It Sounded like a Good Idea at the Time: Niagara Falls and the Utopian Impulse

By Joey Duggan, Associate Historian at Preservation Studios

Frederick Edward Church's landmark painting, Niagara Falls
Courtesy of Wikipedia

The world quivers and Niagara keeps falling. Nothing short of a cataclysm or a well-coördinated hydraulic endeavor interrupts the flow of the Niagara River over the edge of the Escarpment. Gravity’s work here is twofold: expect it to pull water toward the earth’s zero in a torrent, and with the same certainty, expect the voluminous descent to attract tens of millions of visitors from around the world.

The natural wonder straddles an amalgam of fronts. It teases the edge of the modern built environment and the autochthonous wilderness, defines the geopolitical border between two nations, and beckons an examination of the semantic boundary between beauty and sublimity. In the manner of a mirror, the cataract inspires an attitude of reflection, inviting beholders to weigh fundamental questions close to the core of their being. After this rapturous seizure, modern convenience offers onlookers the chance to enjoy an ice cream or a hot dog. Meditation, after all, can arouse quite the appetite.

Father Hennepin's Niagara Falls
Courtesy of Lehigh University Library

In a time before roadside vendors lined the banks of the Niagara River, however, the great thinkers taken by Niagara Falls were left with nothing but their thoughts to chew on. The enormity of the falls has inspired postulation of equal proportion, precipitating endeavors that range from the practical and profitable to the hypothetical and hyperbolic. This tendency dominates even the earliest firsthand records of the falls in Western discourse, beginning with Father Louis Hennepin's many descriptions of his single visit to Niagara Falls in the 1670s. Hennepin took a few liberties in his description: captured by his hyperbole, readers likely imagined a cataract almost four times the size of Niagara in a distant corner of terra incognita. Bolstered by his embellishments, Hennepin’s account cast an enduring spell on the Western world.

The natural phenomenon never shed its allure, not even after the railroad arrived in Western New York almost two centuries later. During the nineteenth century, travelers itched for a chance to stare into the falls and participate in the invention of a national symbolism. The unlimited potential of the torrent signified the beneficence of the nation’s project, manifest destiny and the acquisition of all the resources and land between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Peering into the mist at the falls and the very soul of the country inspired productive meditation, and the banks of the Niagara River soon hosted an abundance of revolutionary advances: Frederick Church of the Hudson School captured the falls in a foundational painting in the American canon, Tesla and Westinghouse wielded alternating current and transported electricity unprecedented distances, and Henry Perky manufactured his groundbreaking foodstuff, Shredded Wheat. The architecture firm McKim, Mead, and White designed an idealized factory town, called Echota, in which workers from the Adams Power Plant, which produced Tesla and Westinghouse’s electricity, raised families in the finest middle-class environment. The fin de siècle was quite the time to be alive in Niagara Falls.

The Adams Power Plant
Courtesy of Wikipedia

The modernity of the moment inspired movers and shakers who realized their aspirations, but it also gave rise to a school of dreamers who failed to launch their lofty ideas. An optimism that transcended application infected the minds of so many idealists at the height of the Victorian Epoch, and quite a few made Niagara Falls their muse. The progeny of ideas that grew like weeds in an era of manufacture and science fueled Technological Utopianism, the belief in the potential of human innovation in the employ of the righteous to put a lid on all forms of suffering, from the mundane to the existential. Utopianism assumed an air of religiosity amongst its subscribers, who coveted an alternative to the iniquitous conditions of industrial dominance in the Western World. These idealists gazed into Niagara Falls and saw an eternal source of energy, an answer to the limiting factor in the swirling equations governing the scientific revolution. The projects they drafted, though never brought to fruition, testify to the cogent symbolism of the falls and its command on the local built environment.

Before the Adams Power Plant successfully shipped electricity to Buffalo almost twenty miles away, electrical power only ensured utility for on-site endeavors. Factories clumped alongside the banks of the Niagara River, drawing power from the torrent and crowding the City of Niagara Falls. As an alternative to the perceived overgrowth of industry, entrepreneur William T. Love initiated a momentous endeavor in the 1890s. With backing from a number of investors, he drafted a plan to construct a vast canal that would redirect water from the Niagara River above the falls to a new community north of the City of Niagara Falls. In the utopia he imagined, one million people lived and worked in a garden city, free of smog and the perils of urban overcrowding. Hydroelectric power from the canal would fuel unprecedented industrial growth while proper urban planning ensured flawless living conditions. Love called this planned industrial paradise "Model City."

Circumstance interwove a tragic irony with Love’s legacy. Love had only paved the first few streets in Model City by 1895, when the development of alternating current at the Adams Plant rendered the canal obsolete: factories no longer required on-site power generation. Model City failed. Love went bankrupt after completing less than a mile of his canal, and the township itself withered in the spring of its life. As the twentieth century progressed, Love's former landholdings changed hands, and the Hooker Chemical Company disposed of many tons of their industrial byproducts by dumping them into the incomplete canal. Following a mid-century population boom in the City of Niagara Falls, the Hooker Chemical Company sealed the dumping site and sold it to the city authorities. A hamlet, known as "Love Canal" in recognition of its heritage, grew alongside the failed canal and the contaminated tonnage.

Courtesy of Newsweek

A well-known story follows. During the 1950s, the people of Love Canal built a community and founded their livelihoods in the area without a full understanding of the hazards that lay beneath the soil. The Niagara Falls School Board built two schools, the 99th St. School and the 93rd St. School, on land previously owned by the Hooker Chemical Company. Most accounts suggest that the City of Niagara Falls did not seriously consider the potential disaster awaiting the blue-collar families that
populated the neighborhood and sent their children to the schools nearby. Decades elapsed before the gravity of the situation dawned on the residents of Love Canal. By the late-1970s, studies of public health in the community reported unprecedented rates of complications with pregnancy and symptoms of serious childhood illnesses, including severe birth defects. The community banded together in protest, and in 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued an order to evacuate Love Canal and initiated the first ever Superfund program to relocate residents and palliate the environmental catastrophe. The name Love, once reminiscent of a grand vision of the ideal community, degenerated into a reminder of one of the most profound environmental tragedies in American history.

The collapse of William T. Love's utopian project set the stage for a disaster, leaving behind by far the least fortunate legacy of any contrivance of its kind. Other schemes of equal scale never made the leap from page to landscape, and the names of the architects behind them do not share the same inauspicious eponymy as Love. Leonard Henkle, an entrepreneur and inventor, imagined a project that, if completed, would have represented the first step on the path to total international harmony. In 1895, decades before Wilson devised the League of Nations, Henkle proposed the construction of "the International Hall," a grand structure straddling Niagara Falls. The lower portion of the building would house a massive hydroelectric plant, while the upper hall provided a hallowed space for representatives of all the nations of the world to congregate and conduct discourse and diplomacy. In order to accommodate travelers on their way to the International Hall, Henkle devised an infrastructural scheme that included a series of transcontinental railways and a flotilla of steamships connecting all the nations of the world with a central hub in Niagara Falls.

In an age of unbridled nationalism, this utopian impulse seemed contrarian: an irenic endeavor, drafted not in favor of a single nation, but with the hope of unifying people across political boundaries. Yet the sheer optimism of such a project captured the concurrent humanist sentiment. Henkle's project suggested that by wedding the momentum of the Niagara and the collective effort of a global society, humankind could overcome all petty hostilities and redefine the limits of possibility. The project itself never came to fruition; the cost of such an endeavor was enormous, and investors shied away from Henkle and his International Hall. But one draft of a more successful and well known global project alluded to Henkle's plan. When the United Nations solicited proposals for the design and location of their headquarters in 1945, a delegation posited Navy Island on the Niagara River as the future site of "the World Peace Capital." The coordinated efforts of influential New Yorkers including Robert Moses and Nelson Rockefeller overshadowed those of the advocates for Niagara Falls and ultimately secured the commission for Le Corbusier, who designed the headquarters in Manhattan that is synonymous with global enterprise today.

The imagined Headquarters of the United Nations on Navy Island
Courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

A patent for King Gillette's Razor
Courtesy of Wikipedia

Historical memory has spoiled Love's name and sequestered Henkle's to its back pages, but one of the most eccentric dreamers from the golden days of the utopian impulse managed to escape both damnation and obscurity. The bold invention for which he is most well known once proliferated a new and modern regard for personal hygiene. It is unlikely to draw much attention today. With his design for a successful disposable shaving razor, King Camp Gillette revolutionized social standards for body hair. For the first time in human history, shaving was an activity that could be performed with ease within the privacy of the home. The clean-shaven face became the enduring image of the well-kempt man for most of the twentieth century. Gillette's later advertising campaigns targeted women, promoting standards of beauty for women that still pervade in contemporary society. Gillette's company, the Gillette Safety Razor Company (now owned by Procter and Gamble), created and dominated its own market during the patent period for Gillette's model, and secured for him a fortune and a legacy. That fortune all but evaporated by the end of the Great Depression, but his name still holds a time-honored office on the labels of shaving products across the world.

Gillette was a ruthless businessman. In order to sell their groundbreaking product, the Gillette Safety Razor Company promoted the infamous "freebie" model, where a firm sells one product at a reduced price based on the guaranteed profits from a cheap and disposable accessory upon which the use of the original product depends. Yet Gillette's personal publications reveal a social philosopher in stark contrast with the eager entrepreneur. Although he lined his pockets with the spoils of consumer capitalism, Gillette identified himself as a utopian socialist and devised a full-scale plan to curtail the inequality and inefficiency of the capitalist system. He published his cornerstone treatise, The Human Drift, in 1894, in which he detailed his vision for a socialist utopia. Gillette called the capital of his utopia "Metropolis" and situated it in Niagara Falls.

Gillette's imagined utopia in The Human Drift
Courtesy of Cornell Library

Gillette reimagined order in the United States altogether: most of the country's population would reside in Metropolis, living and working in support of a universally owned trust. "The United Company," as Gillette termed it, would eliminate corporate competition and centralize every facet of the economy, evenly distributing all goods and services. Technological progress would incrementally improve living conditions for everyone, and class distinctions and gender inequality would expire as the United Company curbed all social ills in Metropolis.

The city itself exceeded the fantasies of urban planners in both scope and applicability. Gillette's Metropolis consisted of a perfect rectangle in which a network of high-rise apartment complexes constructed entirely of porcelain stretched for miles. He laid out his buildings on a hexagonal grid and situated an underground transit system for the transfer of goods and energy. Hydroelectricity from Niagara Falls powered the entire city, allowing all of the country outside of Metropolis to flourish as a sylvan paradise (with exception given to the small subset allocated for farming and mining).

After publishing The Human Drift, Gillette composed several follow-ups which tweaked his plan, but his revolution failed to launch. He was met with little support for his plan. Not a single inch of Metropolis realized, and Gillette left his legacy in steel, not porcelain.

Mimesis governs the built environment: designers draw upon the grandeur of the natural world when composing the plans that shape everyday life. In a cascade of hyperbole, Niagara Falls, with its improbable intensity, inspired a movement to break down the Gates of Eden. The unlikely scale of these proposed utopian projects prohibited their application, and this mode of thinking fell out of fashion almost entirely. As paradigms shifted, the probability of a single individual's capacity for palliating all social ills proved ever more unlikely in a complex world with so many interests and actors. Many feet will tread the path forward, however uncoordinated their efforts. Still, it is tempting to imagine that the answer to perfection exists, and that it awaits discovery just behind the fog.