Niagara Falls

Remember when the Army Engineers shut off the American side of Niagara Falls? It was 1969; I was fifteen; my brother and cousins were older and way cooler; a party of us trudged around the riverside looking at the desolation and being freaked out by the silence.

Paul Zadner sent these photos recently, in one of his world-famous mass emailings. According to the text in that email, a guy named Russ Glasson was visiting his in-laws, somewhere, around 1990, and found these first six photos in the in-laws' garage.

The idea was to remove all this talus.  Ha!  Look at it all. They would need Picard and the Enterprise get rid of it, with triple shifts on the beamer machines. They settled for putting in cable reinforcements.  The business lasted six months.  Those in the local tourism trades despaired in the short run, and then in the long run because the more talus collects, the sooner the Falls flattens out.  

This last Glasson in-law photo is in the Niagara Falls Wikipedia article.  See the coffer dam way up on the right?

Postcard image from the email, with things back to crashing normal.

And here, Ta-da! Ta-da!, is the Maid of the Mist doing her thing.

We went on the Maid of the Mist in what looks like 1958.  Here are Marty, Clara, Gene, and Julie.  Who is taking the picture?  I remember Aunt Gertrude and Aunt Florence were also of the party that day. Tom, were you there?  I remember them, and everyone, wearing big thick rubber raincoats with hoods.  I remember going down into a basementlike concrete place with lots of black raincoats on hooks.  I remember the noise of the Falls, the scent of the river, and the spray in my face. Couldn't see anything.  But who could?  The other impressions were made indelibly.