The canal was more than just a hydroelectric extension cord to power Model City. It would connect the upper and lower portions of the Niagara River, bypassing the falls and creating a navigable gateway to Lake Ontario. According to Love’s plan, the canal would originate in the Village of LaSalle, east of Niagara Falls, then extend seven miles north through Lewiston, where Love had secured options on 12,000 acres. This acreage would hardly contain Love’s vision, however, which imagined a city of one million residents (with each family owning their own house, since Model City was “doing away with tenement housing.”).  In addition to housing, there would be 21,000 acres of public parks, wide and “elevated roads” to accommodate a future of cars and rapid transit, vast industrial complexes and a mile-long garden and fountain area called Fountain Boulevard that, each night, would utilize the water otherwise used for powering factories to “create a scene of beauty which has never been equaled.”

Love considered his plan “one of the greatest undertakings of modern times.” It was to be a megacity, a model for urban development the world over. It would be a worker-oriented, cooperative model, not just an industrial endeavor, but a moral one. No saloons slinging “demon rum,” as he called it, no urban density leading to discontent, no unfavorable worker conditions. Most importantly, it was to be a green city, “free of defiling vapors,” powered by clean energy and centered around nature and beauty. All this was made clear in the Model City prospectus, published in 1893. In the section on scenery and nature (which is longer than any other section in the prospectus, including the section called “Our Plan,” which was fittingly left incomplete), he could not help but veer off into pastoral prose:

Upon [Lake Ontario’s] emerald surface creep the crafts of commerce and of pleasure, some wafted lazily by summer breeze, others swiftly moving, leaving in their trail their breath of inky blackness.

William Love arrived in Western New York in 1892, convinced that Niagara Falls was the ideal location for turning his “long-studied plan for town building” into a reality.
Love’s theories, and the zeal with which he presented them, are reminiscent of utopian socialists of the time, visionaries who wove ethical idealism into their imagined (and often unrealistic) solutions to the world’s problems.

Niagara Falls, with its power potential and natural wonder, was a magnet for such creative fantasies of the future. Among these ideas was the city of Metropolis, as conceived by utopian socialist and disposable razor tycoon King Camp Gillette. His book The Human Drift, published the same year that Love broke ground for his canal, meticulously laid out plans for re-envisioning North America as one corporation in one gigantic city of 60 million people, which would be centered at Niagara Falls. Then there was Leonard Henkle’s Great Dynamic Palace and International Hall, a half-mile, 46-story architectural fantasy that would straddle the entire width of the Niagara River and terminate at the brink of the falls. Like Love’s Model City, both of these ideas promoted a moral progress, without forsaking industrial advancements.

The photograph commemorating the groundbreaking ceremony at Love’s canal, one of the few images in existence of William T. Love, doesn’t exactly read as a harbinger of a bright future. In the rather inauspicious snapshot, Love is the only attendee of the 50 or so pictured wearing even a hint of a smile on an overcast, rainy day, amidst umbrellas and soggy, barren surroundings. Indeed, there were some ominous clouds already hanging over his ambitious project.

Love’s greatest asset may have been his entrepreneurial spirit and his Barnum-esque sales pitching, but his timing was less than ideal. The commencement of his plan coincided with the economic uncertainty triggered by the Panic of 1893, which hindered investment. Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse were also working to transmit electricity further and cheaper through alternating current, making direct current plans like Love’s expensive, cumbersome and unnecessary. Meanwhile, as delays in fundraising and local buy-in plagued his efforts, construction was moving quickly on the village of Echota, another planned utopian community in Niagara Falls. Echota was backed by the more independently powerful Niagara Power Company and designed by noted architect Stanford White. But Love would not be deterred, stating in one of his many Model City newsletters, “We have weathered every storm so far, and will continue to do so until we reach the haven of success.”

As it happened, however, his haven never became reality. Recession, combined with Tesla’s advancements with alternating current, torpedoed his overly ambitious, yet underdeveloped plans. Model City was abandoned after only a handful of houses, a post office, a church and a nail factory were built. The coup de grace came with passage of the Burton Act in 1906, which prohibited the diversion of water from Niagara Falls, thus ensuring that, with or without Love, the canal would never be completed.

His dreams for Model City in shambles, Love penned a goodbye letter to one of his early supporters, Lewiston attorney J. Boardman Scovell, in which he pitched his next pursuit and asked Scovell “to not forget kindly here the poor devil trying to lift the mountain.” He left Western New York and never returned. 

Prior to the development of this promising suburb, the 70 acres that made up Lot 60 in Niagara Falls was owned by Hooker Electrochemical Company, who found Love’s big ditch to be a perfect location for the disposal of toxic chemical waste. 21,800 tons of as many as 82 different chemicals were dumped into Love’s partially-dug waterway (which, before serving as a chemical crypt, was used by locals for fishing, swimming and canoeing), before being capped and sealed with the hope that this would be the last that anyone would see of this toxic sludge.

William T. Love’s story would be unfortunate enough if it had ended when his high hopes for Model City were dashed by a confluence of bad luck and being in over his head. What makes the story even more piteous is the spectacular way in which the future, that Love regarded with such optimism, would be so relentlessly unkind at both ends of his proposed canal, and in ways so diametrically opposed to Love’s intentions. 

Model City didn’t just end up a sparsely populated hamlet, but a desolate landscape, with a resumé that includes a TNT factory built by the federal government during World War II, a radiological dumping ground that includes high profile waste from the Manhattan Project and anthrax that was mailed to Tom Brokaw in 2001. Today, most of Model City’s acreage is dedicated to a large waste management company and one of the largest private hazardous chemical waste dumps on the East Coast.

As for Love’s unfinished canal, far from being left alone as a peaceful pond, subsequent actions ensured its status as one of the worst environmental disasters in the Nation’s history. With his name attached to it, his failure was revisited with every re-telling of Love Canal’s dark saga.

The distance between Love’s intentions and what eventually unfolded is wider than Lake Ontario. Its asymmetry is nearly comedic, a Quixotic allegory of extravagant failure, yet it is also tragically ironic. To many, that is the extent of Love’s story, but it turns out that Model City was not his first—nor his last—attempt at utopian city-building. 

Most of what has been written about Love seems satisfied to leave the details of his biography a titillating mystery. Some say he came from Chicago, others say Tennessee, or even “from parts unknown.” But the actual details of his life make him far more intriguing than simply a footnote to the Love Canal tragedy. 

William Thomasson Love was born in Keokuk, IA, on May 26, 1856, to Mary Peirce and James Madison Love.  James was a prominent federal judge appointed by Mary’s distant relative, President Franklin Pierce. Curiously, William never seems to have leveraged (or even mentioned) his family in any of his endeavors. After studying law at the University at Iowa, he worked as an attorney for the Chicago and Northwestern Railway Company before dedicating his life to his nearly religious approach to urban planning. 

His first foray into town building seems to have been with the New Co-operative Town Company of Elizabethton, TN, where he was listed as a director. Had he stayed with the project, this might have been the most successful of his town-building efforts, as it managed to bring some businesses and residents to the small town of Elizabethton before the company folded in 1900. But Love left the company during its early stages, claiming that it was not “managed to his idea of perfection.” 

A reference in the Buffalo Evening News from March 1893 claims that Love’s “reputation as a place maker is based on his work of putting 15,000 people in Guthrie, Oklahoma in two days,” though nothing of the sort can be verified. What is known is that immediately prior to his arrival in Niagara County, Love traveled to England, where he may have familiarized himself with the Rochdale Principles of cooperative organization, which were central to his Model City plan. Adopting these principles, Love primarily sought to revolutionize manufacturing by improving labor and equity conditions, thus providing a “refreshing freedom from strikes” in a setting where “the workmen will be their own employees.” 

After leaving Niagara County, Love didn’t simply disappear, or abscond with pockets full of investor money, or wander off and “die a heartbroken man,” all of which have been theorized. He simply moved on to the next town, the next opportunity to build that most perfect thing, pitching the same lines—and often making the same mistakes. 

He first engaged in a series of mining adventures, looking for gold in a town called Rat Portage, Ontario (now known as the lovely city of Kenora) in 1897, then in Spokane, WA, where he teamed up with a businessman from British Columbia in 1899 create “one of the largest mining companies in the world” which, of course, never materialized. After that, he spent eight years in Nome, AK. Eventually, Love found himself in Lomax, IL, population 200. It was another tiny town that provided an ideal blank canvas to build an unparalleled city of beauty and industry.

William returned to his penchant for self-published advertising with a 1911 brochure titled, Lomax, Illinois; The Most Remarkable Town-Building Enterprise in the World. In it he outlined his plans for a new, utopian “home of opportunity” that he called New City. Like Model City, plans included his trademark wide streets, fountains, parks and prohibitions on “societal ills” like saloons and racing. Once again, every family would own their own home and every resident would breathe “clean air” in New City.

After Lomax, things looked bleak for Love. In 1923, a humbling article titled, “Poultry School in Gladstone,” found him running something called a “correspondence poultry school” in Illinois. He tried establishing a new town-building project in Gladstone called Nu Hope in 1925, but it never got off the ground. Then, in 1928, his wife was killed when she was struck by a car in Galesburg, IL.

In 1931, Love moved to Mount Holly, NJ, where he decided to give it one more go. Now 76 years old, he published a manifesto in a series of articles in the Mount Holly Herald, outlining a solution to the Great Depression through a social and political platform called “The Posterity Movement.” The manifesto was written in a flamboyant style, seeking $50,000,000 from Congress in a supersized, nationwide implementation of Love’s utopian town-building philosophy. He was motivated by the success of the Garden City movement in England, which he claimed to be a kindred enterprise. In fact, he had even addressed the US Senate Subcommittee on Agriculture and Forestry on the merits of the Garden City movement in 1917. 

In a private letter to an old acquaintance in Lewiston, Love seems to concede defeat in prior exploits, but believes that with his Prosperity Movement he will achieve his “final success, after a long life of trying.” This time, however, there would be no takers. No half-built cities, no unformed revolutionary reforms, just the radical ramblings of an aging dreamer. The local press even had their fun with Love’s series of articles, mocking him as the “Sage of Oquawka.” It was clear that the attitudes of the nation following World War I no longer aligned with Love’s futuristic optimism, and he never found another opportunity to build his dream city. As of this writing, there is no record of Love’s death or burial, and contemporary references are all in relation to the toxic headstone that bears his name in Niagara Falls.

It has been suggested that William T. Love was nothing more than a mere con man. Given the number of claims that speak to Love’s sincerity, however, and the lengths to which he went to realize what he considered his “unique and altruistic plan for the scientific and orderly building of a wonderful manufacturing and residential city,” it is hard to believe that he was simply running a scam. This was a man who had no children, who planted no roots in any of the perhaps dozens of places he called home and who spent his whole life attempting to hone and implement his unique brand of philosophy; it was a legacy that Love was after. 

I return to Western New York a couple times a year to visit family, and I always make it a point to visit Model City. I drive by the three original houses built by Love that still stand. I stop at the Hillview Diner on the corner of Ridge and Model City roads and take pictures of the minimalist landscape in the area. The nothingness is a perfect blank page on which to imagine the unrealized ghost of Love’s metropolis, to observe his Fountain Boulevard in the distance, with bustling activity defining his scenic canal. And that’s exactly what I do during every visit to Model City. As I pull into one of its many empty lots, I imagine a legacy of hope, rather than failure for “the poor devil trying to lift the mountain.”