Niagara Falls

Niagara was the first American landscape to be systematically photographed for sale, and the volume of it is difficult to overstate. Stereoviews of the falls were produced in the hundreds of thousands from the 1850s onward, and for a great many nineteenth-century Americans a stereoview of Niagara was the first photograph of anywhere they had ever held.

The Maid of the Mist began carrying passengers into the basin in 1846, originally as a ferry, and became an attraction once the suspension bridge made the ferry unnecessary.

The tightrope crossings started with Charles Blondin in 1859, who crossed on a rope eleven hundred feet long and then did it again blindfolded, in a sack, on stilts, and carrying his manager on his back. Others followed. The photographs are real, which people frequently doubt.

The ice bridge formed most winters — the spray freezing into a mass thick enough to walk on — and there are photographs of hundreds of people standing on the ice below the falls, with shanties selling liquor. It ended in 1912 when the ice broke up with people on it and three died.

Then in 1895 the Adams Power Station opened, and Niagara became the site of the argument that settled how the world would be electrified. Westinghouse and Tesla's alternating current won the contract over Edison's direct current, because only AC could carry power the twenty-odd miles to Buffalo. It worked, and within a decade AC was the standard everywhere.

The industrial photographs of the power houses and the penstocks sit oddly beside the scenic ones, and both were being made in the same years by the same companies.

The scenic reservation on the American side was created in 1885, the first state park in the United States, after a campaign led in part by Frederick Law Olmsted to clear the mills and fences that had grown up to the water's edge and charge admission to look.

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