TWO CENTURIES AGO, the Erie Canal helped make Niagara Falls a tourism staple of two nations. We haven’t stopped gawking since. Photographer Brian Finke captured a summer weekend, and we talked to locals who keep the place flowing.
The Captain
Captain Kaitlynn McHenry—the first woman to helm the Maid of the Mist in the 178-year history of the sightseeing boat company—grew up outside Rochester, NY. In high school, she worked as a deckhand on Erie Canal. She studied pharmacy, but the water called her back. This is Captain McHenry’s sixth season.
“It never really gets old. You're not going to find water like this anywhere else. You're not going to find the volume of people we see here anywhere else. You're showing people a wonder of the world, and that's incredibly special. That's probably the best part.
“You see a lot of different responses to the falls. Some people are emotional. Some people dance, jump and scream. There are days it sounds like people are riding a roller coaster. It brings people a lot of joy, and it's fun to watch that every day.
Detroit
Square pizza and jazz clubs, boxers and fillmakers, art history and Motown lore.
“If you're working on other tour boats, you're not usually aiming for water like that. It’s something you might even try to avoid. But that's our target. We want to take people into the belly of the beast.
“We sort of get into the horseshoe, where it's the most turbulent and the mist is spraying. It feels like you’re almost becoming one with the falls. Challenging, for sure. The water changes a lot throughout the day—water levels, the strength of the currents. No two days are ever exactly alike.
Our two boats, together, will do about 45 trips a day. We go round in circles like a boat ballet. The boats we’re currently running were built in 2019 and 2020. They’re completely electric—the first of their kind built in North America. They can spin on a dime and move in any direction, and they have no carbon footprint at all.
“Depending on which way the wind is blowing the mist, you're going to get a completely different view of the falls. We always joke that if you find one of the captains out on deck taking photos, it's a pretty spectacular day. We're like, ‘Oh man, look at how beautiful it is.’ Even for us—who get to see it every day—it doesn't lose its splendor.”
THE RESTAURANT OWNER
Niagara’s roar and spray draw an international crowd. On a given day, women in saris of marigold and magenta gather with family around food trucks, cinnamon and cardamom wafting through the air. More than a dozen Indian restaurants (both mobile and bricks-and-mortar) serve visitors in Niagara Falls, NY—product of the place’s huge appeal to South Asian communities. (India is often cited as the largest source of foreign tourists to the U.S. side.) We talked to Smita Dhillon; she and husband Vishal Kumar opened their restaurant, Bombay Palace, in May 2023.
“I always loved cooking, since childhood. I saw my mom and grandmom with all the spices, and they used to teach us. I just loved it. So I took cooking classes in India. I came here when I was 19. It's been like 20 years that I'm here.
“My husband, especially, always wanted to be in the food industry. If we wanted to go somewhere—to an Indian restaurant—we used to go to Buffalo or farther away. So that's when we started thinking about opening one. We love food and cooking. Why not take our opportunity, living in Niagara Falls?"
“We love to make it fresh and take the time. We love feeding people. Mexican, white people, Americans, Indians—but most of the customers are from different parts of India. The most-ordered dishes are the butter chicken and the chicken biryani. We also open at 8:30 for breakfast, and that's what I wanted. I know when we visit other places, we will be searching for our food—homemade food and tea. The main thing in the morning is Indian tea, masala tea. That's what they want. I cannot move without it.
“We do go to the falls. My son loves it. He loves water and everything about it. As of now, we have a restaurant here, so it feels like we live there next to the falls every day. But sometimes, you want to sit quietly there and get the feeling.”
THE HYDRO GUY
Modern Niagara is an engineering wonder as well as a natural marvel. Louis Paonessa of the New York Power Authority (and a Niagara native) gives some eye-catching insight on dams, flow and juice.
“Back in 1956, a private electric facility called the Schoellkopf Plant collapsed into the river. You can actually see the ruins of it—New York State Parks has a display where it took place, right where the Maid in the Mist has its winter mooring. That created an instant energy crisis, and the New York Power Authority went into problem-solving mode.
“In three years, we built the facility we have today. You had 11,000 people working, round the clock, 365 days a year. They moved homes, moved churches, dug conduits. Today we can generate 2,675 megawatts—we could theoretically serve 2.6 million homes. The Robert Moses Dam is the big dam, the big generator. Our Power Vista is located there as well: you can look at a 350-foot drop into the river. Behind that is the forebay, where the Niagara River is diverted. That can hold 2 billion gallons of water.
“A certain amount of water has to go over the falls for tourism purposes. During tourism season, during the day, it’s 100,000 cubic feet per second. At night, and in the winter, only 50,000. You can think of one cubic feet of water as a basketball. So 100,000 basketballs per second going over the falls.
“We have about 300 people working here. Operators, engineers, welders, electricians, pipe fitters—all the skilled trades that you would expect, as well as human resources, accounting, staff to run a visitor center. There are tens of thousands of jobs in Western New York and hundreds of thousands throughout the state that are tied to what we do here.”
