The Niagara Falls Holiday Market is a phenomenal idea. Take a largely abandoned, gritty street not far from a natural wonder, invite locally-owned businesses and artisans like 464 Gallery, Sarah Walley, Delish, Zillycakes, Tony Walker, and others to set up in little sheds along the street, add a festive atmosphere, some concerts, a skating rink – and voila, a European-style Christkindlmarkt.

It has huge potential to help reinvigorate a dead downtown, to bring people to the New York side of the Falls for something that isn’t casino or waterfall-related, and to start a great tradition. I really wanted our visit to this market to be awesome. It didn’t quite hit that mark, but it was fun enough.

The market was officially opened on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The reviews on its Facebook page were unflattering – people were disappointed. Many vendors hadn’t set up yet. Some were completely absent.

We went on Saturday right at 11am when the market opened for buy local day. I’m hopeful that this event gets its act together sooner rather than later. Tony Walker was nowhere to be found. Arrowhead Winery and other local vendors we were looking forward to checking out were absent or closed. 464 Gallery had a great tent-full of locally-produced arts and crafts, and we were honored to meet Sarah Walley herself, who had a table set up to sell her famous French macarons. But Tony Walker? There was no evidence of it anywhere. Biscoff Gourmet was shuttered. I didn’t see Menne Nursery. andBuffalo was still under construction. I didn’t see the Sabres store, either. I saw no evidence of DiCamillo’s at that hour. At least two cabins were empty and without signs.

It’s always difficult to set up a new event – especially one as ambitious as the Niagara Holiday Market. It’s also seductive to make excuses such as “well, at least someone’s doing something positive in the Falls”.   And it is.

But if I was one of the merchants who was able to get it together to be up and running on November 25th, I’d be a bit disappointed that others (especially some marquee names) weren’t. We traveled out of our way to enjoy a stroll and do some shopping in a place where neither really happens, ordinarily.  It was surprisingly empty and devoid of holiday cheer.  Perhaps it would make more sense to be less ambitious in terms of time, and limit it to the three December weeks leading up to Christmas. Maybe the organizers need to crack down on late and lackadaisical vendors.  When an event has so much promise, do it right.  I want the market to work – to thrive and to become a tradition, so hopefully its organizers will learn from their mistakes.

At least one published report indicates that the market costs $900,000 to put on, and that half of that money comes from city and state government. All the more reason why this should be professionally organized and done well.

On another note, the former Oxy Headquarters building known as the “flashcube” has been “saved” by a local developer but now resembles the food court of a dead mall. One gets the sense that it’s taking up loads of super-valuable parking spots. Neither its exterior nor interior are inviting, and it joins its neighbor the former Rainbow Centre as a past-its-prime eyesore stinking up the border with Canada. It’s ugly for a simple building from 1981, and is in palpable disrepair. It’s the Bronx-on-the-Falls.

UPDATE: Full disclosure, about a month after this post was originally written, one of the market’s vendors has retained my legal services to secure payment of a contractual debt.

In this week’s “7 Days” column, Lou Ricciuti and I poke a little fun at Sam Santarosa and Jerry Williams, two guys whose relationships with hazardous wastes and contaminated industrial sites have made them very rich indeed, but who have made recent appearances in the Niagara Gazette wearing the mantle of environmentalism.

To tie the two men together further, we pointed out that they are neighbors in tony Lewiston Heights, whose streets wind around the Niagara Falls Country Club. As it happens, there’s an environmental history lesson in that neighborhood, too, and we’ve written about it before, in a piece called “The Exclusion Zone.”

By all means, read it if you’d like. The story was inspired by this photograph:

That’s a 1946 reunion of industrialists, military men, and scientists instrumental to the Manhattan Project, held at the Niagara Falls Country Club, located on Lewiston Road, whose environmental problems we began to write about three years ago. The postwar “E” Award series luncheon was attended by Major General Leslie R. Groves (under the mirror), the military director of the Manhattan Engineer District of the US Army Corps of Engineers (the name Groves gave to the project), and Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, Groves’s right-hand man.

Thirty years after this picture was taken, an aerial survey commissioned by the Department of Energy suggested that the streets of Lewiston Heights were contaminated with radioactive material. At the time, we wrote:

The Niagara River Greenway Commission announced today that the public comment period has opened for the seventeenth round of projects. In addition, the Commission also announced that the public comment time will close end of the day on August 31, 2010. Projects will be posted on their website at www.niagaragreenway.org beginning Tuesday, July 27, 2010 and public comment will be accepted until August 31, 2010. Comments may be submitted either at the website or by hard copy to the Commission at 2136 West Oakfield Road, Grand Island, New York 14072. Projects in for consistency review are;

• City of North Tonawanda-Gratwick Riverside Park Marina Redevelopment
• Erie County-Black Rock Canal Park aka Ontario St Boat Launch& Cornelius Creek Park
• Forest Lawn Cemetery-Scajaquada Creek Water Quality & Habitat Restoration
• Town of Wheatfield-Wheatfield River Road Park Improvement Phase 1
• Town of Lewiston-Lower Niagara River Road Comfort Station
• Fenian Marker Committee-Fenian Invasion of 1866 Marker

Once the public comment period has ended, the Niagara River Greenway Commission will review projects and on September 21, 2010 vote on the consistency of the projects in relation to the award winning Niagara River Greenway Plan. Project Sponsors will then be notified in writing of the Commissions findings along with copies of the public’s comments. It is then the responsibility of the Project Sponsor to pursue funding with entities that award support. Funding requests can be made through local, state and federal agencies, foundations and various greenway standing committees. To review the Final Niagara River Greenway Plan and GEIS or to learn more information about the Commission log onto www.niagaragreenway.org. The Niagara River Greenway Commission is a public benefit corporation established by Chapter 460 of the laws of 2004, and charged with the planning and development of a greenway of interconnected parks, river access points and waterfront trails along the Niagara River from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario at the site of the historic Fort Niagara.

On Wednesday, March 4, Governor David Paterson visited Niagara Falls for a “town hall meeting” at the Doris Jones Family Resource Center on Ninth Street, just around the corner from the Highland Avenue industrial corridor and down Hyde Park Boulevard from the federally designated atomic weapons employer  Titanium Alloys Manufacturing.

As a gift, Mayor Paul Dyster gave Governor Paterson a bag of tomatoes from the H2 Grow hydroponic tomato facility on Pletcher Road in Lewiston Porter, operated by Modern Disposal, Inc., whose waste stream generates a portion of the hot-house heat through the recycling of gasses generated at their adjacent landfill.

The seven-acre, glass-enclosed complex is located directly across the road (100 yards or so—see images below) from the US Department of Energy’s “temporarily-permanent, good-enough-for-now and for 200+ years with plumes” radioactive waste storage facility, called the Niagara Falls Storage Site. The NFSS is located within a 12-square-mile piece of land once secretly known as the LOOW—the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a location with an eerie and checkered past of military-industrial projects that fill filing cabinets and boxes at the US Army Corps of Engineers offices in Buffalo and whose nasty byproducts fill holes on the Lewiston lake plain.

Discoveries of past “black” or not fully documented projects, activities and wastes at the site seem to happen with some regularity in what are known as “data gaps.”

H2 Grow in foreground.

*Note: Original Manhattan Project era split roadways designed to keep trucks carrying explosives and or radioactive substances separated by one-way lanes to lessen the chance of an accident, critical or otherwise. The underground utility and supply lines for this hydroponics facility were dug across legacy Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission lands (among other historic past .mil users).

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The NFSS (shown on the map above and below) is one of the world’s largest single-source repositories containing the cancer-causing radioactive isotope radium-226—a prodigious generator of other radioactive substances along its decay chain half-life of 1,600 years, including the Nobel gas radon-222, a strong alpha-particle emitter and known cause of lung cancer. In just a few short days, radon-222 changes back to a solid substance and falls back to the ground in what’s called a radioactive daughter or progeny. And that’s only a part of the decay process involved in just that one isotope of radium.

These radioactive decay cycles, producing numerous progeny, have been going on continuously since the 1940s at the Lewiston Porter military dumps. That’s simply a physics fact.

There are many other isotopes at the site that decay and have produced hundreds of radioactive daughters and progeny ,including the “products of fission” and “hot particles” mentioned by Army Corps of Engineers personnel in this September 2008 Army interview, each isotope having its own chemical, physical, and environmental properties, half-lives, characteristics, affinities, and “habits.”

Even though being raised in a artificial root-laden hydroponic medium, tomatoes are well known to take a part of their nutrients/moisture from the surrounding atmosphere and to be receptive to absorption through their outer skin, leaf and vine structures.

Landmarks, legends, and landfills

Out in the desert of Nevada north of Las Vegas, on a desolate stretch of road, sits the infamous “black mailbox” (actually painted white), the only landmark leading into an area of the highly secure base known as the Nevada Test Site–(NTS)–the location of past U.S. above and below ground atomic tests (not-so secret because of sound and flash), Tenopah Test Range (flight and munitions), and the supposedly nonexistent and controversial “Area-51.”

Here in Niagara County, a lone white mailbox (pictured below) marks the main entrance to the once top secret, 12-square-mile, Lake Ontario Ordnance Works complex, on its own desolate stretch of Pletcher Road in Lewiston Porter;  now it marks the 191 acres designated by the U.S. Department of Energy as the Niagara Falls Storage Site (just out of view to the left).

WNY's own "secret mailbox."

Building 401 of the Niagara Falls Storage Site, across road.

Gate closed, restricted access leading into the 191-acre NFSS.

The NFSS is the fat-bottomed, T-topped rectangular shape on the government radiation survey map below. The dots/spots represent historic and remaining radioactive and chemical contamination.

See 2008 chemical/radiological analysis diagrams below.

*Note - Incomplete listing

Please also see:

Niagara Gazette front page tomato story day of Governor Paterson visit.

Audiocast and slideshow of town hall meeting from Niagara Gazette.

See the end below about the gift of H2 Grow (LOOW) tomatoes from Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster to Governor David Paterson [POLITICAL NOTEBOOK: We hear the words, we need more action.]

What others have said.

Enjoy  that  salad,  Governor!

Rep. TOM REYNOLDS has been raking in campaign contributions in spite of the fact he is retiring. The Buffalo News reported that in the in three months before announcing his retirement Reynolds took in $267,113. When he finally turns the lights off in his congressional office for the last time Reynolds will have $1.8 million to spread around however he sees fit. While he can’t go out and purchase a new car for himself, what these guys usually do is get a new job, then cozy up to someone still in office, make a fat contribution, and then get that elected official to hire their new company for some juicy taxpayer funded work. While the donation to the support the elected official is often publicized, the contract that comes down the road is rarely mentioned. Reynolds does have $822,468 from a “leadership” Political Action Committee (PAC) that he can do whatever he wants with. “Former members can take leadership PACS after leaving Congress and put it in their pockets,” Fred Werheimer, president of Democracy 21, told the News. It’s easy to understand why republicans claim they want to cut taxes…. it leaves more money in people’s pockets to hand over to them.

ORCHARD PARK is installing 704 photovoltaic panels on the town’s highway garage to generate electricity. They’re projecting a savings of $3,000 to $4,000 a year. Orchard Park Highway Superintendent Fred Piasecki Jr. said his department is the first highway department in NY state to install the solar panels. The panels, installed by Solar Liberty of Williamsville, are being paid for by a grant of $192,192 from the NY State Energy Research and Development Authority.

KEVIN GAUGHAN would be happy to hear that the Batvia Police and the Genesee County sheriff’s dispatch service will merge AND receive $410,000 in state legislator grants to finance the transition. City dispatchers are leaving their downtown offices in October and moving to the Sheriff’s administration building.

TOM CHRISTY, television talk show host of “Legislative Journal” might be returning to the airwaves. Christy fell afoul of Lockport Community Television after having Geoff Kelly from Artvoice on his show talking about radiation contamination in Niagara County. Apparently he was only supposed to talk about good things. But the Common Council in North Tonawanda will be looking at a measure tomorrow that calls for the return of Christy.

The Niagara Gazette‘s Dan Miner wrote a column on Friday about the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works Restoration Advisory Board (RAB), which the US Army Corps of Engineers is trying to dissolve. Miner got a lot of things wrong—some minor, some major.

To wit:

Bill Boeck is not a chemist; Walter Garrow has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Both were hand-selected for this incarnation of the RAB and are directly associated with Niagara University and/or the contracting company that built the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) radiological “containment structure.”

The original and most previous RAB was disbanded immediately after an US Army officer grabbed and shoved a member of the public at a RAB meeting on March 13, 2002. A police report is on file.

The Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (or LOOW site—see the US Army Corps of Engineers map to the left) is actually a 7,500-acre parcel of properties that were allegedly used for TNT production during only a nine-month period of the Second World War in 1942-1943. This site did not produce TNT for the “nation’s armed forces during and after World War II.” The 191-acre piece of real estate being mentioned here in this article is formally called the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) and is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Energy.

No silo is associated, or ever was, with the current subsurface (read: within watertable) “containment structure” burial. The basements of old military buildings on site are now being used to store these high-level radioactive materials and are considered to constitute the NFSS “interim containment structure.” At the time this project was explained to the public more than two decades ago, it was stated that this “temporary solution” was to be an “interim measure.” The silo being mentioned in this article is where the Radium-226 (between 1/3 and 1/2 of the world’s supply) was previously stored above ground for 40 years. It has since been demolished (1980s), and that structure was also buried with the remaining wastes that were known as being scattered around the LOOW site during that time frame.

Plutonium, an extremely dangerous radioactive element created for the most part in a fission reactor, was found by Environment Canada and was reported as being detected in the mouth of the Niagara River at Youngstown, New York. It can be easily assumed to have leached/traveled/migrated through the ditches and groundwater from the LOOW site only a couple of miles away. No testing has ever been conducted to find the source and origin of this plutonium. In fact, it was never even admitted that plutonium had even been on this site until the Rochester Human Radiation Experiments (HREX) lab wastes (see The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome) Dell-Random House, 1999) were mentioned as being located there at Lewiston-Porter in a series of Artvoice articles (“The Bomb That Fell on Niagara” by G. Kelly, L. Ricciuti, 2001-2002). The US Army Corps of Engineers found these particular HREX wastes buried at the legacy LOOW site in 2002-2003 after the series of articles was published. Other sources of plutonium, in addition to the HREX materials, have been identified as being on the LOOW site.

The suggestion that the site presents “no imminent health risks” is misleading. There has never been a “safe condition” at this site. The cavalier waste disposal practices of the previous military “caretakers” of the LOOW led to leaks and that spread radioactive materials into the surrounding landscape during the entire time (decades) that it has been located there. It is still leaking. “Abatement” is not removal.

No mention is made by either Miner or the RAB committee members of the recent change to federal Law (2003′s House Resolution 2754) that will allow the radium-226 and other slurried radioactive elements to remain buried in this landscape and within the water table forever.

The photo to the left was taken at the Niagara Falls Country Club, on the high ground that rises above Lewiston, not long after the Second World War had ended. The occasion of the banquet was a reunion of industrialists, military men, and scientists instrumental to the Manhattan Project, the success of which had been demonstrated dramatically at Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a year earlier.

In attendance were Major General Leslie R. Groves (that’s him under the mirror), the military director of the Manhattan Engineer District of the US Army Corps of Engineers—the name Groves gave to the project—and Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, Groves’s right-hand man.

The others seated at the table with Groves and Nichols were the owners and managers and scientists who guided the region’s leading heavy industries—the people whose expertise and facilities made Niagara Falls, in many ways, ground zero in the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb. (more…)