Tor-Buff-Chester, the ridiculous-sounding “mega-region” touted by Richard Florida throughout his first year as a local think-tanker, and in his book Who’s Your City?, gets something that resembles validation August 14 when the Buffalo Bills play an exhibition game against the Pittsburgh Steelers at the Rogers Centre — even if tickets were priced higher than the local market is apparently eager to pay. Meanwhile, a proposal to replace the failed fast ferry linking Toronto to Rochester with a once-mothballed British hovercraft was rejected on both sides of Lake Ontario last month due to a glaring lack of feasibility.
These ambitions, once predicated on Toronto's blind worship of anything American, are no longer as easily fulfilled as they used to be. Ginger Strand has gone to the epicentre of that distinction for her recent book, Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power & Lies.
“The two Niagaras wink at one another across the gorge,” she writes by way of introduction, “the contrapuntal faces of globalism: on the Canadian side, the monotony of our worldwide monculture, the proliferation of malls and brands and franchises proclaiming globalism’s intent to make every town look the same, from Benares to Boise. The soul-snapping boredom of it all is reflected in its urgent spawning of ever-more-extreme cheap thrills.
“Meanwhile, across the river in America, you see globalism’s economic underbelly: crumbling row houses, unemployment offices, and defunct factories parked on EPA-designated brownfields, the sediment of a century’s toxic run-off.”
Inventing Niagara, as inferred by its title, is Strand’s personal study of how much of the legacy of the waterfall so nice it named towns twice is actually full of fake — that the tackiness associated with its tourism bait is therefore no less genuine than the power company-harnessed Falls themselves, or several of the surrounding Indian myths, or the perpetual equation with Jacuzzi-soaked honeymoon romance. Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. Fake.
Now, does this make the place seem less attractive as a tourist destination, or tempt you even more?
The book got an initial publicity boost with an excerpt, “Selling Sex in Honeymoon Heaven,”The Believer. Strand’s discussion of the origins of artifice is actually an outgrowth of reporting on environmental issues — a short piece penned for the March issue of Harper’s on Google’s addiction to cheap electricity to help power the search engine made her no friends at their Mountain View, California headquarters, yet their NYC office invited her to talk Niagara.
Curiosity about the Falls was apparently a niche waiting to be filled in those seemingly impenetrable modern literary journalism circles — the late Pierre Berton gave Niagara his weighty tome treatment in 1997, but Strand’s book takes the whimsical deadpan discovery approach more synonymous with This American Life.
“The documentaries and guidebooks all tell the same stories,” Strand says. “There would never be any discussion of how the Manhattan Project or the Underground Railroad factored into the history. I was working on what was supposed to be my second novel at a writer’s colony, and kept sneaking away to work on Niagara Falls, like I was having an affair.
“In the process, I realized that I was probably more of a non-fiction writer all along.”
So, a book that starts off with Strand's confession that she originally visited Niagara Falls as a college student “because I wanted to laugh at it” spends over 300 pages trying to make sense of an obsession with untangling its history. The focus is rooted in the American side, for that’s where the greater myths were perpetuated, more of the environment contrived, and wreckage generally wrought.
“The industrialists ran amok and took over the whole place,” says Strand, “whereas there was more of a grass roots movement in Canada that saw the Falls as a power source, and were also quicker to see it as a tourist resource, erecting a park, and seeing the riverfront as an important place.”
But, with the passage of time and emergence of gambling temples as the dominant economic driver of tourism — just announced was a second show for Jessica Simpson next month at the Fallsview Casino Resort, with tickets starting at $70, whereas the Seneca Niagara Casino offers Joan Jett & the Blackhearts for free — a 21st century inversion continues to develop in distinctions between Team Tor and Team Buff.
“It’s hard for people here to believe how much more the side of the Falls in crypto-socialist Canada actually out-Americanizes the American one,” says NYC-based Strand, who grew up in Michigan, and four other states. “But the Canadian casino is definitely bigger and swankier, while the American one doesn’t even make an effort to present itself as upscale. It’s certainly not Monte Carlo — it’s better suited for those people who park their oxygen tank next to the slot machine.”
Mercifully, for Niagara Falls, NY, the sudden indicator of whether a smallish town can weather the economic storm, whether or not any of its Starbucks locations are marked for closing, will be spared — since they only have one, situated in the Crowne Plaza Hotel. (“Here's a bonus,” reads one review posted last year on Yelp, “since it's in a somewhat of a strange place (and still new) there's never anybody there! Just an interesting fact: there's this guy who works there who changes his accent every time you come in. One day he might be Spanish, the next Italian!”)
Not that Niagara Falls, Canada lacks for its own dilapidated downtown — it’s just older than the abandoned c. 1982 Rainbow Center, a dead mall that stayed open for five years after its last retail tenant to accommodate a location of Off-Track Betting.
Strand’s attempt to find something genuine amidst the warped realities led her to investigate what became of the Niagara Falls Museum — founded in 1827, and essentially homeless, while Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the Guinness World Records Museum and Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks have their mid-20th century kitsch frozen in time on Clifton Hill. The current web presence for the oldest museum in Canada cites a 416 area code, and its quirky contents are currently stored in a St. Catharines warehouse, long ago banished from its American sanctuary after complaints by residents about “the noises and the odors.”
But while the Canadian side remains home to a storefront dedicated to the memory of Evel Kenevel — a museum that incorporates a pawnshop — the Americans continue to attempt getting their urban renewal act together, aspiring to replace their corrosive industrial legacy with attractions celebrating ecology.
“There’s enough interesting land that can realistically be developed into a nice natural environment,” says Strand, “although a lot of it comes down to shielding the Robert Moses State Parkway to make the riverfront more walkable. There’s definitely a growing market that wants to stay in bed-and-breakfasts.
“It’s the American way to get in your SUV and drive to a state park, and then celebrate all the nature you haven’t ruined yet.”
Whatever the currency being spent, Strand doesn’t see the venerable souvenir shop disappearing right away — even if her research casts aspersions on just how legitimate all of the Niagara Falls symbolism might be.
“It’s the most reproduced natural landscape,” she says, “and it’s amazing how little the depiction of the Falls has changed. It’s usually the same kind of stock picture on a T-shirt, or a coffee mug, or a screensaver.”
In other words, the contemporary equivalent to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, or walking above it on a tightrope, is buying a shot glass from a shopkeeper who doesn’t deal in irony.
“I think it ultimately comes down to the intense desire of puny humans to pretend they have some kind of mastery over nature,” says Strand. “People have always wanted to harness and tame this thing. What better way to do that than to make this image part of the everyday components of their domestic life.”
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