The Master of the Chemical Machine

Model’s City’s demise did little to slow industrial growth in Niagara Falls. During the early 1900s, the region’s economy expanded at a tremendous rate. Niagara’s next big thing came in the form of chemicals. When William Love departed the area, the Falls claimed no major chemical maker. By the 1920s, Niagara Falls was home to a dynamic and thriving chemical sector that produced huge amounts of industrial-grade chemicals via hydroelectric power. By World War II, dozens of companies called Niagara Falls home, making it a global leader in the production of chlorines, degreasers, explosives, pesticides, plastics, and myriad other chemical agents. The chief architect of Niagara’s chemical expansion was Elon Huntington Hooker, an engineer turned industrial titan who settled in the Falls soon after William Love left. [ Fig. 6 ] Hailing from famous families, Hooker was destined for great things. On one side, Hooker could trace a lineage back to Puritan divines who had literally built cities on a hill; on the other, there were railroad titans who had traversed the American West. In both cases, Elon Hooker’s family background inspired him to think big. The guiding spirit of a brash new chemical company that bore his surname, Hooker harnessed Niagara’s power to become the nation’s leading producer of two key chemicals: chloride of lime (bleaching powder) and sodium hydroxide (caustic soda). Over the next fifty years, Hooker Chemical became a mainstay of American industry. Its products helped win wars, explore space, and fuel American consumerism. These developments would not surprise Elon Huntington Hooker. Indeed, he thought of himself as an American Adam: a technological originator who reshaped nature and society in equal measure. His vision of chemical superiority would come to fruition a few miles from Love’s abandoned canal—at first glance, perhaps nothing more than a coincidence of history. But Hooker’s success would soon collide with Love’s failure at the big ditch in Lasalle, once again illuminating the Love Canal landscape’s importance to the American environmental past—and future.

Creative Destruction

Although the tenth anniversary of the crisis pictured Love Canal as a thing of the past, the area still inspired dreams of development in the future. That became clear in September 1988, when Health Commissioner David Axelrod returned to Niagara Falls to announce that the state would back Love Canal resettlement. The longtime mayor of Niagara Falls, Michael O’Loughlin, beamed at the news. This was the first “positive statement about Love Canal” in years, he said. Axelrod’s resettlement recommendation was the result of a five-year, $14 million study. Using massive amounts of test data, the study drilled down into Love Canal’s new nature to see if the monumental remediation plan had worked. The study determined that parts of the ten-block Emergency Declaration Area (EDA) had acceptable chemical levels and only slightly higher contamination risks than comparison areas hard by landfills, steel plants, and old manufacturing facilities in the American Rust Belt. While no one could certify the neighborhood’s absolute safety, Axelrod proposed that people might soon move into sections of the nearly empty subdivision. Former residents again fumed at Axelrod. Joann Hale called Axelrod’s decision “piece meal,” at best, and dangerous at worst. Anything but a “black and white” answer about the safety of resettlement was wrong. The ETF’s Roger Cook said that resettlement posed “unacceptable risks” to future residents. Janet Ecker, a former resident not known for screaming and shouting, told a reporter that Axelrod’s announcement was “very sad.” “I don’t agree it is a safe place. The chemicals don’t know that they’re supposed to stop” at certain places. The mere mention of Love Canal brought back unhappy memories to Ecker, who left in 1980 for Florida and was still “glad to be as far away as I can get from that place.” Lois Gibbs went even further: it was morally wrong for the state to resettle the area. As these divergent perspectives on Axelrod’s announcement indicated, Love Canal remained a hotly contested environment well after final evacuation had occurred.

Widening the Circle of Influence

Although known as “Mr. Clean” for his longtime environmental advocacy, Edmund Muskie had little knowledge of the American hazardous waste grid until 1978. A congressional sponsor of the landmark Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the senator from Maine epitomized environmental politics. In fact, a few months before the Love Canal crisis unfolded, Muskie proposed yet another federal environmental law: a “comprehensive scheme to assure full protection of our national resources” in the wake of oil drilling disasters, tanker spills and toxic train derailments. Yet Muskie soon realized that his plan omitted something important: hazardous waste dumps. Love Canal had illuminated the toxic perils many Americans faced in their own neighborhoods. With an EPA study showing that tens of thousands of old toxic sites had yet to be contained, it was clear that the everyday landscape of homes, playgrounds, and schools needed environmental protection too. “In our society,” Muskie told an interviewer in the late 1970s, ...we are discovering almost every day, in almost every day’s newspaper, new hazards that have been released into the atmosphere over the period of our industrial revolution. [They] suddenly crop up in Love Canal, up in New York State … to create enormous hazards to public health, property values, to people. So we are constantly dealing with problems that [we] were not anticipating, which suddenly create almost insoluble problems for people and communities … [A]ll of these poisons and toxic materials were buried in landfill sites here, there, and elsewhere and sadly begin leaking in underground water, or into lakes and rivers, streams[,] only to rise up to hit people in the face with disease, with cancer, declining property values so on.... For Muskie, Love Canal was revelatory. It showed that federal law lagged behind the mounting problem of hazardous waste. After hearing Love Canal residents’ testimony, he believed that the time had come for a national statute governing toxic waste remediation—what he would refer to as a “clean land” law.

Past as Prologue

In 1978, Love Canal resident Anne Hillis sarcastically explained the “recipe” for the chemical disaster taking shape in her neighborhood: take “approximately 16 acres” of land, add “22,000 tons of toxic wastes, mix with spring water, snow, etc …” Then, she wrote, add “human beings.” The “yield” would be “miscarriage … birth defects … suicide and death.” For people wondering just how the chemicals ended up in Love Canal in the first place, Hillis wrote that the whole saga began not in the recent past but in “the late 1800s, [when] a canal had been dug” by a starry-eyed industrialist who then abandoned the altered landscape. The groove of earth he left behind was “filled in with chemicals in the … 1940s,” covered over and forgotten. Only later would “these chemicals” migrate from the dump into the local environment. For Hillis, as for other residents, Love Canal’s troubled environmental present was a product of its toxic past. But how far back did that troubled past go? New York State health officials asserted that the “seeds” of Love Canal were sown in Niagara’s “highly industrialized” history, which stretched from the late 19th century onward. Similarly, the Niagara Gazette created a “Love Canal Chronology” that began in 1894, when entrepreneur William Love began excavating a power canal that never materialized but whose remains formed a perfect burial pit later on. An activist group pushed Love Canal’s chronology back further. Although “Love Canal became a household word in 1978,” the group claimed, “the idea for the place that was to carry the name originated in 1836,” when an engineer stamped out the route of an artificial river that would be even grander than the Erie Canal. No matter how far back they went, all of these commentators saw history as a key lens through which to view the modern Love Canal disaster. Yet few traced the area’s toxic history back to colonial times.

Introduction: Of Burial Mounds and Toxic Tombs

Driving north on the 290 Expressway from Buffalo to Niagara Falls each day, thousands of cars race alongside the mighty Niagara River. North America's fastest-flowing body of water, the Niagara seems jet-propelled. If the Mississippi is the Father of Waters for its grand length, then the Niagara is its furious little cousin: a short but manic river that, in a span of roughly 30 miles, sprints from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, with a famous plunge of nearly 200 feet at Niagara Falls. Few visitors ever come away from a tour of Niagara unmoved. "I was in a manner stunned and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene," Charles Dickens said of his first glimpse of the Niagara River Basin and Falls in the 1840s. "Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever." For Dickens, as for countless others, Niagara Falls exemplifies the American natural sublime. The highway chasing the Niagara River illuminates a different force cutting through Western New York: industrialization. For what was once a scenic landscape astride a beautiful waterway has long since become a poster child of mega-industrial growth. In Buffalo, where the "Niagara" section of the thruway begins, mammoth factory buildings, hulking steel mills, and a cityscape of grain elevators testify to the industrial pathway that made the region a production powerhouse. At Niagara Falls, the road rolls past majestic power canals and generating stations, illuminating the region's (and the nation's) path to hydroelectric energy. The advent of hydroelectric power, as the saying goes, turned night into day and helped fuel the American industrial dream. No wonder area nuns used to tell troublesome teens that they should pray for their souls. If the Soviet Union wanted to take out American industrial power in Cold War times, Buffalo-Niagara was a main target.

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.

A Toxic Subdivision

For most Love Canal residents in the mid-1970s, owning a house in a relatively new subdivision offered tangible proof that they had achieved the American Dream. The pretty tree-lined streets bisecting the ten-block neighborhood colloquially known for the old canal that once ran through the area contained rows of attractive and affordable housing stock. Kids walked to schools located only blocks away while their parents talked to one another like longtime friends. Many area fathers had secure, well-paying jobs in Niagara Falls’ thriving industrial and chemical sectors, lending an aura of confidence to Love Canal life. While many American communities were still reeling from the tumultuous politics of the Vietnam War, the Love Canal neighborhood appeared to be a quiet, family-friendly oasis. Who wouldn’t want to live there? Lois Gibbs, a young housewife and mother of two who moved into the area in 1974, certainly felt blessed. “If you drove down my street before Love Canal,” she would later write (referring to the crisis that redefined the place), “you might have thought it looked like a typical American small town that you would see in a movie—neat bungalows, many painted white, with neatly clipped hedges or freshly painted fences.” It was, she continued, a “lovely neighborhood in a quiet residential area, with lots of trees and lots of children playing outside.” So powerful was the sense of paradise that Gibbs did not pay much attention to early news reports about a leaking toxic dump somewhere in Niagara Falls. Those poor people, she thought. Wherever they are, I hope they will get the help they need. Thankfully, it was not her neighborhood. Like many of her friends, Gibbs focused on family and home, not the looming tragedy of hazardous waste—and certainly not the global cause of environmental justice. A snapshot of the Love Canal area during the tumultuous summer of 1978 offered a completely different picture. Gone were the peaceful images of home life; in their place, illness, uncertainty, and rage reigned supreme.

Worlds Collide at Love’s Canal

In 1938, Hooker Electrochemical confronted a future without its founder when Elon died in a tragic automobile accident. The longtime patriarch was just 68 years old. Hosannas to his leadership piled up in a moving tribute album, which was quickly published as a special edition of the company newsletter, “Hooker Gas.” “Engineer, Industrialist, Patriot, Public Servant, Author, Humanitarian”: Elon Huntington Hooker was all of these things, the tribute declared, and would be sorely missed. Yet while Elon’s passing hit family and friends hard, it did not slow the firm’s extraordinary growth. Indeed, over the next thirty years, Hooker Chemical (as it soon became known) grew at an even more impressive rate than during Elon’s time. By midcentury, the company was a global leader in the production of an astonishing array of chemicals beyond bleaching powder and caustic soda—degreasers, rubbers, explosives, defoliants, plastics, and much more. One measure of its far-reaching reputation came in the late 1940s, when Hooker executive Bjarne Klaussen traveled from Niagara Falls to the South Pacific to watch a new round of atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. Cleared of its native inhabitants, the tiny island served as Ground Zero for a weapon far more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II. Klaussen was part of a small delegation from American corporations and universities that had made “special contributions” to the nation’s atomic development. “Hooker played an important role in the Manhattan Project,” the company historian bragged just a few years later (without providing further details, though they probably revolved around chemical igniters and explosives). The company would remain a key player on the Cold War chemical front for years to come. Hooker’s explosive growth during the 1940s and 1950s had a palpable impact on the Love Canal landscape too. For booming production overwhelmed the firm’s on-site disposal capacity. Searching for new ways to deal with this growing problem, Hooker resorted to “inground disposal” at sites beyond the Niagara plant.

In the end Is the Beginning

As yet another summer approached with little prospect of change, Love Canal residents took more risks to get out of their toxic environment. On May 19, 1980, the LCHA detained two EPA representatives visiting the group’s headquarters. Residents were angered by the results of a much debated genetic test showing that roughly one-third of the thirty-six people sampled may have suffered chromosome damage (a possible indicator of future illness). Angry and confused, residents gathered en masse at the group’s headquarters. Spilling fuel on the lawn, they lit a fire that read “EPA.” Hoping to quell rising discontent, the EPA officials drove over to meet with Love Canal families. When they arrived, however, the two men were told “they couldn’t leave.” While Gibbs explained that she was protecting the men from the chaos outside, others proclaimed that they would be held until the federal government vowed to evacuate all area residents. “If we won’t be relocated, keep them here,” one activist remembered someone shouting. The scene grew increasingly tense. A crowd of residents, some holding two-by-fours, stood guard as police officers arrived. On the phone, Gibbs explained residents’ demands to politicians in Washington. “We’ll keep them fed, we’ll keep them happy,” she also told reporters. But the LCHA would not release the men. The drama ended a few hours later when the FBI phoned LCHA headquarters, darkly warning that agents would storm the home if the hostages were not freed in “six minutes.” The EPA representatives were let go—one thanked residents for serving delicious oatmeal cookies—while LCHA activists were put inside a police car, driven around the corner, and then released. That same month, LCHA figures engaged in a sit-in at the county legislature. The demonstration came after county politicians vetoed a novel plan to “revitalize” parts of Love Canal, including the possible purchase of outer-ring homes.

Growing Protest at Love Canal

As the seasons turned and a new year passed, Love Canal remained a whirlwind of remediation activity. “A plan is being set in motion now to implement technical procedures designed to meet the seemingly impossible job of detoxifying the Canal area,” EPA administrator Eckardt C. Beck declared in January 1979. Though a cold Western New York winter had set in, Beck explained that everything remained on track. “The plan calls for a trench system to drain chemicals from the Canal. It is a difficult procedure, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that it will yield some degree of success.” Beck reiterated that securing Love Canal’s poisons, rather than evacuating all area residents, remained the key to the neighborhood’s future. While conceding that no “one has paid more dearly already than the residents,” Beck commented that the Love Canal “tragedy” was well on its way to a successful resolution. Beck was wrong. In February, New York declared homes beyond the inner ring potential health hazards to pregnant women and children under age 2. Health officials recommended temporary evacuation but no more home buyouts. While roughly two dozen families exited, remaining residents exploded. If the broader neighborhood was deemed unsafe, they clamored, then everyone should be evacuated. The LCHA, several of whose members had been arrested in December for blocking remediation vehicles, intensified its protests but to no avail. Most Love Canal residents remained in a toxic environment. As one person put it dimly, the neighborhood itself had become a chemical “prison.” A local punk band called the Vores captured the area’s dark mood. “Contaminated. We’re all contaminated. Don’t get near us, or you’ll turn blue,” the band growled in a tune entitled simply “The Love Canal.” “Contaminated. We’re all contaminated. Don’t let us move in or you’ll get it too.” The troubling tenor of the times notwithstanding, Love Canal residents refused to give up.