Niagara Falls

The Canadian Falls from the gorge

Niagara Falls...step by step...inch by inch - Vaudeville routine

It used to be that people remembered that particular Three Stooges routine (also performed by Abbot and Costello, Lucille Ball, and many others in vaudeville where it was a standard). Now I don't find many people, usually the young, who, when asked, even remember the Stooges. Ah well, as they say, things change and the once familiar becomes the arcane knowledge of another generation.

And who exactly are these 'they' and why do they say these things?

I used to think of Niagara Falls as the universal home town, mainly because everyone has heard of it. It always seemed to have the small town feeling and in many ways still does. I lived on the south end, in a quiet residential section, right across from a park - more like a large playground, with baseball diamonds, swing sets, a teeter-totter and a sand box, all right across the road from the house I grew up in. Very handy for a growing lad. I hadn't really thought much about the Falls for years, almost all my relations had either moved on or passed on and so there was no real reason for my going to visit it. What changed all that was when I signed up for sightseeing training with Greyhound Canada.

Greyhound has the Grey Line sightseeing franchise from Toronto and they needed drivers to take visitors on day excursions to the Falls and the vicinity. I figured, why not me? I've been there. I even know where it is. For a sightseeing driver it meant daylight driving (usually) which was nice, a chance to meet and entertain people from all over the world, and a change from the regular 'line runs' we do for work. So I studied and then went down with a number of other drivers to write the test and to become a licensed tour guide. I have to re-write the test every year. Can you imagine the embarrassment of failing the test on your home town?

I never really knew a lot of the 'particulars' of the history of the area until I had to study to do the tours. So now I've learned the whos and the whys and the wheres, volumes of water, heights of the falls' (there's really more than one you know), amounts of erosion, and a hundred other details about the falls and area. I didn't stop there, when I was asked a question that I didn't have a ready answer to I'd research and find out, possibly adding that little tidbit to the tour. Also extra reading has added to my knowledge, like who was the visitor named Charles Lyle and how did he help to change the view of the world, and who was Nikola Tesla was and why he is so important. I'm still learning about Niagara Falls.

I'm leaving a lot of teasers in this script, I know, but if I go into detail we'll be here all day.

Once I started conducting the tours I also started remembering more of what it was like to grow up there and actually incorporated some of the personal things, personal touches, into my commentary which the people seemed to like very much because it became for them a much more personal tour. I'd start off, back in Toronto at the terminal, by introducing myself as I walked the aisle of the bus, making contact for the first time really with the whole group, and saying that I was going to take them on a tour of my home town, the place where I was born, where I was raised, and where I couldn't wait to move away from. This would always get a laugh. The funny thing is that now, after all this time away, I've actually been considering moving back.

Now, why would I say I couldn't wait to move away from the place? Well, the Falls is weird in a way. It's definitely a tourist town. When I was growing up it had a population of approximately 68,000-69,000 people - although that number could for some reason vary according to which population sign you were looking at posted at which end of town. Now, the population is around 85,000 people which isn't enormous growth considering that over 35 years had gone by since I last lived there. It really hasn't grown all that much (except for the hotel boom along the top of the embankment). The reasons are various but I believe part of the reason is because there's not much of an industrial base for the city, well any more. 

I think that many industries first located around Niagara Falls in order to make use of the hydroelectricly generated power, but when transmission became easier and cheaper those same industries could locate closer to their markets, like Toronto, so several industries moved away, 

Many people, particularly the young, would move away from the area, for jobs or for higher education or a combination of the two, like I did. Many of the jobs that remain in the Falls are in the hospitality sector because the town is very much rooted in tourism as you might imagine (and now it's also a casino destination), and although that may have kept it's population size rather limited it has also kept it's physical size fairly small and thus, to my mind, preserving some of that home town feel. 

What do I remember from my growing up? I can remember on the rarest of occasions slamming the screen door and stepping outside from my house on Arad Street and, if all the conditions were just right, just perfect, I could feel the faint breath from the mist from the falls on the skin of my face; that on quiet days I could even hear the voice of the falls from my house. I only lived about a mile away from the embankment overlooking the falls (back in those days a mile was a mile and there were none of those pesky kilometers around for hundreds and hundreds of miles in any direction).

On long summer days I would either go for a walk (sometimes clambering down the embankment into the park that parallels the river) or bike down to the park to stare at the tourists and their antics, and the license plates from vehicles from all over North America and sometimes beyond, or I would spend most of the day at the local swimming hole - and if you're from the south end of town like I was you'd usually go to a rather special place, an indentation of the Niagara River, which was called Dufferin Islands.

There has always been a carnival side to Niagara Falls, again on tours I'd refer to it as the dark side of Niagara. Clifton Hill, one of the major tourist areas, has always looked gaudy, but in recent years that tackiness seems to have been escalated with a new profusion of attractions; Ripley's Believe It Or Not vies with the House of Frankenstein to entice people to part with their cash and enter their doors. There are lights and barkers and souvenir shops in profusion. Some of the people on the tours I conducted have likened it to Blackpool in England. One change that I noted was that one of the landmark attractions, Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, has moved away from it's former place on the lower hill (where the character of Blondin used to stand on top of cables suspended over the street as if walking the tightrope over the falls) to a spot further up and around the corner on Victoria Avenue.

Oakes Garden Theatre

One of the best kept secrets of Niagara Falls Ontario is a little place just down the hill from all the glitz and the lights of Clifton Hill. Oakes Garden Theatre is a wonderful place to get away from the hustle and bustle and the bodies en masse. Here you can sit on a park bench under a manicured tree and take in the sights and the sounds. Walkways lead you through garden areas and over a bridge leading to a beautiful pergola which sits just above an expanse of lawn and overlooking one of the falls, the American, one of the true spectacles of nature.

Oakes Garden - side nearest the river and falls

Oakes Garden staircase

Wind on the American Falls

 I have a rant I like to do about the American Falls by the way but I won't get into it here.

Rocks below the American Falls

The Canadian Falls, or as it's also known 'the Horseshoe Falls', is very wet due to the impossible amount of water which passes over it (cha) on it's way down the river traveling between Lake Erie to the south to Lake Ontario in the north (that's right, the river flows north). It's phenomenally wet. Consider that one third of the standing fresh water in the world uses this watercourse in it's travel toward the sea. That's phenomenal. 

The down side of the fact of all that water is that I find that it makes the Canadian Falls just one of those things which is almost impossible to photograph and give it justice, like the Grand Canyon. There's just too much of it. Most views of this falls are taken from a distance in order to fit the whole thing in, but then it loses some of it's impact. Most of the close-up images of the falls, like those taken at the brink, often just look like slices of green water (yes, the water is a beautiful color of green) with people's backs facing it, and the background of these images are often obscured by mist, although sometimes punctuated by rainbow (I think of Niagara Falls as 'rainbow central'. Because of the amount of water vapor in the air when the sun is out you often see rainbows, sometimes more than one at a time.). For both of those reasons the only photograph that I've included here of the Horseshoe Falls is the one that heads up this post. 

The American Falls from below

And in this little story I haven't talked about many things, the Falls in winter, much of the history, other sights and attractions like the scow, the aerial car, the floral clock, power plants, and more and then some. I had to keep it brief because, really, my main intention was to show you a few pictures. I hope you enjoy them, and I hope they are a bit different from the ones you normally see.

All photographs taken by Colin Campbell