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Niagara Falls
The city beside North America's most famous waterfall
Niagara Falls is a city in western New York on the U.S. side of the great waterfall of the same name, where the Niagara River plunges between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario along the border with Canada. The falls - the most powerful in North America by flow - draw millions of visitors a year, and the city grew up around the tourism and cheap hydroelectric power they generate.
The river drops about 170 feet over the Niagara Escarpment, split by Goat Island into the American Falls and the larger Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side. The enormous, dependable flow made Niagara one of the birthplaces of large-scale hydroelectricity in the late 1800s, powering the surrounding industrial belt.