Niagara Falls has fallen on lean times. Even the traditional honeymooners seem to be going elsewhere. My first view of the famous falls was in the film Niagara, where a pouting, wiggling Marilyn Monroe, is murdered there on her honeymoon by her bridegroom, Joseph Cotten.
Maybe this was what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he said that "every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life." He is also reputed to have said that the falls "must be a bride's second greatest disappointment".
Wilde also made the cheap gibe that he would have been more impressed with the falls if the water had flowed upwards. It would be interesting to know what Oscar had against the falls.
The falls never fail to impress this correspondent, who has seen them from the Canadian side and last week from the US side. The problem is with the shabby city of Niagara Falls in the US, which has fallen on hard times. Most of the industries attracted to Niagara by the cheap electricity the falls generated have closed down while the forest of pylons still disfigures the approaches. Whole shopping malls are boarded up.
Across the gorge on the Canadian side there is an air of prosperity in the luxury hotels, and the new casino is said to be one of the most profitable in the world.
There were traffic jams on the bridge last Saturday night as Americans queued to get to the casino. Casinos are illegal in New York state unless run by an Indian tribe, so the Canadians provide the biggest tourist draw after the falls themselves. It is estimated that the millions of tourists who come to see them on the US side every year stay an average of only four hours because there is nothing else for them to do.
As a honeymoon mecca, its glory days are long gone. Maybe we have lost the feeling of romance which inspired a historian of the falls, Pierre Berton, to write that "honeymooners went to the falls to lose themselves in a crowd too busy contemplating the cataract to notice the billing and cooing at their elbows; that the sound of the falling water acted as an aphrodisiac; that the negative ions produced by the cascade served as a stimulant for the marriage bed; that moonlight dappling the water," etc. You get the picture.
In the 1920s, Niagara Falls was called the "Baby City" since it was believed that more babies were conceived there than anywhere else in the world. The British royal family seems to have liked the falls as you keep coming across photographs of various members going back to King George VI admiring the spectacle - but from the Canadian side, of course.
The first person to go over the Horseshoe Falls in a barrel was a brave schoolteacher called Annie Taylor from Michigan in 1901. It has been speculated that Annie, who said she was 43 but was actually 20 years older, hoped by this crazy act to "capture the man of her dreams". But she died destitute in Niagara Falls.
In spite of the scenes of industrial desolation in and around the city, there seems to be a revival in the fascination of the falls. Two full-length documentary films on their history have been shown this year on US TV. One of them featured the only person to go over the Horseshoe Falls without some protective container and survive. This was a seven-year-old boy called Roger Woodward, who was swept over the falls wearing a life-jacket on July 9th, 1960, after a small boat owned by his uncle capsized.
He was picked up by one of the Maid of the Mist launches, which bring tourists close in to the falls. His sister Deanne was rescued from the rapids above the falls just in time but the uncle who had allowed his boat to go into the danger zone was drowned.
The Woodward family was driven away from Niagara to escape constant media attention and Roger was told by his father never to mention the accident. But now Roger finds that being open about what happened that day has been "one of the greatest therapies".
He does not remember falling 160 feet, nor hitting the water. But he recalls his anger as people rushed to rescue his sister and left him. "I was seven years old, no one was coming to rescue me, and I knew I was going to die.
"Your life really does pass before your eyes. I thought about my family, how they were going to miss me. I thought about my dog. I thought about my friends." As he went over the falls, "it was like I was in a cloud . . . all I remember was that everything went dark . . . I came out of it and there was this 60-foot ship."
He attributes his escape to God. "On that day God was merciful. I really feel that God's hands were in this." Now he brings his own sons to the falls when they reach a certain age so that he can show them what happened to him and how he survived.