A monument to the progressive spirit of the age
They’re building now a great big ditch, through dirt and rock so gritty
At the tail end of the 50s, the stench from the Voorhees basement intensified. Headaches were common, eyes burned and breathing difficulties increased as the smell first permeated the house and then the entire neighborhood. While unpleasant, it wasn’t uncommon. It smelled like progress, American ingenuity and the factories that formed the backbone of the neighborhood and nation.
Then came the black sludge. The dark, oily goo seeped through the basement’s cinderblock walls. Edwin Voorhees attempted to seal the gaps between the blocks to no avail. The goo’s flow and its resulting odor only increased. When city authorities paid the situation no mind, Edwin took more evasive action, breaking the wall open, unleashing a steady stream of the substance, which had amassed behind the blocks.
Sheri was born nearly a decade later. Her tiny heart had a hole and beat at irregular intervals. She had a cleft palate, partial deafness and ear and nose abnormalities, coupled with mental disabilities. Her issues only compounded, as her tiny liver grew enlarged. When her teeth came in, doctors were shocked to discover that the Voorhees’ granddaughter had two rows growing out of her lower jaw.
Plants around the property began to die off. Children tossed clods of mud they called “fire rocks” against walls to watch them glow green. Their eyes itched and their legs broke out in rashes. It would be another decade until the government declared the town’s residents anything more than “hypochondriacs.” Sheri was simply the tip of the spear when it came to birth defects and liver damage. Cancer rates skyrocketed, as well.
A report published by The Office of Public Health soon declared the area,
simply unfit as a container for hazardous substances, poor even by the standards of the day, and now, in 1977, local authorities were belatedly finding that out. Several years of heavy snowfall and rain had filled the sparingly covered channel like a bathtub. The contents were overflowing at a frightening rate, sopping readily into the clay, silt, and sandy loam, and finding their exit through old creek beds and swales and into the neighborhood.
The report noted that it “may very well be the first of a new and sinister breed of environmental disasters,” adding, “an environmental time bomb gone off, Love Canal stands as a testimony to the ignorance, lack of vision and proper laws of decades past, which allowed the indiscriminate disposal of such toxic materials”
The lack of vision wasn’t William T. Love’s. His own misfortunes were the product of extremely poor timing. The railroad entrepreneur burst into town at the beginning of the final decade of the 19th century. When he was ready to declare his ambitions, he did so with a torrent of circulars, ads and his very own brass band performing original lyrics to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” Vocalists sang, in part, “They’re building now a great big ditch / Through dirt and rock so gritty / They say ‘twill make all very rich / who live in Model Town.”
The pomp, circumstance and promises of prosperity went a long way toward convincing residents of the surrounding area to back the project. But the truth of the matter was that Love had already done all the convincing he needed to do, prior to the campaign’s launch. On a trip to Albany, the businessman became the second private citizen to address a joint session of the state senate and assembly. The lawmakers, it seemed, were smitten, voting in favor of his development. Roswell Flower, the state’s business-friendly governor, followed suit, signing the legislation with great enthusiasm.
Love promised a “megalopolis” capable of housing as many as 600,000 – 370,000 more than presently lived in the nation’s capital. He aimed to secure 10,000 acres of land for Model City, his planned urban utopia. He wound up with 20,000 instead.
“No skill, art or effort will be spared to make it the most beautiful city in the world,” he proclaimed, with customary aplomb, declaring it, “a monument to the progressive spirit of the age – to the genius, goodness and greatness of the American people.” In spite of an abundance of state of the art factories, he added that the area would contain, "the most beautiful [park] in the world” and be “free from defiling vapors.”
Model City would be situated less than 10 miles from Niagara Falls, though its plan entailed circumventing the massive waterfalls entirely. A six- to seven-mile canal would be dug, connecting the upper and lower portions of the Niagara River. A 300-foot drop was planned along the path. Here, the manmade waterfall could be harnessed to power the city through hydroelectricity.
Depending on who you asked, Model City was either a futuristic utopian metropolis or a massive company town tied to the numerous planned factories. Business magnates were bullish on the latter, with plans to build numerous manufacturing sites in the area. Investors from New York, Chicago and London also got in on the action. The first opened in 1893, and the following May, Modeltown Development Corporation began digging the Canal.
Two months prior, Grover Cleveland had been inaugurated the 24th President of the United States (the second of his two non-consecutive terms) amid the beginnings the Panic of 1893, a five-year economic depression. Stock prices plunged, 15,000 businesses closed and 500 banks failed. Soup kitchens were opened and women reportedly turned to prostitution in bids to feed their starving families.
Investors began pulling out of Model City.
The true nail in the project’s coffin, however, was Nikola Tesla’s triumph over rival Thomas Edison. With the help of entrepreneur George Westinghouse, the famed Serbian-American inventor opened Niagara Falls’ first hydroelectric plant. Tesla’s technology also allowed for the long-distance transmission of the power it harnessed, negating the need to build factories directly adjacent to their power source. With around 3,000 feet of its canal dug, Model City was abandoned entirely.
The area was sold at auction in 1910. Over the years, the hole accumulated water. Children swam in the unfinished canal in the summer and skated on its surface in the winter. In 1920, Niagara Falls began using the hole as a city dump. Two decades later, the city granted Rochester firm, Hooker Chemical Company, access to the canal to dispose of its own harmful byproducts. Over the next 10 years, the corporation dumped 21,800 tons of "caustics, alkalines, fatty acid and chlorinated hydrocarbons resulting from the manufacturing of dyes, perfumes, and solvents for rubber and synthetic resins” 20 feet below the surface. Once the site was spent, they covered it with clay soil to prevent seepage.
To address a booming population, the city sought to purchase the land back. Hooker agreed, selling the entire site for a $1, in return for a limitation of liability for the area it had come to recognize as a source of potential harm to the surrounding community. The company’s counsel noted in a letter to its president, “We became convinced that it would be a wise move to turn this property over to the schools provided we could not be held responsible for future claims or damages resulting from underground storage of chemicals.”
In the mid-1950s, Niagara begun building a school on the site, breaching the clay seal in the process. Erosion soon exposed several of the drums, which filled with rainwater and seeped into the surrounding soil. The EPA would later noted a "disturbingly high” number of miscarriages, birth defects, nervous disorders and cancers. It took two decades, hundreds of health problems and activist hours before President Jimmy Carter ordered the use of emergency money to clean up the site – the first time in U.S. history those funds had been allocated for something other than a natural disaster.
The federal government did not require residents to evacuate, however. But in August 1978 alone, 237 families fled the area. Around 100 people – primarily older and childless – stayed behind. ''Sure, at first it was lonely when everybody left,'' one resident told The New York Times, while mowing his lawn late the following decade. ''But then I kind of got to like it. I get up in the morning and instead of hearing some man yelling at his wife or a kid with a boom box, I hear birds chirping in the trees and I see deer running down the street.''
A year prior, a former resident who had abandoned her house returned to spray paint words on its boarded-up windows. They read, “Tourists!! This is it! Love Canal!”
Sources:
Model City USA: The Environmental Cost of Victory in World War II and the Cold War https://www.jstor.org/stable/25473132
Love Canal: Public Health Time Bomb https://www.dec.ny.gov/data/DecDocs/932020/Report.HW.932020.1978-09-01.LoveCanal-PublicHealthTimeBomb-RptToGov-Legislat.pdf
Life on the rim of a chemical stew https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1980/7/7/life-on-the-rim-of-a-chemical-stew
After 10 Years, the Trauma of Love Canal Continues https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1988/08/05/526188.html?pageNumber=27
Life on the rim of a chemical stew https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1980/7/7/life-on-the-rim-of-a-chemical-stew
Love Canal and the Poisoning of America https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1979/12/love-canal-and-the-poisoning-of-america/376297/