Making A Porno Picture Of Our Natural Niagara Falls

By Doug Draper

When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was on the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls a year ago this June to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Boundary Waters Treaty signed between her country and Canada, Rick Dykstra, a federal member of parliament for St. Catharines, Ontario, made a quip during a short address he gave before hers that Canada has the best view of the falls.

Is this really the view we want of one of nature's great wonders? Photo by Doug Draper

Clinton then took the podium and said something like – ‘Wait a minute, I have to take issue with that.’

It was a little bit of back and forth banter, all in the spirit of fun on a day of celebrating a first-of-a-kind agreement between any two nations in the world for protecting shared waters. But you know, Clinton had a point.

Canadians like to think anyone in the world stand out on ‘Table Rock’ on the Ontario side and get the best view of the American and Horseshoe Falls. But if you go to a place called Goat Island – a classic old Olmsted-designed park overlooking the brink of the Horseshoe Falls in Niagara Falls, New York, the view can be just as spectacular there. That is if you look mostly southward, across the brink of the falls to the upper Niagara River on the Ontario side, and away from that wall of multi-storey towers.

In an article, featured this May 2 in the Viewpoint section of The Buffalo News, Cathy Marie Buchanan, a former Niagara, Ontario resident now living in the Toronto area, took the side of Niagara’s American neighbours when it comes to looking over at the blight of those hotel and casino towers mugging what is supposed to be one of the more scenic water falls in the world.

“An unsightly wall of hotels extends downriver from the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side of the river, and that wall is slated to infiltrate the seven acres of green space that today frame the Horseshoe Falls in nature when viewed from the American side of the river,” said Buchanan, who is also author of a new and well-received novel entitled ‘The Day the Falls Stood Still’.

One of the last remaining, more natural views of the falls from Goat Island in Niagara Falls, New York. Photo by Doug Draper

Buchanan certainly deserves some credit for a courage most of our mainstream media on the Ontario side of the Niagara River doesn’t possess, to make any suggestion that these glass-box towers might constitute blight near what has often been described, in so many words, as a natural wonder.

I know that when I was still an environment reporter at the St. Catharines Standard in the mid-1990s (a couple of years before I left the paper in disgust) all I got was grief from my editors and from the mayor of Niagara Falls, Ontario and others for writing about these towers under construction. That was the case, even though the Niagara Parks Commission, under the chairmanship of now-Niagara-on-the-Lake Mayor Garry Burroughs at the time, was preparing to fight any more building of these towers past the Fallsview, that was already some 20 or 30 storeys in the air.

But even the Niagara Parks Commission, a time-honoured public agency that thought it had an agreement with the City of Niagara Falls, Ontario, not to build above what they called “sight lines” around the falls that would expose buildings above a tree-line as you walk along Table Rock, could not keep the genie from getting out of the bottle. Once the first high rise went up (and this is what people in communities like Port Dalhousie and Crystal Beach, where high-rises are now on the drawing board, should keep in mind) it is hard to fight the next. All the next one has to do is go to the Ontario Municipal Board – the mostly useless body for ruling on appeals to development plans – and say, ‘those other guys got their high-rise sweets above the falls, so why can’t we?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking on the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls last June, on the 100th anniversary of the Canada/U.S. Boundary Waters Treaty. Photo by Doug Draper

And why can’t they, indeed. So the wall just keeps getting thicker and wider.

Just as disturbing about Buchanan’s piece in the Buffalo News, and we will provide a link for it here, is the concerns she raises that the new tunnel the province of Ontario is building to divert more water from the upper Niagara River to generate hydro energy, might leave so little water flowing over the natural Niagara Falls that it is a joke of what it was before we humans decided it was in our best interest to exploit whatever we can out of it.

That is a subject Niagara At Large intends to spend more time reporting and commenting on in the weeks and months ahead. Certainly, if you have views on all of this, including the impacts on the natural environment, of diverting more water from the natural Niagara Falls, share them with us.

In the meantime, you can read Cathy Marie Buchanan’s full article in The Buffalo News by clicking on http://www.buffalonews.com/2010/05/02/1037649/preserve-natural-wonder-of-the.html.
You can read more on this and related subjects by navigating to the following websites, including Friends of Niagara Falls at http://www.friendsofniagarafalls.org
Friends of Niagara Falls petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stopthewalls/
Stop the Walls Above the Falls on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=123329554485
 
(Please also click on www.niagaraatlarge.com for this site – Niagara At Large – and more news and commentary of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)