Niagara Falls International

167,000 cubic meters of water per minute plunge over the brink — the mist plume is visible from 30+ miles away. The horseshoe shape of the Canadian falls is best appreciated from directly above. The Niagara River gorge downstream shows the incredible erosion power. The international border runs down the river's center.

Darwin D. Martin was a self-made man — orphaned at six, working as a soap salesman by twelve, employee of the Larkin Soap Company by his late teens, then Larkin's secretary and one of its top executives. By 1903 he was rich and looking to build a house in the Parkside neighborhood of Buffalo. His brother William Martin had recently commissioned a young Chicago architect named Frank Lloyd Wright for a house in Oak Park. Darwin asked his brother to introduce him. Wright was 36 years old, several years into the Prairie Style work that would define the rest of his life. The commission Darwin Martin gave him was extraordinary — a 15,000-square-foot main house, a conservatory, a carriage house, a pergola connecting the buildings, a separate gardener's cottage, and a smaller Barton House for Darwin's sister Delta and her husband. Wright designed the complex 1903-1905. He considered it (along with the Robie House in Chicago and the Susan Lawrence Dana House in Springfield) one of the three masterpieces of his Prairie period. He also designed the Larkin Administration Building downtown in 1904 — the office building considered Wright's first masterpiece in any genre — which the company demolished in 1950. After the 1929 crash, Darwin Martin lost his Larkin fortune. He couldn't pay the taxes on the complex. After his death in 1935 the property fell into receivership, the Martin family lost it, and by 1937 the City of Buffalo took it for back taxes. The conservatory, pergola, and carriage house were demolished in 1962. The main house sat empty for years; squatters lived in it. It was used as briefly as architecture offices for the University of Buffalo. By the 1990s it was a wreck. In 1992 the Darwin Martin House Restoration Corporation began a 30-year, $50 million reconstruction. They rebuilt the demolished conservatory, pergola, and carriage house exactly to Wright's original drawings (his drawings still existed). They restored 394 art glass windows. They rebuilt the demolished gardens. The work was substantially complete by 2017. Today the complex is open Wed-Sun for tours and is widely considered the most thoroughly restored Wright Prairie-period complex anywhere. Buffalo also holds Wright's Blue Sky Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery, the Graycliff Estate on Lake Erie (Isabelle Martin's summer home, also Wright), and the recently completed Filling Station — Wright's only built gas-station design, executed posthumously at the Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum.

George Eastman invented roll film. In 1888 he founded the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester to manufacture it. By 1900 Kodak was the dominant photographic company in the world. Eastman built a 50-room Colonial Revival mansion on East Avenue in Rochester in 1905 — a 35,000-square-foot personal palace with a conservatory, library, terrace gardens, a working pipe organ, and a billiard room. He had a chauffeur named Solomon, a butler, and a private string quartet that played at dinner. He never married. On March 14, 1932, at age 77, Eastman shot himself through the heart at his home. A note on his nightstand read "To my friends: my work is done. Why wait? G.E." He had been suffering from a degenerative spinal condition that was making his life progressively more painful. He had given away the bulk of his fortune — by his death he had distributed roughly $100 million (in pre-1932 dollars) to MIT, the University of Rochester, Tuskegee Institute, the Hampton Institute, and the Eastman School of Music. He outlived his usefulness on his own terms. The mansion, his fortune's last bequest, became the George Eastman Museum in 1949. It is the oldest photography museum in the world and one of the world's largest. The collection holds over 400,000 photographs (including 12 of Daguerre's original 1839 plates, and a deep run of Civil War, Western expansion, FSA, and 20th-century holdings), 30,000 motion pictures, over a million film stills, and a deep technology archive — every Kodak product back to 1885 plus a working chemistry lab where film preservationists still develop early stocks. Two miles W of the museum, the Genesee River drops 96 feet over High Falls of the Genesee — one of three significant waterfalls within the Rochester city limits. The High Falls Heritage District around the falls is the historic Rochester millworking district; in the 19th century Rochester was the "Flour City" of America (then "Flower City" after the milling industry declined and seed catalog companies took over). The Pont de Rennes pedestrian bridge crosses the gorge directly over the falls.

When built in 1882 the Kinzua Viaduct was the tallest railroad bridge in the world — 301 feet high, 2,053 feet long, carrying coal trains across the Kinzua Gorge in north-central PA. Rebuilt in steel in 1900. In 2003 an F1 tornado ripped through the gorge and tore out 11 of the 20 towers, twisting them into the trees below. Rather than rebuild, Pennsylvania turned the surviving towers into a skywalk — an open-grate observation deck cantilevered 600 feet out into the gorge, ending at the point where the tornado snapped the bridge. The downed towers still lie scattered in the forest below.