Building Love’s Canal

The fall from environmental grace that Mark Twain described was a product of sweeping industrialization at the close of the 19th century. Spurred by the advent of hydroelectric power, a whole new group of commercial schemers flooded the Falls in search of wealth, power, and prestige. “This is an electrical era,” a Niagara booster bragged. “Back in the centuries that are past, we had the stone age, the ice age, etc., but the electrical age is purely the utilization of natural forces by the genius of man.” “Naturally,” he noted, “the first development of electric power was at the source of the greatest quantity of power anywhere to be found on earth, the Falls of Niagara.” That meant Niagara Falls would remain a watchword of industrial expansion far into the future. Among the legion of businessmen, engineers, and investors flocking to the fin de siècle Falls was an unheralded entrepreneur named William Love. After surveying the area in the early 1890s, Love was smitten. The environment he encountered was beautiful and bountiful. He soon unleashed bold plans to build both the world’s greatest hydroelectric power canal and “a model manufacturing city” that might someday encompass millions of people. By offering cheap power to businesses and an array of modern amenities to residents, Love’s Model City would become “the most complete, perfect and beautiful” urban locale “in the world.” As Love told anyone who would listen, his plan was destined to succeed. History knows Love for his dramatic failure. The economic crisis of 1893 undercut investments in Model City, while Love’s tangled business plans killed construction of his power canal. By the early 1900s, Love was long gone. In Model City, located a few miles from the Falls, little remained of his epic vision, save for a few small buildings. Yet in the town of Lasalle, an environmental ruin associated with Model City remained a prominent part of the landscape for many years: “Love’s Canal.” Before Love’s funding evaporated, his workers excavated a portion of a power canal and waterfall that would have been higher and more powerful than the natural Falls.