glimpses of the churning waters fade in and out of view. And then there is calm, silence.
The momentary tempest has passed, risen skyward until it is completely vanished, consumed within the large billowing shroud of mist that hovers perpetually over the Falls like a faithful sentinel.
This is Niagara as perhaps few visitors have experienced it. It is not a comfortable place, not at all like in summer when you can stroll at your leisure for a quick glimpse and a snapshot, oblivious to the powerful, enigmatic forces of nature that are at work here.
In the winter, this place assumes a different light and hue, a different attitude. It demands some acknowledgement, some respect. All your senses are taxed but you are rewarded for your efforts with a heightened awareness of everything, including your own smallness in the presence of such awesome power and beauty.
Sadly, the incongruities that mar this otherwise magical landscape also become more apparent, more ominous in winter. A wall of high-rise hotels and observation towers looms over the Canadian side of the gorge as if a chunk of downtown Toronto has somehow fallen out of the sky and landed there. Visitors, it is said, have at times mistaken the space-needle-shaped Skylon for that city’s landmark CN tower.
On summer days these gleaming edifices seem to recede somewhat into the rampant glitz and frenzy of the tourist season. In the winter, however, you see them for what they are–cold, stark edifices of cement and glass at home in an urban landscape but woefully out of place here.
Commercial development in Niagara Falls, Ontario has outpaced that on the American side for the past several decades but most noticeably since the arrival of casino gambling in the late 1990’s. This past summer, it was not unusual to see six, seven, eight giant tower cranes plying the skyline above the gorge. Hotels appear to be bumping shoulders, muscling their way up front for a better view like a group of burly gawkers at a car wreck.
“On the Canadian side, the change has been striking and its direction obvious,” observes Paul Dyster, a city councilman in Niagara Falls, New York. “Population has exploded in the Golden Horseshoe from Niagara Falls, Ontario to Toronto, and the Canadian focus on tourism since 1970 has paid big dividends. On the U.S. side, the story of the last 40 years has been one of continuing industrial decline, urban blight, and the loss of population. Paradoxically, the failure of economic revitalization efforts has probably reduced development pressures along the city-park border, giving us a chance to learn from Canada’s successes and missteps. At least for now, our side is still the more ‘natural’ side.”
While commercialization on the American side is not nearly as severe, the onslaught has clearly begun. At the very brink of the Falls, a newly “refurbished” Prospect Point observation tower tugs at your gaze. The original structure, completed in 1961, was somewhat higher and more architecturally austere. It was built to offer a scenic overlook for visitors and elevator access to the Maid of the Mist boat rides that operate at its base. Decades of neglect have turned it into a rusted, decaying hulk, an embarrassment to both the City of Niagara Falls and State of New York.
“Is that hideous or is that hideous?” asked Gov. George Pataki during a visit to Niagara Falls in 1998. “It’s coming down soon,” he vowed. The governor had come to town to announce a $20 million renovation project and a new commitment by the New York Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation to re-embrace the vision of Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect who designed the Niagara Reservation and spearheaded the public campaign that led to its creation in 1885.
Pataki announced that the existing tower would be “removed” and “the natural landscape restored.” New, less-obtrusive, elevator shafts would be drilled in the bedrock 200 feet back from the escarpment with a horizontal tunnel to provide access to the Maid of the Mist docks. It wasn’t to be. The state decided that this approach was cost prohibitive and proceeded, instead, to refurbish the tower rather than eliminate it.
About 55 feet of the old tower was lopped off and the steel superstructure clad with reflective glass panels. New high-speed elevators were installed, tripling the capacity to carry Maid of the Mist patrons from 800 to 2,400 per hour. To conservationists, the move was a blatant abdication of the Olmsted philosophy that was purportedly guiding State Parks’ decisions at Niagara.
“Ultimately, money talked louder,” observes E.R. Baxter, a member of the Niagara Heritage Partnership, a group that advocated removal of the tower.
“As a rationale for maintaining the observation tower, the state contended in its 2000 draft environmental impact study that the structure provided ‘views important to the community.’ As a further justification, they extracted Olmsted’s quote that the best view of the falls is on the Canadian side. This use of his remark was a serious misreading, however.”
“Olmsted’s comment about the view from Canada was an objective description, not a plea for an observation tower in partial redress of a geographical reality. He went on to describe the natural environment features that should be preserved and restored on the Niagara Reservation. A mirror-sided observation tower was not one of these features. In fact, he said that attempting to build something to improve the view from the American side, if it is built on a large scale, would be grandiose, useless, and wasteful.”
Baxter suspects that increased elevator capacity will be used as rationale for adding more tour boats. “How many Maids will eventually float in the pool below the falls?” he asks. “Will they follow one another like plastic horses on a merry-go-round?”
Governor Pataki has followed through on a promise to pump millions of dollars into infrastructure improvements at the Niagara Reservation. In addition to the tower renovation, $6.2 million has been spent to refurbish the American Rapids Bridge to Goat Island and new “alternative fuel” trolleys have replaced the aging fleet of gas-powered “viewmobiles” that carted visitors around the park for decades. New interpretive signs have also been erected throughout the Niagara Reservation, some recounting the history of Olmsted. To conservationists, however, these “improvements” are not the kind that Olmsted had in mind and they remain skeptical of the state’s commitment to a more natural Niagara.
“Because the state parks commissioner-and the governor-have spoken favorably of pursuing the Olmsted vision at Niagara,” says E.R. Baxter, “we should be encouraged to be charitable in our assessments of their performance. Sadly, the evidence
demands otherwise.”
As examples he points to the placement of portable food shacks around Goat Island, fireworks displays over the Falls every Friday and Sunday evening throughout the summer, the planting of wildflowers in clearly defined beds, and the installation of a million dollars worth of floodlights to illuminate the upper rapids above the American Falls.
“These lights are anti-Olmsted,” says E.R. Baxter. “They are artificial, unsightly, and distracting when seen from Goat Island. Approximately 90 of these floodlight standards line the mainland riverbank, most over three feet tall, the shape of economy refrigerators. In some instances, shoreline foliage has been hacked away.”
“The thought that’s heartbreaking,” says Baxter, “is that somewhere in State Parks there are individuals making these decisions who think they’re doing something good. They may, in some instances, have good intentions. And some people might say, ‘well, they’re trying,’ but Parks should know that their actions are heartbreakingly inadequate at best and disastrous at worst, however well intentioned.”
Niagara historian Paul Gromosiak concedes that the state has made a few alterations to Prospect Park that follow the Olmsted philosophy somewhat, such as removing a portion of the Robert Moses Parkway there and replacing it with parkland. However, he feels there’s a lot more they can do.
“They should replace all foreign flora with native species; remove all vehicular traffic and parking lots from Goat Island; replace lawns with woods; allow people to once again see the lunar bows by turning off the lights on the falls a few days each month; allow the natural flow of water over the falls one day each month.”
The situation, as Niagara Falls Councilman Paul Dyster sees it, is that park officials have to deal with a two-fold mission that is often at odds with itself. “Preservationists see them mostly in the role of steward of precious natural resources, and that’s certainly part of what they do, but they’re also in the tourism and recreation business, creating opportunities for people to get close to and enjoy the resources they’re protecting.”
“To make things even worse,” Dyster says, “they’re under pressure to generate revenues to help support the Niagara parks and the park system in general. It’s the Olmsted dilemma all over again, and I’m sure he’d be sympathetic to the commissioner’s problem–they’re the same ones he and Vaux faced in 1887 as they tried to lay out a system of scenic roads and paths to get as many visitors as near as possible to the Falls without desecrating
the landscape.”
Over the past few years, the Niagara Reservation has also undergone a slow, quiet name change to “Niagara Falls State Park.” “The ‘reservation’ aspect is now being downplayed,” says Gromosiak. “State officials claim that visitors confuse ‘Native American reservation’ with natural ‘reservation.’ I think the name was changed so that the reserve could be treated more as any other park-land set aside for recreation.”
The legislative act of 1885 that established the Niagara Reservation stipulated that the grounds around the falls were to be “forever reserved by the state for the purpose of restoring the scenery and preserving it in its natural condition.” The act was the culmination of a long and arduous grassroots campaign, led by Olmsted, to rescue the falls from private interests that had decimated the landscape on the American side with factories, mills, fences, hotels, and souvenir shacks.
Throughout the years, however, this guiding principle for park management has either been forgotten or ignored. Today, some paint Olmsted’s ideas as antiquated and out of touch with the demands of modern society.
“Of course, Olmsted’s philosophy is relevant today,” argues E.R. Baxter, “at least for those who value the experience of nature over trivial amusements. Critics who say his concepts are based on 19th-century realities and values that no longer exist are simply ignorant. These critics existed in the 19th century, too, and the park had to be wrestled away from them to move it toward Olmsted’s vision.”
In developing his plan for the Niagara Reservation, Olmsted deliberately chose to use the term “Niagara” rather than “Niagara Falls” because he felt that here, in this place, was a convergence of natural phenomena unique in all the world. Every aspect of the environment-the rapids, the gorge, the mist, the lush foliage, the colors of the landscape and foaming waters-was a vital part of the masterpiece, as important to the experience as the obvious spectacle of the Falls itself.
“Some things and ideas never change in importance-are timeless,” says Paul Gromosiak. “Is Frederick Law Olmsted still important today? Is the Mona Lisa still important today? The Egyptian pyramids? The Grand Canyon? The teachings of all the great philosophers? Olmsted knew how to treat a natural wonder so that people, today, understand the proper way to respect nature.”
“What we have done to Niagara Falls some would call a sin or crime,” laments Gromosiak. “We have tamed it and changed it to suit our wants and needs. We fool ourselves by calling it a ‘natural’ wonder. To most people, the Falls are a source of economic profit. That’s all.”
The National Park Service now classifies the park at Niagara as “threatened/endangered,” mainly due to the visual contamination of commercial development on the Canadian side. While there remain some areas in the gorge that are relatively untouched, to get a glimpse of nature at Niagara, E.R. Baxter says, “you’d have to be a one-eyed contortionist with a good imagination.”
“Until State Parks undergoes a major shift in its thinking about stewardship, the food-shack mentality will continue to blot out the more subtle pleasures of the natural landscapes that Olmsted intended to be valued,” says Baxter.
“Squeeze-a-penny souvenir trinkets and other superficial clutter will continue to multiply at the expense of what Niagara should be. This impoverished management policy is stubbornly resistant to change and criticism of the policy is largely ignored. Those critical of park management at Niagara would be further ahead talking to a stone at gorge bottom, pouring out the litany of offenses against nature alongside the flowing river. After a time, the stone would begin to weep.”
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