Speech to the NE Regional Honors Council [By E.R. Baxter III]

[The following is the speech E.R. Baxter III gave to the Northeastern Regional Honors Council at the Sheraton Hotel in April 2014]

Welcome to Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls: Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch–are any of you familiar with those words? For those who aren’t, they come from a Three Stooges comedy skit–it’s worth Googling–where this story is told: a man’s wife runs off with another man, and the enraged husband chases them all over the country, catching up with them here: Niagara Falls. He beats the man to the ground. It’s slapstick, lots of sound effects.

In the skit, he’s telling the story to an innocent passerby. It appears he’s become so deranged by the experience that every time he hears the words “Niagara Falls,” he assaults the person who’s uttered them–(Or if he’s said “Niagara Falls” himself in the course of telling the story, it’s enough to get him started.) He approaches his victim prior to the beating, saying, “Slowly I turned, step by step,” and so on. Afterward, the victim picks himself off the ground, exclaiming what a crazy thing that was to do, and innocently says “Niagara Falls,” which triggers a repeat performance….funny stuff, huh? With horror, the demented man shrieks maniacally as he recalls “rivers of blood” associated with the beating.

Right there you’ve got a fragment of the essence of Niagara Falls–I’ve come to see it as symbolic of what Niagara can do to you: take what you love, drive you unbalanced to the point of mayhem at the mention of the place. And yet at the other end of the spectrum is “Niagara Falls: Honeymoon Capitol of the World!” All the romance & love you can imagine, with all of nature at your beck and call and the marvelous falling water and rainbows in the mist for a backdrop.

I’m not a city planner; I’m not a politician. I was born & raised & spent the first half of my life in the City. I’ve worked in its factories; I’ve driven the sightseeing train on Goat island; I’ve worked on the Power Project, and ended up teaching at Niagara County Community College until I retired. Everything I say is biased in favor of the natural environment–and should be open to question and criticism. The natural environment has been under assault by commercial interests almost from the beginning and also by, believe it or not, State Parks, whose own commercial interests trump the latter part of their official name: the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

Long before all of this, during the last ice age about 12 thousand years ago, this area was covered with ice about two miles thick. This massive shovel of ice had dredged out the Great Lakes’ basins as it worked its way south; when it began to melt about two thousand years later, torrents of water runoff blasted out what we now call the Niagara gorge–and right here the water from four of the lakes runs into the fifth, Lake Ontario, on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. The Falls at Niagara are merely incidental, a sudden drop of 176 feet (for The American) and 167 feet (for the Horseshoe). I have a friend who calls it “a bunch of water that surprises itself by jumping off a cliff.” We’re just a short distance away from it here at the Sheridan.

The first European to see the Falls was Father Hennepin, in the winter of 1678-79. He described it as being over 600 feet high, a frightening sight, the roar of its falling water as “dismal.” So the misinformation had already begun–and for centuries now the rushing water flowing from Lake Erie to Ontario has become widely known as the Niagara River, but it’s actually a strait, as most fifth graders would recognize.

The earliest of the pioneers and traders experienced the Falls of Niagara as an impediment–waterways were the transportation corridors of the day and the movement of goods and the furs of the all important fur trade moved by water. The Falls had to be gone around, detoured, goods carried over this lengthy portage on the backs of men, typically Native Americans. Today, just several thousand feet to the east of us here is Portage Road, which marks and honors the path they took. As a man whose initials were RC wrote in 1775:

“On this carry-place I saw about 200 Indians, most of them belonging to the Six Nations, busy in carrying packs of furs, chiefly of deer and bears…An Indian has twenty-pence for every pack he carries over; and he dearly earns it, for the distance is nearly three leagues.”

It’s worth noting that the Falls of Niagara and surrounding areas, especially the cave at Devil’s Hole, is regarded by the Seneca as having spiritual significance–and if you get the opportunity to visit the cave at Devil’s Hole, you should politely decline out of respect. Additionally, the Devil’s Hole Massacre was in large part a labor dispute. Wagon trains that followed a newly hacked road through the forest on the gorge rim threatened the livelihood of those carrying goods over the portage on their backs. Senecas and others ambushed a wagon train carrying goods to Fort Niagara, killing all but two of those accompanying it, running the wagons and horses and oxen into the gorge–and additionally killed the 81 British soldiers who rode to the rescue. A second group of rescue soldiers found the waters of a small creek there flowing red with blood, which was then named Bloody Run.

I’ve always been a Union man myself, so you know on whose side I’d have been. Further, that road for the wagons and oxen was a precursor to the parkway that runs there today, the removal of which I’ve long advocated as a founding member of the Niagara Heritage Partnership. A young Seneca named Farmer’s Brother, as part of the larger hostilities encouraged by Chief Pontiac (an Ottawa), had planned that ambush. The associated war, called Pontiac’s Rebellion, was eventually lost, obviously. And what did Chief Pontiac get out of it? Posthumously, a car was named after him, and his imagined profile, in a variety of designs, rendered in amber plastic and chrome, became a hood ornament on some models from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. They’re collector items now–on ebay for up to 200 each.

For those of you who’ll be visiting Fort Niagara today: take a few minutes while you’re there to think of that wagon train from 1763 that never arrived.

Because the rushing water provided power, Niagara Falls quickly became a center of industry, sawmills, and so on, to start–and then factories where chemicals, steel & other alloys, paper, rubber, plastics, and manufacturing, took place–a wide variety of petro and electro-chemical products. Of course, tourism (we did have the Falls of Niagara, after all) was also valuable, but a second thought.

We loved our industry: it was hard & dirty & smelly work, but it put food on the table–it bought the table–paid for our homes, bought our cars–sons followed fathers into the plants. So what if the smells were bad? The smell of overtime, time-and-a-half, made them sweet.

But the bottom fell out of those good times. The permanent “Help Wanted” signs half the size of billboards positioned at the front gates disappeared. Companies stopped recruiting African-Americans from the south to work for them. Like other Rust Belt cities, Niagara Falls experienced the flight and closing of huge factories.

Industry left a legacy of contamination behind: hundreds of Love Canal families were relocated because of the toxic brew that seeped into their cellars–President Jimmy Carter declared a federal emergency because of it; Hyde Park Landfill (listed as remediated) continues to seep contaminants underground from the old watershed of Bloody Run into the Niagara Gorge; acres of Niagara County have been rendered useless from radioactive elements leftover from work on the Manhattan Project; road work in the last ten years routinely turns up radioactivity that causes jobs to screech to a halt, while people scratch their heads,wondering where it came from, what to do. It “fell off trucks,” they conclude, and revise the landfill limits upward to accept the waste. My father worked for a while at Vanadium where radioactive ores were processed for the Manhattan Project. He died of cancer at age 48. In the southeast corner of College Avenue and Hyde Park Blvd. no trace of Vanadium exists.

On the northwest corner, same intersection, General Abrasives has vanished; just 1000 feet away on the south stretch of College, National Carbon was abandoned and razed. These are but a few examples.

This condition had been made worse by the collapse of the Schoellkopf Power plant in 1956 and the construction of the Robert Moses Power Plant, completed by 1962, which no longer gave much of a break to local industry. It was at the time the largest power plant in the Western World–but building it had damaged & destroyed much of our natural heritage: 507 acres of the Tuscarora Reservation is forever under water; hundreds of graves were dug up as cemeteries were relocated; the gorge side was disfigured with the generating plant; and four lanes of parkway have replaced and now disgrace the potential landscapes of the gorge rim: the natural edge of the upper river has been replaced with an artificial one to accommodate the concrete lanes of the Robert Moses Parkway–the northern section was envisioned and designed to carry the administrative elites of industry from their country estates and suburban homes to the filthy places in the Falls where they earned their living while they avoided the City proper. (Today it functions as a detour around the business districts of the City, a prized commuter route for regular folk who’ve decided to work in the City, but not live there.)

But soon there was very little work to be had. Over a period of years the population of the city had dropped from over 100,000 (when the new plant construction was in full swing) to just over 50,000. A poorly executed Urban Renewal plan, which demolished scores of historically and architecturally significant buildings, had failed to produce the imagined prosperity.

The following has been gathered from various sources–question it at will: 60% of Niagara Falls residents are on some kind of public assistance; this includes the City itself, welfare-dependant on a percent of the take from the Casino slots run by the Seneca Nation of Indians; the unemployment rate is 10%; 20 houses out of 100, either abandoned and/or in disrepair, need to be demolished. A recent symposium on city poverty, after much talk and the dust settled, concluded that first the unemployed poor needed to be trained, then jobs created. The process seems reversed, but gee, why didn’t I think of that?

If all of this seems a little bleak, Google up Mayor Dyster’s 2014 State of the City address for balance. Please ignore his rhapsodizing about outdoor recreation from “horseback riding to zip-lining to rock-climbing, and everything in between.”

The collapse of heavy industry left tourism for Niagara Falls. In the early 1800’s the area around the waterfalls was privately owned, jammed with waterwheels, sawmills and other businesses, souvenir shops and other goods to appeal to visitors, shacks and sheds and high board fences, through which tourists, for a modest fee, could peer thorough holes for a glimpse of the falls. This is only a slight exaggeration.

By the late 1800’s, via the Free Niagara movement, the property had been wrested from private owners, and the natural scenery restored according to the vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. This was the second state park in the nation. Niagara Falls became the “must see” place for European travelers and others, who stayed for extended periods. The “Reservation,” as it was called then, indicated it was reserved for wilderness forever–no statues, souvenir stands, food carts, restaurants, and so on. All these were better suited for the City.

For those of you who visit the park today, ask yourselves how well State Parks has honored the Olmsted vision: how many millions are denied to the City annually by parking fees, meals & drinks, and souvenirs sold by the State or their proxies? How much of Goat Island is covered by asphalt? What’s with the fake-looking paving stones in historic spots, The Three Sisters, Islands, etc? What’s going on with the musical chair game being played with the Tesla statue?

In Canada an army of towering hotels dominates the skyline, a contemporary crowd of Stonehenge monuments, shouldering one another for a view–Canada has always had the best panoramic view of the waterfalls and they’ve exploited that to the extent that the National Park Service has classified the parks at Niagara as “threatened/endangered” primarily because of this visual contamination.

Put the cluster of Canadian hotels together with the Frankenstein and two-headed goat museums of tacky Clifton Hill at ground level, and you’ve got what some perceive to be the ideal tourist destination that many on our side want to emulate.

What’s next? The Niagara Heritage Partnership has proposed that a tiny step forward in the interest of reclaiming a sliver of the natural environment and enhancing the economic potential of the region (and the business districts of Niagara Falls) is the total removal of the gorge parkway between Niagara Falls and Lewiston, NY–or at the very least from downtown Niagara Falls to the City line at Devil’s Hole. The restoration of this significant natural environment along the gorge rim would permit direct marketing to a new population of Niagara tourists–to those individuals, families, and organizations interested in experiencing a “green vacation,” ecotourists. Those opposed to the idea (the village of Lewiston, Fort Niagara management et al) claim, without presenting a shred of evidence to support it, that the gorge parkway is their economic lifeline.

In fact, recent decisions involving funding for removal suggest that the section envisioned for removal will leave the parkway intact along the most ecologically significant portion of the gorge rim, thereby maintaining the detour around the City and effectively killing the idea of developing a regional ecotourism market.

Perhaps, as you disperse to investigate various aspects of this place, you will sense the conflict between natural and developed landscapes, and begin to understand how crucial it is to discern where the two can blend in a cooperative way and where they cannot–you might get the sense, if you roll down the gorge parkway in your tour bus, that both the bus and the concrete it drives over is defacing the gorge rim; you’ll see, for example, at Whirlpool Park, the desecrated portion of the Old Growth Forest that should be allowed to regenerate. It’s in places like these where Wendall Barry informs us that “The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.” You’ll be able to see from the Power Vista the remnant of Devil’s Hole State Park severed by the Power Plant’s access road, the currently unreachable portion marked by the old stone railings at gorge-top; you’ll see the fenced off passageway for toxic discharges on either side of that road, the seepage from beneath the landfill squatting over the watershed of Bloody Run, heading for the lower river. These are visible traces of our past whispering to the present, asking to be rehabilitated.

The best to all of you in your quests, today and in the future.

E.R. Baxter III