Niagara Falls — America's First State Park

The starting line of America's oldest state park — and one of the great untold stories in the country. Long before this was a place anyone could simply walk into, Niagara was fenced off, mill-choked, and notorious as…

The American Falls pours over the brink just feet from the railing here — the closest, loudest, most head-on look at a waterfall anywhere in the park, with the Observation Tower cantilevered over the gorge beside it a…

America's oldest boat ride and the cheapest ticket at the falls share one window at the base of the Observation Tower. The Maid of the Mist has run since eighteen forty-six — a decade and a half before the Civil War —…

A slender splinter of rock perched right on the edge, where two waterfalls thunder at once — the broad American Falls off one flank and the lacy ribbon of Bridal Veil off the other, mist drifting up through the trees…

The third and slenderest of Niagara's falls, and its most graceful. Where the American Falls is a broad wall of water, Bridal Veil comes down as a single fine, lacy ribbon, slipping over the edge beside little Luna Is…

A quieter corner of Goat Island, and the spot where the modern electrical age was born. Nikola Tesla sits here in bronze — not gazing at the falls like everyone else, but reading his own plans — alongside a salvaged s…

The legendary descent into the Niagara Gorge — an elevator sinks 175 feet through Goat Island's rock to wooden walkways that climb the boulders to the Hurricane Deck, a platform roughly 20 feet from the base of Bridal…

The finest seat on the American side for the great Horseshoe Falls — the largest waterfall in North America by sheer volume, where roughly nine-tenths of the entire river bends into a vast green-blue wall and curls ov…

A chain of little islands stepping out one after another into the upper rapids, until visitors stand surrounded — out in the middle of the wild, shallow, racing river just before it goes over the edge. The water runs…

The walk ends here, and the road trip begins. From Lot One the tour turns north into the Niagara Gorge corridor — fourteen miles of river that most falls visitors never see, where the real second half of the story wai…

The walk back from Goat Island: over two footbridges, island to island, to the mainland, then along the rim past Prospect Point and the Welcome Center to Lot One. Stay on the paths and behind the railings.

Coming up, turn left onto 1st Street, then turn right onto Main Street, then bear left onto 3rd Street.

The opening miles of the gorge drive, rolling up and out of the park along Whirlpool Street and threading the city blocks before rejoining the river road. There's a Free Niagara footnote built right into the route: a…

Some of the most violent whitewater on the continent, churning in the gorge below. Just upstream the canyon pinches down by more than half, forcing the entire Niagara River through a single narrow slot — and when it d…

Coming up, stay straight onto the Niagara Scenic Parkway, and let Findlay Drive go off to the right.

The Niagara River does something here it does nowhere else: it stops charging forward and spins in place. Whirlpool State Park's level, railed rim path overlooks the famous basin where the gorge bends 90 degrees and t…

The wildest scenery on the gorge drive hides the heaviest history. At Devil's Hole, a shadowed notch in the cliff wall overlooks the river's most violent rapids — and marks the ground where, on September fourteenth, s…

The drive down from the gorge rim to the village of Lewiston covers more history per mile than almost any road in New York. As the canyon walls lower and the Niagara settles into calm, navigable water, the route passe…

In about a quarter mile, take the exit ramp on the right, for Route 104 and Lewiston.

Up ahead, keep right at the fork, then right again at the next fork, then bear right onto Ridge Road.

At the corner of Center Street and Portage Road, two Tuscarora men in bronze shield a settler mother and her baby — sculptor Susan Geissler's tribute to the morning of December nineteenth, eighteen thirteen, when Lewi…

Get ready: in about a quarter mile, turn right onto North Water Street.

Five larger-than-life bronze figures stand at the river railing, frozen in the last moments before freedom: a family hurried toward a rowboat while Josiah Tryon — Lewiston's real-life tailor and secret Underground Rai…

A genuine small-town main street with serious history under its sidewalks, Center Street climbs from the riverfront through the heart of Lewiston village. This was once the Niagara portage road — the great carry aroun…

No hotel finer stood west of Albany — that was the boast when this massive four-story stone landmark opened on Center Street in 1825, its walls thirty inches thick. The Frontier House hosted the stagecoach traffic of…

In about a quarter mile, turn left onto North 2nd Street.

Seven unhurried miles separate Lewiston from Lake Ontario, and Lower River Road shadows the water for nearly all of them — the closest public road to the lower Niagara River anywhere on its length. The drive itself is…

One of the prettiest river villages on the Niagara doubles as an unfenced battlefield. Youngstown's Main Street rolls past porches and sailboat masts with Niagara-on-the-Lake in plain view across the water — and benea…

Coming up, bear right onto Porter Avenue.

In about a quarter mile, bear right, toward the fort's parking lot.

The tour's finale is a full state park wrapped around the river's last point of land. One vehicle fee at the entrance booth — $8 — covers it all: parking in the shadow of the old fort's walls, the visitor center, the…

In plain sight inside these walls stands the Great Lakes' oldest building: the French Castle of 1726, a stone fortress the French presented to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a peaceful trading house — complete with…

A 50-foot octagonal tower of gray limestone stands free to visit outside Old Fort Niagara's admission gate — no ticket required. Lit in 1872, the Fort Niagara Lighthouse descends from a light the British mounted on th…

Lake Ontario fills the horizon from this easy shoreline viewpoint northeast of the fort — the exact place the Niagara River's 300-year-contested, falls-carved journey finally ends. On clear days Toronto's skyline, CN…

Coming up on your right, turn into the Artpark parking lot.

Niagara Falls began here. Twelve thousand years ago the cataract poured over the escarpment at this very rim, and it has been carving its way upstream ever since — the entire seven-mile gorge is the trail it left behi…