"Human Accumulations": Class and Tourism at Niagara Falls

International Journal of Canadian Studies, 2000

Annals of the Association of American …, 1987

Between 1890 and 1910, Niagara Falls became the focus of a great deal of thinking about the future. Many engineers and entrepreneurs predicted that Niagard's waterpower would make it the grcateht manufacturing center in the world. Utopian plans were drafted for a future metropolis that would exemplify moral as well as material progress. During thc same period several novelists pictured Niagara as the focal point of a disastrous future of wars and dangerous inventions. This paper examines the roots of these visions of the future in earlier perceptions of the falls and assesses their relation to the actual industrial development of Niagara.

Literature Compass, 2014

Writing within the conventions of the European sublime was often problematic for 19th-century travel writers who discovered that Niagara had no Old World precedent. I am concerned here with the development of the Falls' treatment in the 19th century when they first became widely written upon, painted, and commercially exploited after the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal. In what follows, I explore the importance of various 'points of view,' a term often used by Henry James as a device to describe a perspective both visual and thematic. These points of view will take in subjects that include silence, guidebook empiricism, guidebook Romanticism, nationalism, irreverence and an artistic acceptance of the Falls as a tourist destination.

The American Historical Review, 2001

Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies

My research-creation examines how colonial language and words inspire the logic behind resource extraction, appropriation, and exploitation. Through found poetry—a creative and analytical process of using different (“found”) sources and various methods to critique and view the world—I create a collection of poems responding to Daniel Macfarlane’s Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall (2020). Macfarlane claims that the “result” of Niagara Falls is a “compromise between scenic beauty and electricity generation” (208). However, I argue that Niagara Falls is not a “compromised” space but a hub of ecosystems coming into being. My poetic techniques emphasize the arbitrariness of colonial practices that classify beings as successful, political, and economic gains or progress. As such, I use various found methods to think with water and Indigenous modes of healing with Niagara Falls. By redacting, cutting, and layering the found word...

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2019

The essay addresses the depiction of the Niagara Falls as an ambivalent symbol of progress in nineteenth-century Mexican travel accounts of the United States. At that time, various Mexican intellectuals spent some time in the USA. In diaries and travelogues, some of them articulated their views of their host country but also reflected on their own society through the contrast with their northern neighbor. The Mexican visitors expressed a particular fascination with signs of modernity in the United States. Interestingly, such signifiers included not only political and social institutions and economic and industrial advancements, but also the Niagara Falls as a site of both natural and technological wonders. Examining the depiction of the Falls in major nineteenth-century Mexican travelogues of the United States, the essay illuminates some of the metaphorical “uses of nature” for articulating socio-political ideas as well as experiences of mobility.

This paper concerns tourist narratives, a type of autobiographical narrative condensed by the temporal and spatial constraints of tourism experience, as a place-making tool. While much attention has been paid to the importance of metanarratives both in the construction of tourism sites and in the self-identity process, the role of personal narratives for bridging this divide has been underexplored. As episodes of personal narratives, tourist moments are both socially and semiotically constructed. These narratives are at the nexus of spatial and temporal experience as tourists use multisensory experience, material objects, and landscape cues to connect memories with contemporary events and metanarratives to personal history. Narratives, however, are a construction; as they are (re)interpreted and (re)told events change in terms of their significance. As tourism experiences are incorporated into one's autobiographical narrative, the tourism space takes on new meanings and through this incorporation it becomes place. This process is examined via tourist narratives of Spring Mill Pioneer Village. Collected during survey work at the site, these narratives illuminate the deeper significance of place more than survey data alone could have revealed. By teaming these two data sets, the importance of the social, semiotic, and sensory to the tourist experience, as well as their creation of place, is brought to the fore.

In the 1950s Canada and the United States, along with Ontario and New York State (and their respective power entities), completed two hydro-electric developments: the International Niagara Control Works and the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project. Both water control projects—and the concomitant large-scale environmental manipulation of these borderland waterscapes—were shaped by “hydraulic nationalism” and “hydro tourism.” This study explores the tourist infrastructure and recreational facilities created to accommodate the millions of people who viewed these megaprojects. Blending tourism history with environmental, technological, cultural, transnational, and borderlands approaches, it gives consideration to the ways in which the involved governments and power utilities had similar, and diverging, conceptions of the nation-building importance of the St. Lawrence and Niagara undertakings.

San Rocco magazine, 2014

The Niagara Falls speak to us with great clarity about the evolution of the relationship between man and nature in Western culture. Here a shift can be recognized both in aesthetic and physical terms – from feelings of repulsion and anxiety to ones of enchantment and delight, from the fear of the overwhelming power of the falling waters to the illusion of man’s total control of them. Paradoxically, the Niagara region, a key node of the Great Lakes ecological and economic system, is a region that did not lack planning: the construction of the western end of the Erie Canal, the system of parks designed by Olmsted and Vaux in both Niagara Falls and Buffalo, and the large infrastructures Robert Moses and his Power Authority built in Niagara County, not to mention all of the utopian urban projects that were developed for Grand Island and Niagara Falls. Yet today Niagara is one of the poorest and most socially devastated counties in the state of New York. Its once booming industry has nearly completely evaporated, hiding a territory riddled with toxic landfills and decrepit neighbourhoods behind the touristy curtain of the falls. So what went wrong? How did the grandeur of the past get lost?