Why Nobody Wants to Visit Niagara Falls Anymore?

In 1960, Niagara Falls, New York, was a city of 102,000 people, powered by the same water that drew honeymooners and presidents to the Cataract House hotel a century before. Nikola Tesla's hydroelectric plant had turned the falls into the cheapest electricity in America, and that cheap power built a chemical empire — Hooker, DuPont, Carborundum — that employed the entire city. Then the factories poisoned the ground beneath a neighborhood called Love Canal. Robert Moses built a highway that walled the city off from its own waterfall. Urban renewal bulldozed Falls Street, the old downtown, and replaced it with a convention center and a mall that both failed. Across the gorge, Canada built the tourist infrastructure the American side destroyed. Today fewer than 48,000 people remain. The falls still draw eight million visitors a year. Almost none of them stay. Sources "Love Canal: A Brief History" — Dr. Jordan Kleiman, SUNY Geneseo Department of History "Niagara Falls Historic Preservation Industrial Survey" — Buffalo Architecture and History archive (buffaloah.com) "When the Niagara River Crushed a Power Plant" — Smithsonian Magazine, June 2017 "Niagara Falls In Danger of Losing City Status, Aid" — NPR, October 2012 "Called 'Misguided Mistake,' Robert Moses' Parkway Removed from Niagara Gorge" — Thomas J. Prohaska, The Buffalo News, July 2020 "Niagara Falls State Park: Celebrating 140 Years" — New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation