Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls

by Patrick Vincent Mcgreevy

Niagara Falls was a lightning rod for nineteenth-century enthusiasms. Although travelers came to the falls to experience a place they considered outside the world of their ordinary lives, they brought with them their contemporary concerns. Many tourists were obsessed with the mysteries of death, others with scientific or religious speculation. The way they imagined Niagara Falls found expression in a torrent of writings and images that took a variety of forms.
Patrick McGreevy begins with the question, What can these visions of Niagara tell us about the place itself? The landscape surrounding the falls contains not only parks and religious shrines but also circuses, horror museums, and factories. People travel to Niagara not only to experience nature but also to celebrate marriages or commit suicide.
One way to make sense of these bizarre "human accumulations," as H. G. Wells called them, is to take seriously the Niagaras people have imagined. This book focuses on four interlocking themes that recur time and again in descriptions of the Niagara as a thing imagined from afar, as a metaphor for death, as an embodiment of nature, and as a focus of future events. Using the skills of a cultural geographer, McGreevy discovers some surprising connections between the Niagara people have imagined and the one they made, between its natural grandeur and its industrial exploitation, between Frederick Law Olmsted's Reservation and the Love Canal.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1994

Reviews

[Sheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this, despite a few gripes. At one point the author kept making these grand statements and then supporting them with poetry that does not mean what he says it does at all. I can't decide if he's just ignorant of the Bible and so doesn't realize what the poets are actually saying, or if he is just taking someone else's word for it, or if he just doesn't think I'll notice it doesn't mean what he says he does. I don't doubt his claims that some people saw Nature as being a kind of force for some sort of secular salvation, I'm just annoyed he keeps trying to drag conventional Christian poetry in to defend his position, when it's obvious in context -- and even more obvious when I look the poem up -- that the original poem fits just fine with conventional Christianity.

On the upside, he got me to look up some poetry and discover there's a massive site on poetry dedicated to Niagara, which is pretty neat. I was also intrigued to discover how often Niagara Falls appeared in literature, and am thinking about tracking down the two Jules Verne novels he discusses in the second-last chapter. And I have to wonder if Jerry Seigel or Joe Schuster were familiar with King Camp Gillette's book The Human Drift which includes a very futuristic city named Metropolis.

As another reviewer notes, he does tend to tell you what he's going to tell you, and then tell you, and the (short!) conclusion chapter is essentially telling you what he just told you, a writing technique that does sometimes annoy me but did not this time around.

[Chuck · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very important angle of niagara falls history but i was a little turned off by the writing. It wasn't bad, i just don't like research books to spend a lot of space telling you " in the next few pages i will be talking about this"

The first three chapters were a little repetitive but the last chapter about how people viewed the future of Niagara is absolutely worth reading and has the most information on how the falls inspired three large utopian dreams.

I also enjoyed the way the author likened Moby Dick to Niagara Falls

[Christi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is part of a doctoral dissertation. It's a fascinating geographic description of Niagara Falls throughout history.