Abrahamsen Park

Posted on June 16, 2021 by admin

It’s nice, and a little astonishing, to discover a park you didn’t know in your part of the suburbs, especially when it’s pleasant to walk through. I’ve been in the northwest suburbs going on two decades, yet I had no notion of Abrahamsen Park until the other day.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I regularly drive by one part of the park, which fronts a small but important road, and from that vantage you can see the park’s baseball diamond, basketball court, tennis court and playground. All those things are available closer to home — and it’s been years since I’ve needed a playground — so I never gave Abrahamsen much thought.

Turns out there’s a walking path as well. It begins behind those facilities and runs a quarter mile or so along a small creek through a neighborhood. That is, through fenceless back yards facing the creek and walking path. I expect it’s known almost only to people who live nearby, so hidden is it. As I walked, I reveled in the obscurity of it.

This time of the year, even in a dry June, the way along the creek is lush.

At one end are towering trees.

Eastern cottonwoods (Populus deltoides), I think, and I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look that up.

Our Lady of Victory Basilica and National Shrine, Lackawanna

Posted on June 14, 2021 by admin

The last place we visited over Memorial Day weekend in greater Buffalo was Our Lady of Victory Basilica and National Shrine, which is in south suburban Lackawanna, New York. We drove south from Lockport just after noon, had lunch in Buffalo at the Lake Effect Diner, and continued south on surface streets to Lackawanna, mainly U.S. 62, which is Bailey Ave. and then South Park Ave.

That course takes you through areas well-to-do and ragged, residential and industrial. Greater Buffalo might be like a smaller version of greater Chicago, but on our drive through the heart of the MSA, we found an essential difference: it’s much easier to get around Buffalo.

Maybe the holiday weekend had something to do with that, but I suspect the difference between 1.1 million people living on the edge of a Great Lake and 9.4 million people living on the edge of another Great Lake was the determining factor. Driving through metro Chicago is often like driving through glue. Buffalo proved much more pleasant as a driving experience.

The basilica stands at South Park Ave. and Ridge Road in Lackawanna.

The church was open. I believe only two other people were there when we visited.

“The artists who painted the murals, sculpted the statues and painstakingly produced the basilica’s 134 stained-glass windows were also members of an international team,” the Buffalo News reported, as reposted here.

“– Architect Emile Ulrich, a graduate of the Academy of Paris, was in Cleveland when the call came from Baker.
— Italian born Gonippo Raggi masterminded the artwork. His oil paintings can be seen throughout the shrine. When he died at age 84 in 1959, Raggi was the subject of a New York Times obituary that credited his work in more than 100 churches on three continents.
— Buffalonian Marion Rzeznik of Poland assisted Raggi. Rzeznik studied sculpture in Krakow, Vienna and New York City.
— Otto Andrle, a Buffalo-native, crafted the stained-glass windows.”

All that talent was brought together in the 1920s to build the basilica by the Venerable Nelson Henry Baker (1842-1936), an exceptionally talented and energetic priest. One of his talents, useful almost anywhere with a money economy, was fundraising. Besides the basilica, which started construction when Baker was 79, over the course of his vocation he founded a hospital, high school, elementary school, an infant home, a home for unwed mothers and a boys’ orphanage.

A bronze Baker is across the street from the basilica.

Not far away is Mary.
Baker declined credit for his many legacies, it seems, with his quote on the matter on the pedestal.

The Erie Canal

Posted on June 13, 2021 by admin

On our last day in metro Buffalo, we drove to Lockport, New York, late in the morning to see the Erie Canal. Even in my South Texas elementary school, and in U.S. history classes later, we heard about the Erie Canal. It probably was of special interest to my high school U.S. history teacher, the estimable former Wobbly Mrs. Collins, who grew up in Buffalo. Yuriko, on the other hand, heard nothing about it in Japanese schools; no reason she would.

I’ve heard the songs, too. The oft-recorded one about the loyal mule (which Bruce Springsteen does wonderfully, paying homage to Pete Seeger). The more fun one is about drunkenness among bargemen (and -woman), which I expect was true enough to life in the early days of the canal. The obscure Yellow Jack version, incidentally, used Lockport as a backdrop for the video.

Despite all that, I’d never gotten around to seeing the canal with my own eyes. So it was time. Naturally, we visited only the smallest slice, since the canal stretches more than 360 miles.

Lockport’s an interesting spot on the canal because it originally had five locks, which is unusual enough to have its own name: Flight of Five Locks, to allow the canal to cross the Niagara Escarpment. For the 1820s, I expect it was state-of-the-art engineering.

We got there at about 10:30 and knew we were in the right place.

There were other signs as well.

Looking east, from the bridge over the locks.
As usual, an historic site isn’t as simple as somewhere or something that magically hasn’t changed since its most interesting period. In structure, and certainly a lot of other details, the canal as we saw it isn’t how the 19th-century bargemen would have.

To the left in the picture is the original canal locks, the five of the name. It’s a narrow passage compared to the wider channel on the right, which involves two locks covering the same distance as the older five locks. In the early 20th century, the state of New York upgraded its canals, including the Erie, to form the New York State Barge Canal system. That’s when wider channel was built, no doubt state-of-the-art in its time.

Such a change made for much faster commercial movement on the canal. Of course that’s an obsolete virtue now, though the wider canal still makes for the more expeditious movement of pleasure craft, which are all that use the waterway anymore. The last commercial vessel to ply the Erie Canal, or rather that branch of the NYS Barge Canal system, was the Day Peckinpaugh, which quit service in 1994. Later than I would have thought.

Apparently there was (in effect) a Day Peckinpaugh class of ships on the NY canals. “After her 1921 maiden voyage, she was followed by over a hundred similar motorships on the Barge Canal,” notes the Waterford Maritime Historical Society. A lot more about the ship, at first unimaginatively called the Interwaterways Line Incorporated 101 and built to traverse the Great Lakes as well, can be found here.

We took a tour that started with a walk along the canal. Here is one of the two locks filling or draining, I forget which.More boats.

The hill side.

The “Upside-Down Bridge.” It’s a railroad bridge over the canal in Lockport, build just before the canal was improved.

“This bridge is a multi-span railroad bridge built in 1902 by the prolific and noteworthy King Bridge Company of Cleveland, Ohio,” says HistoricBridges.org. “The main span which crosses the river is a Baltimore deck truss. The bridge was referred to as the ‘Upside-Down Bridge’ because as a deck truss, it looks like a through truss positioned upside-down.”

Near the bridge, the tour turned into a man-made cave in the hill, a water tunnel (hydraulic raceway) built in the 19th century using muscle power, hand tools and black powder.

The raceway used to power local industry, opening for tourists in 1977. That happened, it seems, because the natural cave in the limestone under Lockport proved disappointing in the 20th century, and possibly a locus of fraud in the 19th century.

It was dark in there.
The tour also involved a short boat ride in part of the tunnel that’s partly flooded still. A novelty, certainly, but not for anyone even a little claustrophobic. I figure they stay away from commercial caves anyway.

Out in the sun again, we looked around town a little more. The west entrance of the locks is visible from Big Bridge.

A sign near Big Bridge (built 1914) claims that at 399 feet, the bridge over the canal at that point is one of the world’s widest. Maybe so, but it’s completely undistinguished in every other way.
One more sight in Lockport.
A fairly recent (2015) mural called “Guardian of the Waters” by Augustina Droze and Bruce Adams. Its plaque says: “The mural is inspired by the history and engineering marvel of the Flight of the Five Locks, which opened a path to the West, inspired inventions that changed the world, and gave rise to the city of Lockport, NY.”

Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo

Posted on June 10, 2021 by admin

The UB Council of the University of New York at Buffalo, in its wisdom, has effaced the name of President Millard Fillmore from the institution, which he also founded. Fillmore himself, however, will remain undisturbed for now at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo. Also in the Fillmore family plot are his two wives, his children and one of his mother-in-laws.

The 13th President of the United States is one of about 152,000 permanent residents of Forest Lawn. The cemetery is a splendid example of the Victorian rural cemetery movement, realized in thickets of headstones and a profusion of funerary art and ornate mausoleums inhabiting a lush landscape of grass underfoot and leaves overhead (in the warmer months, anyway). I arrived just after opening on the morning of May 31. I only had time for a slice of the place.

Spanning over 269 acres, Forest Lawn was founded in 1849, and is home to early Buffalo politicos, businessmen, artists, musicians, lawyers, doctors, inventors, a wife of Irving Berlin, the mother of Aretha Franklin, and 17 unknown victims of the Angola Horror train wreck of 1867. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mausoleum for the cemetery that wasn’t built until 2004 and there’s a statue of Seneca Indian chief Red Jacket dating from 1851.

Lorenzo Dimick (1842-1888) might have been a criminal in Buffalo who evaded justice by fleeing to Canada, but in death there was no problem for him to return to his native city for burial under a fine piece of funerary art.

A squib about him is here. I am able to read the full story in the NYT archives, so I will relay that he committed insurance fraud in Buffalo, was duly convicted, and skipped town. Good thing for him a border was handy, presumably before cooperation between the United States and Canada in such matters. Or maybe some bribery went down.

The Firemen of Buffalo and Erie County are honored with a statue and a plaque.
The Schickel memorial. From what I’ve been able to tell, Bernhard Schickel (1820-1884) owned a beer hall. That could get you the dosh you need to pay for such finery in stone.

The Blocher Memorial is the kind of array that gets its own articles.

“The story of Nelson W. Blocher combines fact and folklore,” begins Atlas Obscura, which is to say we don’t know everything, or even very much for sure. “Local legend claims…” only affirms that further.

“Within the structure, enclosed by glass, are Italian Carrara marble statues depicting a romanticized scene of Blocher’s final moments. Blocher himself lies on a sarcophagus slab, clutching his Bible, while his parents look on,” AO says. “Above Blocher is an angel (possibly modeled after [his lost love] Katherine) who watches over him, or, perhaps calls him to heaven.”

Near a creek that runs through the cemetery —

— is a bust of Verdi. Hm. I didn’t think was buried here, and he isn’t. He’s at the Casa di Riposi per Musicisti in Milan.

The table says:

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

Giuseppe Verdi is credited with having invented the Italian national operatic style. Born the son of a poor grocer in LeBoncole, Italy, Verdi began composing at age 13… His best known works include Rigoletto, Aida, Il Trovalore and La Traviata.

Forest Lawn thanks the City of Buffalo, Buffalo Arts Commission and the Federation of Italian American Societies for this bust sculpted by Dr. Antonio Ugo of Palermo, Italy… It is dedicated this 28th day of September, 1996, in tribute to the many accomplishments of the Italian-American community in this cemetery, the City of Buffalo, and all of Western New York.

Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site

Posted on June 9, 2021 by admin

Quoted in the pamphlet that the National Park Service gives out at the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo is a characteristic TR thing to say:

“It is a dreadful thing to come into the Presidency this way; but it would be far worse to be morbid about it. Here is the task, and I have got to do it to the best of my ability; and that is all there is to it.”

On September 14, 1901, the site was the house of Ansley and Mary Wilcox, friends of Theodore Roosevelt, when he took the oath of office there as 26th President of the United States. TR had hurried there from the Adirondacks when word came that President McKinley was dying.

We arrived ahead of lunch on May 30. One docent and two other staff members were there. That was all. The docent thus gave us a personal tour of the house, which is part house museum and part museum devoted to TR and his presidency.

It’s a handsome mansion, typically of those that used to stand on Delaware, though in a little need of paint these days.

Delaware Avenue, once Buffalo’s Millionaire’s Row, is still characterized by large houses, many of which are now office buildings for attorneys and accountants and such. There are also places where mansions probably used to be, but which were lost to time. Directly across the street from the former Wilcox house is a chain pharmacy.

TR stands in bronze on the grounds. The work is surprisingly new, completed only in 2015 by sculptor Toby Mendez.

Photography was allowed inside, and while I’m not always inclined to take pictures inside house museums, I wanted to take one of the room in which TR took the oath. Most of the items are period-specific but not actually owned by the Wilcoxes.

“No definite plans had been made for swearing him in,” Wilcox wrote, “and it had not even been settled where this should be done. The first suggestion had been to take him directly to Mr. Milburn’s house, there to be sworn-in, but this had been objected to as unsuitable, while the body of the president was lying in the house. So he was asked to go to my house to get lunch, and immediately at arriving and being equipped with borrowed clothes, more appropriate than his traveling suit, he insisted on starting for Mr. Milburn’s house, to make a call of sympathy and respect on the family of the dead president. This was done, and by three o’clock he was at my house again…

“The room [the library], not a large one, was far from full, and at the last moment, the newspaper men, who were eager for admission, were all let in, but were prohibited from taking any photographs…

“The new President was standing in front of the bay window on the south side of the room. Others had fallen back a bit when Mr. [Elihu] Root spoke. After his response, Judge [John] Hazel advanced and administered the oath… The written oath, which Judge Hazel produced…was then signed. Then President Roosevelt made the announcement of his request to the cabinet to remain in office. The whole ceremony was over within half an hour after the Cabinet had entered the house, and the small company dispersed, leaving only the six Cabinet officers with the President, who at once held an informal session in the library.”

The Wilcoxes died in the early 1930s, and afterwards the house was used as a restaurant until the 1960s, when it was in danger of demolition, as so many historic structures were at the time. Fortunately, the citizens of Buffalo didn’t let that happen, and 50 years ago the house opened as a museum.

Visiting this particular national historic site made me wonder how many there are. Quite a few, Wiki tells me: 87, most of which (76) are National Park Service units, with 11 as affiliate areas, though I’m not sure what that distinction might mean on the ground.

How many have I visited? Only 14, counting the latest one, though I’m not entirely sure about two of them. Clearly I need to get out more.

Main Street, Buffalo (Theater District)

Posted on June 8, 2021 by admin

At the five-way intersection of Main, Edward, Pearl and Goodell streets in Buffalo — only Main has the same name on both sides — stand the Catholic Center and the Sidway Building (mentioned yesterday) but also St. Louis Roman Catholic Church.

Designed by Schickel and Ditmar in 1889 on the site of the two earlier churches, it’s considered the Mother Church of the Diocese of Buffalo. Local architectural firm HLL, who did some restoration work in 2003, notes that “the 245-foot-tall steeple includes a 72-foot-tall, pierced spire, reportedly the tallest open-work spire ever built completely of stone without reinforcement. It is reputed to be the only remaining pierced spire in the United States.”

I popped in for a look, surprised to find it open on Sunday afternoon. A wedding was in progress, but I was able to see much of the interior from the narthex, through large windows in the doors.

A descriptive stone outside the church.

Main Street continues southward, but not as New York State Route 5, which veers off onto Edward St. and heads into downtown via another street. Main becomes narrower at that point, includes tracks for Buffalo’s light rail system, and runs through Buffalo’s Theater District, which I expect hasn’t been too busy lately. By that I mean in 2020, but also since its heyday about 100 years ago, when it was home to about 50 theaters of various sorts. I didn’t count, but maybe there are seven or eight.

Still, even former or diminished theater districts have their interests. Dotonbori in Osaka, for instance, only has a single theater any more (for Kabuki), but it sure is interesting to walk through.

The grande dame of Buffalo theaters is Shea’s Buffalo, these days one of a complex of three theaters known as Shea’s Performing Arts Center.

It’s one of the many Rapp and Rapp theaters that started as a movie palace in the 1920s, like the Chicago Theatre. If it had been open, I would have gone in.

“A casual observer may not know the history behind Shea’s. Michael Shea, for whom the venue is named, was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1859,” Buffalo Tales reports. “Around the turn of the century, he operated several vaudeville theaters in Buffalo and Toronto. By the early 1920s, Shea and his associates had traveled the country to gather ideas for constructing an ornate theater in Buffalo.

“Cornelius and George Rapp, famous theater architects based in Chicago, were hired to design a building that would resemble a European opera house and ‘compare favorably with such buildings in other cities.’ The initial plan was to spend approximately $1 million, but investors eventually spent twice that.”

A little further south and across the street is another splendid bit of Beaux Arts, the Market Arcade.

“Designed in 1892 by Buffalo architects Edward B. Green and William S. Wicks, the Market Arcade is the city’s only historic covered shopping arcade,” the site Buffalo As An Architectural Museum says. “This nineteenth century building type, which first achieved popularity during the 1820s, is generally regarded as the forerunner of the contemporary suburban mall.

“The Market Arcade recalls more famous arcades, such as the Gallery Umberto I (1887-90) in Naples and London’s Burlington Arcade (1818-19), which G.B. Marshall, the builder of the Buffalo Arcade, suggested to the architects as a model for his structure.

“Like European arcades, the Market Arcade maintained close ties to the street life around it. When constructed, the building connected this bustling stretch of Main Street with the flourishing public market that formerly existed at Washington and Chippewa streets. It was the market — the ‘belly of Buffalo’ – that gave the arcade its name.”

These days, the restored Market Arcade is home to CEPA Gallery and a mix of retail shops. The building was closed when I wandered by.

Further south still, the theater district peters out, giving way to a more general commercial area. I was a little tired by this point, but I had to get a closer look at the gold-domed building on Main, which I’d seen from a distance earlier in the day from the lawn of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, and which I’d imagined might be a church.

Turns out it’s a temple of mammon instead, a branch of M&T Bank that used to be Buffalo Savings Bank. That institution was founded in the 19th century by prominent Buffalonians, including local attorney and politico Millard Fillmore.

“Few buildings on Buffalo’s skyline are as pronounced or recognizable as the historic Gold Dome building,” USA Today reported in 2014. “Designed by E.B. Green [him again], the granite landmark was commissioned in 1898 and opened in 1901 — just before the Pan Am Exposition. But back then, this ornate edifice was actually rather plain.”

The article details the artwork added in the 1920s to the interior — inaccessible on a Sunday — and then says about the outside of the dome: “When it was built, the tiles were a simple beige terra-cotta. They stayed that way until the ’50s when they were gilded with 23 and 3/4 karat gold leaf.”

A bank building with a gold leaf dome. Now that’s something you’d think there would have been more of, at least adorning banks of the pre-FDIC period. A good-looking way to send a simple message: We’ve got the dough.

Main Street, Buffalo (NY 5)

Posted on June 7, 2021 by admin

At about 8:30 this evening, as dusk settled in, I was reading out on the deck. I glanced up and spotted a brilliant rainbow. It had been cloudy and slightly misty much of the day, but no real rain. The clouds off to the west were pink and gray.

I could see almost all of the arc, which stretched from due east to south-southeast. Should I tell the rest of my family? I did, and remarkably they got themselves outside in time to see the glorious multicolored curve, which lasted all of about five minutes.

In Buffalo, Main Street is a main street, running northeast from downtown roughly to the border with Amherst. Because we stayed in Amherst over our Memorial Day weekend trip, it proved to be the best route into the city and downtown, so I drove it more than once. Much of the street also counts as New York State Route 5, a highway that runs from the Pennsylvania line on Lake Erie to Albany.

Main is a busy commercial street, marked by various restaurants, retail establishments, public buildings and more. As you head into Buffalo, you’ll also see Grover Cleveland Golf Course, University at Buffalo South Campus, St. Mary’s School for the Deaf, Sisters of Charity Hospital, one edge of Forest Lawn Cemetery, Canisius College, and two restaurants we visited on different days: Lake Effect Diner and Anchor Bar.

The former.

The latter.

Originally a Philly diner, new owners relocated Lake Effect to Buffalo in 2002 and restored it to its ’52 chrome-and-neon self. I had a good Reuben sandwich there. Anchor Bar, which sports a sizable collection of motorcycles along its walls, and a truly enormous collection of old license plates and other bric-a-brac, claims to have invented the Buffalo wing. Whatever the truth of that, we had the wings, and they were a tasty highlight of the trip.

After lunch at Anchor Bar on May 30, we drove along Main Street to see other things. Or rather, I did. Lunch had been heavy, and Yuriko napped in the passenger seat. I drove along, parked on the side of the street — there was always plenty of parking — and walked around for a few blocks, and then repeated the process a few blocks further on. That was when I spotted the KEEP BUFFALO A SECRET mural.

That isn’t the only mural on Main. Late last year, two local artists, Edreys Wajed and James “Yames” Moffitt, collaborated on a mural commissioned by the Albright-Knox Public Art Initiative.

Then there was this. Sigh.

A handsome block.

It includes this delightful find: the former home of McDonnell & Sons who, as the building itself still says, were “dealers in every variety of granite work — monumental and building.”

Vacant now, as it has been for many years. According to this short history of the company, McDonnell & Sons moved to Buffalo from Massachusetts in 1884 and stayed in business until about 1968. The perfect place for a hipster bar, if you asked me, though restoration would cost a pretty penny.

The Catholic Center, which is another building on Main with a backstory.

A nice bit of art deco, designed by Monks & Johnson of Boston and completed in 1930. Until 1982, it was HQ for Courier Express newspaper. The Catholic Diocese of Buffalo has owned the building since 1985.

The figures toward the top, which I didn’t notice until I looked at my pictures, are famous printers (such as Ben Franklin). This site has better pictures of them and some detail.

One more Main Street building for now.

The Beaux-Arts Sidway Building, designed in 1907 with a two story addition in 1913 by McCreary, Wood & Bradney of Buffalo. An office building originally; these days, loft apartments. Curious, I checked the rents. About $1,200/month for a one bedroom. The average in Manhattan would be three times as much at least, and even in or near the Chicago Loop, twice as much. That’s the Buffalo discount, I guess.

Downtown Buffalo

Posted on June 6, 2021 by admin

Last Sunday morning, May 30, we were up fairly early and spent time in downtown Buffalo. I had a walking route in mind, inspired by a walking tour map I’d seen on line, but we pretty much disregarded that and used the “hey, what’s that building over there?” technique to set our path.

After parking in a garage, the first thing we spotted was Millard Fillmore. In bronze.

A work of New York City sculptor Bryant Baker, from the early 1930s, next to Buffalo City Hall. Naturally, President Fillmore has attracted the ire of removalists, who want to take his memory to task for signing the Compromise of 1850, especially the odious Fugitive Slave Law, and for being the standard-bearer for the Know-Nothings. Not for being mentioned as a mediocre president in song and story.

Fillmore’s on the southeast corner of the building. On the northeast corner is the Baker bronze of Grover Cleveland, who was mayor of Buffalo before he was ever president.

Buffalo City Hall is a famed bit of architecture, for good reason. Chicago has a handsome city hall, as does New York City and other places, but I’ve seen none more impressive than Buffalo.

Local architects Dietel, Wade & Jones did the soaring art deco design, with completion in 1931. I’ve read there’s an observation deck on the upper floors, but it was closed on Sunday. Actually, most of downtown Buffalo seemed closed on Sunday. A 24/7 city, it is not.

City Halls faces Niagara Square, which has been a focal point for the city for a long time, and continues to be in the news.
The obelisk is the McKinley Monument, designed by the architects of the 1901 world’s fair, Carrere and Hastings.

East of City Hall, facing Lafayette Square, is the Liberty Building, developed in 1925 for Liberty National Bank.

At one time the bank had been German American Bank, but the bankers thought better of that name during the 1910s dust-up in Europe. Just to hammer home the patriotic point, there are replicas of the Statue of Liberty atop the building.

The Rand Building, completed in 1929.
One M&T Plaza, completed in 1966 and looking every bit of it. A design by Minoru Yamasaki, who’s best known for the destroyed World Trade Center in NYC.

A detail of Ellicott Square, designed by Charles Atwood of D. H. Burnham & Co. and completed in 1896. The lobby is supposed to be like the Rookery in Chicago, which would be high praise indeed, but the building wasn’t open for a look.

The splendid Guaranty Building, originally the Prudential Building, also completed in 1896. A Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler tour-de-force.

Across the street from the Guaranty is St. Paul’s Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York. Richard Upjohn, who designed Trinity Church Wall Street in Manhattan, did the original design in the 1840s. After a bad fire in the 1880s, Robert Gibson did the renovation.

The Sunday service was in progress and we sat in for a while, with a good view of the resplendent interior.

Those were the buildings we had energy for. Some details along the way, such as the Buffalo city flag.

In the street across from the cathedral are Toynbee tiles.

Been a while since I’ve seen any. The last time was St. Louis, maybe 20 years ago. An examination of the spot on Google Streetview tells me that these particular tiles appeared after 2011 but before 2015, and one of the tiles says 2013. So they might not be the work of the original tiler, whomever that might be, but does that even matter? The obscure oddity has a life of its own, and it’s good to know that they’re still being created and you can still see them with your own eyes.

Along the Niagara Gorge

Posted on June 3, 2021 by admin

What’s within walking distance of Niagara Falls State Park if you want a (relatively) inexpensive lunch? There’s a food court in an ugly building, but also Zaika Indian Cuisine, Taste of Nepal and Punjabi Hut on streets near the park, all of which speak to fairly recent immigration in this corner of western NY. When honeymooners visited Niagara in the early 20th century, or even most of the rest of the century, those were surely not options. We had the buffet on Saturday at Punjabi Hut, which was pretty good.

Afterwards, we spent a little more time at the park riding the Niagara Scenic Trolley, whose route was shortened during the pandemic, and then headed north by car on the Niagara Scenic Parkway. The road is fairly short — 18 miles or so — and goes from the town of Niagara Falls to Lake Ontario, but it is definitely scenic, except for the section that passes by the New York Power Authority plant on the river. Just north of the falls the parkway follows the river fairly closely.

The road was known as the Robert Moses Scenic Parkway until about five years ago. Looks like Confederate memorials aren’t the only ones getting the boot these days. So are those honoring urban planners with a taste for neighborhood-impinging expressways. (And what’s to become of this state park on Long Island? Time will tell.)

North of the town of Lewiston, the parkway still follows the river, but at a remove of a mile or so. It’s pretty enough, but I understand that the Niagara Parkway on the Canadian side, which follows the river quite closely, is the prettier drive. But one goes where one can go.

First stop: Whirlpool State Park. The intense current of the Niagara River rushes to this point and forms a enormous whirlpool at a bend. Been quite a while since I’ve had a good look at a natural whirlpool which, despite the name, looks like a choppy patch of water rather than the thing you see in a drain.

The view upriver. In the distance is the Rainbow Bridge. As I’ve said, nothing is very far from anything else in this part of New York state.

The flow into the whirlpool.

The whirlpool.

It doesn’t look like a particularly safe place for boats, but that doesn’t keep tourists from venturing there under the command of “highly skilled captains.” I’d hope so. I don’t know whether the jetboats are running now. We didn’t see any. The cable car that dangles over the whirlpool, the Whirlpool Aero Car, and which launches from the Canadian side, looked immobile, still shut for the pandemic.

Then there’s the story of Capt. Joel Robinson, skipper of the Maid of the Mist in 1861, who shot the Niagara rapids and whirlpool. Niagara Falls Info tells the story:

“In 1861, due to a financial crisis and the American Civil War, the Maid of the Mist was sold at public auction to a Canadian company. The deal would go through if the boat could be delivered to Lake Ontario. To get to Lake Ontario, the Maid of the Mist had to be navigated through the Great Gorge Rapids, the Whirlpool, and the Lower Rapids.

“On June 6th 1861, 53-year-old Captain Joel Robinson undertook this risky mission along with two deck hands…[McIntyre and Jones]. With both shores lined with onlookers, Captain Robinson and crew rode the Maid of the Mist into one of the world’s most wild and dangerous whitewater rapids.

“The first giant wave that struck the boat threw Robinson and McIntyre to the floor of the wheel house. It also tore the smoke stack from the boat and Jones was thrown to the floor of the engine room. The tiny boat was now at the mercy of the massive waves crashing against it. The boat was carried at approximately 63 km/h through the rock strewn rapids. Soon the Maid of the Mist was propelled into the Whirlpool where Captain Robinson was able to regain control of the boat.

“Captain Robinson had great difficulty maneuvering the Maid of the Mist from the grip of the Whirlpool… The 5 kilometre journey through the rapids and the Whirlpool was well executed, although they lost the smoke stack. Captain Robinson was the first person to accomplish the impossible [obviously not, just difficult] task of taking a boat through the dangerous waters.

“The frightening experience of this journey caused Captain Robinson to give up a career that he loved. He retired into near seclusion and died two years later at the age of 55.”

In modern terms, sounds like he suffered from PTSD. In 19th-century terms, I figure people said he was spooked by the ordeal. No mention of the aftermath for the deck hands.

Not long after visiting Whirlpool State Park, we spend a while in the pleasant town of Lewiston, New York, whose equally pleasant riverfront isn’t at the top of a gorge, but at river level. Not far from the river is the Freedom Crossing Monument, an ensemble of bronzes by Susan Geissler commemorating those escaped slaves who crossed into Canada.
Elsewhere in Lewiston is the variously named Earl W. Brydges Artpark State Park, or Earl W. Brydges State Artpark, or simply the Artpark, a venue for summertime musical entertainment. It also includes some other standard features of a park, such as playground equipment and picnic tables, as well as an Indian mound. I expect there haven’t been any events there in more than a year, but maybe that will pick up soon.

All very interesting, but what struck me was the parking lot. It’s large and undistinguished except for the paintings on its surface. When I pulled into the lot, I took them for children’s chalk drawings, maybe left over from a kids’ event, but soon I noticed they were paintings, and extensive in scope across the lot.

More parking lots such be decorated like this. The end of the line for the Niagara Scenic Parkway is near Old Fort Niagara State Historic Site, which overlooks the mouth of the river on Lake Ontario. The fort itself, which is ringed by an iron fence, was closed by the time we got there. But the rest of the grounds were open. While Yuriko napped in the car, I looked around.

The Old Fort Niagara lighthouse.
This particular light dates from 1871, but the fort had more primitive lights much earlier than that, ca. 1781, which count as the first lights on the Great Lakes.

The old fort also has an old cemetery. Small, but a dignified spot for those who died during here the War of 1812. The fort was scene of a bloody bit of business during that dimly remembered war. Good to see that the stones were ready for Decoration Day.Erected to the memory of unknown soldiers and sailors of the United States killed in action or dying of wounds in this vicinity during the War of 1812.

Niagara Falls State Park

Posted on June 2, 2021 by admin

Something I didn’t know until I visited there on Saturday: Niagara Falls State Park in New York is considered the oldest state park in the nation, established in 1885 as the Niagara Reservation. Creation of the park was an early success for Progressivism, spearheaded by Frederick Law Olmsted. Him again. The wonder is that he isn’t more widely known for his terrific landscape artistry, which anyone can see.

A victory for the Progressive movement because, as I’ve read, before that private landowners around the falls monopolized access. You’d think that wouldn’t be much of an issue in the 19th century, but the falls have been a tourist attraction for a long time. In the park we saw a sign that noted that on his grand tour of the U.S. in 1825, Lafayette came to see the falls. But the real tourism boom began after the falls became a public place with easy access.

We arrived on Saturday around 9 a.m. and found a place to park right away in lot no. 1. Good thing, too, since later in the day we noticed a long line of cars waiting to park. Even that early there were a fair number of people in the park, but by early afternoon the place was mobbed.

It didn’t matter once you’d ditched your car. The park holds crowds well because it’s large, encompassing a long stretch of shore along the Niagara River upriver and downriver from the falls, and the islands that divide the falls into three: the relatively small Bridal Falls, the mid-sized American Falls, and the mighty Horseshoe Falls, most of which is Canadian.

Created at the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago or so, the falls have an estimated existence span of another 50,000 years. So we’re witnessing a geological blip. How many countless mighty cataracts of this kind have come into being only to erode away over the billions of years of liquid water on Earth? And what about crashing falls on other worlds?

From the U.S. side, your first view is of the American falls, looking to the south. The buildings in the background are part of the town of Niagara Falls, Ontario. This is a shot with the tourist infrastructure edited out.

Left in.

Bridges cross from the shore upriver a bit to Goat Island, the main island in the channel. For a few moments, you can forget you’re surrounded by the intensity of the Niagara River.

But not for long. More views of the American Falls are easily found. Looking north over the drop, with the Rainbow International Bridge in the background, seeming not nearly as high as it is.

Spray. It wouldn’t be the last time.

A curiosity on Goat Island: a statue of Tesla.

“Gift of Yugoslavia to the United States, 1976,” the Tesla Memorial Society of New York says. “Nikola Tesla designed the first hydroelectric power plant in Niagara Falls. This was the final victory of Tesla’s Alternating Current over Edison’s Direct Current. The monument was the work of Croatian sculptor Frane Krsinic.”

A standing Tesla was installed on the Canadian side more recently, in 2006, according to the society. More about Tesla and Niagara is here.

Go far enough on Goat Island and you’ll reach Terrapin Point, which offers a view of Horseshoe Falls, which is what most people think of when they think of Niagara Falls. It’s wider than the other falls combined, and drops more water, as much as 90% of the 100,000 or so cubic feet of water per second that flows over the three falls during the summer. The rate is controlled by engineering, and is lessened at night and during the spring and fall, when fewer tourists are around, so that more of the flow can be used to generate electricity at those times.

Naturally, lots of people were gathered to take a look. And pictures.

There’s a good view of the Canadian side from there as well, when the mist doesn’t obscure it. Looks like there’s reconstruction going on over there, near the edge. I remember standing next to the Horseshoe Falls at that point 30 years ago, and it looks like that observation deck is missing for now.

The Canadian town looks more prosperous than the U.S. town from that vantage, and indeed it is for various reasons. Sad to say, beyond the tourist enclave, Niagara Falls, New York is another one of the small cities of the industrial North that has seen better times.

Canada, as it happens, was still mostly closed to visitors over Memorial Day weekend, which would be an ordinary weekend there. Later in the day, we saw the entrance to the Rainbow Bridge on the U.S. side, and only one lane for traffic was open, and no one was in it.

The bridge is visible from Terrapin Point, since it isn’t far downriver from the falls. A striking bit of work across a gorge.

After our Goat Island wander, we wanted to do the Maid of the Mist boat ride. That was something I skipped in ’91, and wasn’t expecting much more than a ride along the river with a nice view of the bottom of the falls, to complement the views of the tops. We waited in line about half an hour to get on one of the two boats, which made me think of waiting around for a ride at Disneyland. A thing that you do as a tourist. I grumbled a little about the price. I didn’t realize what was ahead.

This is one of the boats, the James V. Glynn. We rode on the other one, the Nikola Tesla. Him again. Mr. Glynn is a long-time Maid of the Mist chairman.

Tourists have been riding Maid of the Mist boats since 1845, another indication of how long tourists have been coming to Niagara Falls, though intermittently until 1885 and every year since then. The boats were steam and then diesel powered and now, as the company is eager to point out, all-electric with no emissions, launched into service only last year. As people get on and off, the boats are recharged at the dock.

The company gives you bright blue thin plastic ponchos and off you go, for a 20 minute or so trip. It isn’t the quantity of the time aboard that counts, but the quality. First you pass by the American and Bridal Falls, which are impressive in their flow and in the huge boulders piled at the bottom.
The ship then passes into the curve under Horseshoe Falls. I didn’t think it would get as close at it did. The roar is enormous. The spray is continuous. The curving walls of water, taller than walls of water should be, fill your senses. The place is enthralling. I haven’t been as captivated by a natural phenomenon (well, partly engineered) since I saw the total eclipse a few years ago.

No wonder people have been paying for over a century and a half for this little boat ride. It was worth the effort to get to Niagara Falls, all by itself, and all of the $25.25 each to be escorted under the spectacular cataract.

I wasn’t in the mood to take pictures during most intense moments, like during the eclipse. Except one.
One of three or four selfies I’ve taken since that concept was popularized. Hit the nail on the head with that one.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There