Let's Go Again to Niagara

"Every American bride is taken here," reported Oscar Wilde after visiting Niagara Falls in 1882. "This waterfall," he added, "must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest disappointments in American married life."

Wilde was more wry than right.* Niagara may rank 83rd on the list of the world's 100 highest cataracts, but only two (Guaira Falls on the Brazil-Paraguay border, and Khone Falls in Laos) cascade vaster quantities of water. Since the area's first hotel opened on the Canadian side of the Niagara River 148 years ago, the falls have proved one of the most visited, derided and durable attractions in North America. A record 16 million tourists are expected to visit Niagara Falls in 1965. And despite all the quips by wags from Mencken to Mort Sahl, it still draws some 32,000 newlyweds a year, mostly to Niagara Falls, Ont., which indefatigably calls itself the Honeymoon Capital of the World and has the added lure, for U.S. citizens, of being in a "foreign country." Mused one recent visitor: "I guess it's camp. So Out it's In."

Congealed Spray. After the War of 1812, the falls were fashionable. Southern gentry traveled up to see the battlefield of Lundy's Lane and to summer by the mint-cool falls. But the era was short-lived. After the Erie Canal was completed in 1827, Niagara Falls became the first frontier town on the way West. By the time the New York Central came in 1858, it was one of the rip-roaringest burgs in the U.S. Floozies and fakes, barkers and con men made the Niagara the rube's Rubicon. "Indian chiefs"--chiefly from Ireland--plied a brisk trade in white pebbles, which they hawked as "congealed Niagara spray." The cries of "hackmen, photographers and vendors of gimcracks," wrote a horrified Henry James, "at times drown out the thunder of the cataract."

Ironically, the resort's reputation was redeemed by one of the world's great artists. In 1859, when France's Blondin started strolling the 1,300 ft. from the U.S. to the Canadian side of the gorge on a 2-in.-thick tightrope, rubbernecks flocked across the continent to gawk. For two summers, while spectators placed bets on his fate (and sometimes cut his supporting cables to improve the odds), the dapper Frenchman sashayed back and forth on his rope, drinking champagne (he once cooked an omelet 150 ft. above the falls), turning somersaults, pushing a wheelbarrow while riding a bicycle, even carrying his manager across on his back. Once Blondin stumped across on stilts, a display of bravado that won him $400 from the future King Edward VII.

Others followed in his wake. One, an Italian daredevil named Signor Ballini, splashed into the rapids and the headlines from a tightrope 160 ft. above the water. And there were barrels. Though countless daredevils pitted their fate against rapids and whirlpool, it was only in 1901 that anyone dared barrel over the waterfall itself. Anna Edson Taylor, a middle-aged widow from Michigan, survived the venture, but three of six others who later tried the stunt died in the attempt.

Toilet Bowl. After the turn of the century, the falls fell on hard times. The Ontario side, which had once been awash with bars, went dry in 1916, and so, in consequence, did the tourist trade. The New York side, a pioneering area for hydroelectric power, became an unsightly clutter of high tension wires, oil tanks, highways and factories that spat foul industrial waste into the river. One critic called it "the toilet bowl of America." Explains the current Democratic Mayor, E. Dent Lackey: "Tourism became a byproduct. If people wanted to come and look at the falls, O.K. But nobody cared much."

Trade did not really pick up again until 1957, when Niagara Falls, Ont., voted to reopen its bars. Encouraged, several Canadian businessmen modified a well-known name and put up Louis Tussaud's English Wax Museum, featuring such vivid spectacles as the slow death of Nelson, whose chest actually heaves as he expires on deck. Niagara Falls, N.Y., tidied up its parks, built a big new aquarium that opened last week, began constructing a monorail, and initiated a $27.5 million urban-renewal project that will include a $7,000,000 John F. Kennedy Convention Hall. The city also built a tower that rises 282 ft. from the base of the falls, giving an unsurpassed closeup of the U.S. side.

One of the two Canadian towers, the 325-ft. Seagram, goes one step better than the one on the U.S. side, allows the tourist to enjoy the view over dinner. A third tower, called the Skylon, is due to open in August; it will boast a restaurant 700 ft. above the falls that will revolve once every hour, so that diners can contemplate Buffalo over their Beefeater, Toronto over the tournedos, the cataracts over coffee.

Rubble Removal. Even the falls are to be face-lifted. Until 1962, when control gates were installed to spread the flow, the 1,000,000 gallons of water that gushed over the crest of the cataracts each second were eroding the falls at the rate of 3 to 4 ft. a year. Worse still, two tremendous rock slides on the U.S. side have reduced their height as much as 40 ft. and piled thousands of tons of debris at the base. A multimillion-dollar federal project is now being considered to remove the rubble below. Not that most honeymooners care. The average newly wed couple, the natives complain, leaves the resort without even seeing the falls.

* Nor did his disparaging remarks discourage Wild Willie, his older brother, from honeymooning there in 1891.

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