Distant View Of Niagara Falls by Thomas Cole, 1830 Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Softly the light in these umbrageous realms
Falls on the path, and plays upon the leaf —
Softly the breeze now whispering steals between
The thousand pillars of the quiet wood —
And we with gentle musings, and fond thoughts
Untroubled, free, pursue our pleasant way —
What sound is that careering on the wings
Of stormy blasts, so mightily and fills
The lofty arches of the forest wide ?
Is it the clamor of impetuous winds
That strive for egress from some rock-bound cave ?
Or is an earthquake waking from its wrath
And from the high unstable mountain tops
Hurling the ponderous and rebounding rocks ?
No! tis Niagara shouts from the abyss
Where headlong he has cast him in his might !
And rocks, and woods, and the astounded air,
And earth’s deep center tremble as with fear —
Approach and view the wonder of a world
See ! when the waters of a hundred lakes
An unheaped multitude tumultuous leap
O’er the projecting crags, into the gulf —
Thence the thick mist perpetual ascends,
In cloudy piles into the sky and hides,
The quivering torment of the floods below —
Like steam emitted from some cauldron vast
Vexed by furious and unquenching fires —
Thou consummation of the earth’s sublime !
Thy course nor time, nor tide, nor change hath stemmed !
Thy voice hath risen above the tempest’s roar
Year after year till countless they are grown —
Seasons have looked upon thee and have died —
Ages have vanish’d and the earth grown old —
Man who hath moved mountains, bound the sea,
Awe-struck recoils and works on thee no change
The earth hath much of beauty but the choice
Is garlanded around thine august brows —
Yon, flaky foam is white as alpine snow —
Yon gushing emerald clear as ocean’s depths —
The bow of promise sits on sable clouds ;
But lo ! a far excelling iris girds
The dazzling splendour of thy snowy breast—
Ages untold thy voice broke forth unheard ;
But by the shrinking wolf, or the tim’rous deer
Or wandering savage of the echoing wild —
Until an enterprise sublime unbarred
The mighty portals of the golden west
And midst its teeming fulness thou wast found
Majestic in the wilderness enthroned —
Written at the Falls May, 1829
Thomas Cole visited Niagara for the first time just before his departure to England in June 1829.
Source: Thomas Cole. Thomas Cole’s Poetry. comp. & ed. by Marshall B. Tymn. York, PA : Liberty Cap Books, 1972.
Source: Chester E. Pond. The Falls of Niagara Our School of Sublimity. Topeka, Kansas, 1888. Cover title: The Sublime Niagara of Our World.
N.B. This poem comes after a series of lessons by Pond about Niagara Falls, as “Thoughtful persons visit the Falls not so much for temporary pleasure as for permanent soul culture. Not simply to be able to say, “I have seen the great Niagara,” but to become better acquainted with Niagara’s great Creator.
The small railway hotel and tavern near the Rainbow Bridge of Niagara Falls, Ontario at Bridge St. and Erie St. was named seven times during its 125-year history.
For decades, the hotel was known for basic rooms, meals, stabling horses, and postal delivery.
Since its inception, the building had been called the Suspension Bridge (1853), the Waverly (1880s-90s), the Arlington (mid-1890s), the New Arlington (mid-1930s) the Erie Hotel and the Avon House (1950s), and, finally, the hotel was named the Klondike Hotel in 1960.
On the rough side of town, it became well known that, for regular, law-abiding folk, just going there was risky.
Over the years, there were constant law enforcement interventions about alcohol, drug, health, solicitation, strip club, and vice regulations.
There were continuous police citations for a myriad of recidivist by-law and civil infractions and criminal code violations.
Lawlessness prevailed, and the characters around the scene acted with impunity;
The Klondike had become a well-known bane to the civilized community.
One day, while I was researching the interesting landowner lineage of the plot at Sam’s Montrose Hotel/Motel at Montrose and Lyons Creek roads in Niagara Falls (my research paper found at Niagara Falls Museum in the Thompson/Thomson files collection),
I was in a public telephone booth calling the hotel for deed information, and I became a part of a peculiar telephone call misconnection.
I was confusedly speaking with a confused woman who was also telephoning Sam’s Montrose. I asked her name. She said her name was Cinnamon. Dare I say that I don’t know how she spelled her name.
Curious, I asked her where she was calling from. She replied, “the Klondike.” She added that she was working there. Intrigued, I felt a song coming on. I asked if I could meet her at the Klondike to talk person-to-person for ten to fifteen minutes, so I could take some notes. Honestly, that was my aim.
I went down to the Klondike to chat with this muse. As I walked through the door, facing me — three feet in front of me, on a raised runway stage — there was a full-frontal nude exotic dancer called Bambi. She was gyrating to Stevie Wonder’s major hit “Sir Duke.” As I stood before her, she opened her arms wide and shimmied. I heard the blasting lyrics, “You can feel it all over, you can feel it all over, you can feel it all over.” Believe me, I could feel it all over. The small lobby’s barroom was overcrowded, and marijuana and drunkenness were apparent. Bedlam reigned everywhere.
I briefly spoke with Cinnamon; she was so completely unimpressive that I took no notes. There was no song arising from this occasion. I quickly left, sensing the high tension in the thick, smoky air.
Everything about the Klondike festered until the hotel met its final fate.
Thank goodness no one was injured, but the building sustained a dynamite explosion in 1978.
One wonders why, over time, the police investigator
Never caught the perpetrator.
Rumors were that police facilitated the deed. The person(s) involved — never found.
Finally, in 1980, the officially condemned, unsafe building was demolished to the ground.
The land where The Klondike once stood is presently part of the Niagara Falls Ontario Bus Terminal site.
Today, word on the street is that, in the shadow of the Klondike area’s history, it’s not a neighborhood to walk through in the dim light of night.
Source: The author, 2026
Author’s note:
The poem “Klondike Hotel,” a Niagara Falls atypical rhyming piece is one of five ̶ what I call ‘rambling poems’ ̶ comprising the unpublished work Rambling Reminiscences.
Glenn Bridenbaker:
Happily married to beautiful and wise muse wife Cheryl since 1967. Two brilliant sons, a gorgeous daughter. Two glorious granddaughters, an excellent grandson. Ontario residences: Toronto, Manitoulin Island, Wikwemikong Unceded Indigenous Reserve, Niagara Falls, and Ridgeway. Bibliophile. Musician. Nonprofessional writer. Amateur oil and watercolor painting. Novice Oriental Brush Painting. Art collector. Musical instruments and recorded music collector. Numismatist and philatelist. Dog and cat owner. Home vegetable, flower, and landscape gardener. Birdwatcher. Astronomy and space aficionado. Meaningful values include: know thyself, family, health, common sense, truth, logic, integrity, sharing, creativity, curiosity, quality, arts appreciation, and humor. Two years graduate student of Marshall McLuhan at the Centre for Culture and Technology.
The attached photo shows three generations (my grandfather, my father, and me), taken on Luna Island at Niagara Falls, in 1953. I made countless visits to the falls as a child and continued to do so as an adult. Now living in Missouri, a visit to see the falls (both sides) is a part of every trip back to New York.
Understanding of both
Power and majesty
Seeds planted early
In the arms of grandparents
Held close by parents
Three generations
Photos as testament
In black and white
Niagara’s precipice, water churning
Roiling, yet beautiful
Mere feet from such splendor
This infant’s first opportunity
Witness to the glory of these falls
Repeated again and again
Through childhood and beyond
Hundreds of times, never once
Disappointed, always in awe
Even over seven decades
Often, camera in hand
Endeavoring to capture
Beauty first encountered
As an infant
This is my response to Day Two (of National / Global Poetry Writing Month 2026), the prompt at NaPoWriMo.net in which we’re asked to write “your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.”
Ken Gierke was born and raised in Western New York and, since moving to Missouri in 2012, has
missed Niagara Falls the most. He was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been featured
online and in numerous print anthologies. His four poetry collections from Spartan Press, Glass Awash
(1922), Heron Spirit (2024), Random Riffs (2025), and The Long Haul (2026), are available on
Amazon. More of his poetry can be found at https://rivrvlogr.com/.
Great Blue Heron in the Niagara Glen Photo by Ken Gierke
Consider the river that cares not
what man thinks of it, churning
over obstacles that will not impede it
in a gorgeous canyon, miles from
a roaring cataract yet filled with the sound
of a rapid staccato best heard at the water’s edge,
that edge approached with peril for it cares not
what safety one desires when near, its own safety
never at stake, raging as it does at the disservice
served upon it, the waters it carries never truly clean,
yet powerless, despite its power, to change that course.
Now walk the trails that lie beside it, trails
that care not whether they are trod by soled feet
or the pads of wildlife content to share
with those who understand the fragile nature
of their home, this pocket of green. Marvel
at the escarpment that once was the falls
as the river wore at its limestone foundation
in its inexorable march to the current home
of those falls. Move briefly through shadow
between boulders larger than a house,
cleaved from the side of the wall towering
above you, as you wind your way to the river.
Watch a heron pull a fish from the water as you sit
on the rocks at the river’s edge, then gaze
at the roiling water beside you, sun glinting
from the foam of the rapids. Follow that light
to see the sun approach the crest of the gorge,
all the while taking in the green that surrounds you,
green that would not be had it not been preserved
by those who understand its fragile nature.
Source: The author, 2026. First published 2021 at Earthweal
This poem was inspired by walks in the gorge at Niagara Glen. The attached photo of a great blue
heron was taken there.
Watch Ken Gierke perform Gorgeous
Ken Gierke was born and raised in Western New York and, since moving to Missouri in 2012, has
missed Niagara Falls the most. He was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been featured
online and in numerous print anthologies. His four poetry collections from Spartan Press, Glass Awash
(1922), Heron Spirit (2024), Random Riffs (2025), and The Long Haul (2026), are available on
Amazon. More of his poetry can be found at https://rivrvlogr.com/.
The Niagara River, the strait of water between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, carries all of the water of the upper Great Lakes. Much of the thirty-six mile length of the river was lined with industry, including within the gorge below Niagara Falls. The majority of that industry is gone, with the few remaining on the US side in the stretch north of Buffalo. While stricter regulations and ambitious cleanup campaigns, from the late twentieth century onward, reversed much of the degradation of the lakes during the industrial era, toxic sediments still exist and agricultural runoff remains a serious problem. The Canadian side of the Niagara River is a true parkway, maintained by Niagara Parks of Ontario. Beyond the falls, from the whirlpool to the end of the gorge is Niagara Glen, where a stairway descends the gorge wall to join four miles of trails that lead to the river’s edge as they wind through a Carolinian forest. When I lived in New York, I often crossed into Canada at Niagara Falls, just to walk those trails. The rapids within the gorge range from Class III to Class V.
