From the New York Times:
The scenic attributes of Niagara Falls are well known, but if the pilot points them out to you in a plane at 30,000 feet, the falls can look more problematic than sublime, as if there’s a leak in the Great Lakes — it makes you want to call someone. On the ground, there’s a long list of things the falls have made people want to do, including but not limited to the following: kill people to own the falls for navigational purposes; cross the falls on a tightrope while making an omelet; pay people off to own the falls for power-production purposes; pay people off to own them for scenic-enrichment purposes, covertly affiliated with the power purposes; inflict electrical consumption on a nation that first thought electricity was deadly but then, when it saw all the gadgets that could be bought, said, Electrify me!; use the falls to make chemicals to help make said gadgets, dumping the leftovers all over the place, especially in the infamous Love Canal; make more chemicals in the name of war — arsenic trichloride, for instance, which makes a gas called lewisite, now on terrorism watch lists; stay overnight in a hotel adjacent to the falls to inaugurate a long marriage (“Every American bride is taken there,†Oscar Wilde said, in the days before Niagara rhymed with Viagra); bury nuclear waste in and around workers’ neighborhoods and not mention it; depopulate the city named after Niagara Falls by building a highway through it; attempt to repopulate the city by building a big mall (the Rainbow Center); attempt again with a casino; and, most recently, write a book that is wild and sometimes thrilling, as far as local history goes — like a ride over the falls in a barrel that turns out O.K., from which you emerge with a new view of Niagara as well as what we call nature.