NIAGARA FALLS, Canada -- Niagara Falls spills 750,000 gallons of water per second down a 167-foot drop in a roar that began when glaciers melted 10,000 years ago.

Tourists come by the millions, stare into the white mist, and marvel at one of the wonders of the world. Then they have wonders of their own: What to do next?

As Nick Ramunno, who oversees a hall full of wax rock stars there for the staring at, puts it: "You need something else besides the Falls. You can only look at the Falls so long."

That's when it's time to climb Clifton Hill.

There is no compromising with Clifton Hill. Either you recoil in horror at the noise, lights, crowds, smells, outsize waffle cones and howling fright houses or you give yourself over to the Great Spirit of Kitsch that has pervaded since the days hotel owners shanghaied each other's guests at the train station and shook them down for trips to the bottom of the Falls.

Consider the words of Chucky Prime Time, who is bellowing the virtues of Ripley's Moving Theater, a lights-stereo-and-cinema attraction on the main drag of Tourist Land.

"It's what's going down. It's the Vegas of Canada, Clifton Hill. That's the only way to describe it," he says. Then, after some prodding, he confesses that his last name isn't Prime Time. It's Booth. And in real life he's a college student and spends his free hours as a volunteer youth coach, but in Niagara Falls, every kid who wants to can get a summer job being something else: a cross between a day laborer and a carnival barker.

The Vegas of Canada is a perfect inversion of all common assumptions. Canadians have been famously defined as polite, unarmed Americans with health insurance. Yet in this one corner of the world, stereotype has been turned on its head. The Canadians bellow, their signs all but jump off the buildings, commerce reigns supreme, and a people ordinarily famed as the guardians of every leaf on every tree have left it to the Americans across the river to maintain a sedate park where it is the birds, not a recorded Dracula, that are heard during a walk.

But Clifton Hill? There is kitsch beyond computation. On a two-day swing a visitor counted five wax museums, three commercially haunted houses, a village built of LEGO, three towers capable of satisfying anyone's urge for vertigo, King Kong on one building and Frankenstein holding a giant Whopper on another, a two-headed lamb, three electric chairs, a pair of shrunken heads and a bowling alley with giant TV screens affixed above the pins and filled with distracted bowlers who couldn't seem to figure out why their shots landed in the gutters.

One caveat, warns Tara O'Hara, a Canadian who had three hours to spare and stopped by Clifton Hill with her date: "I would say it's the children-friendly Las Vegas of Canada."

Niagara Falls, Canada, has long been known as bridal suite to the world. It got that reputation in 1801 when Aaron Burr's daughter Theodosia sauntered north for a honeymoon. Three years later, Jerome Bonaparte, youngest brother of Napoleon, carted his bride to the Falls for a wedding trip. Jerome went on to become a notorious philanderer, but the die was cast: couples began flocking here. Then they had children.

The trick was to make money out of the place.

That's when Saul Davis, an entrepreneur of Homeric proportions, began his trade. It involved a unique combination of hospitality and hostage-taking.

Davis owned a hotel on Table Rock, a shelf that jutted over the Falls. He built a set of stairs down to the bottom of the Falls and it became his practice to gull visitors into donning oilskin coats and taking "free" trips down those stairs to see the Falls. Upon their return, he then charged them extortionate rates for the rental of the coats.

The battle between Davis and his nearest competitor, Thomas Barnett, isn't traditional Chamber of Commerce fare. Barnett ran a small museum and had his own stairs to the Falls. Davis put up signs declaring Barnett's stairs unsafe. Later, Davis sold tickets to his own stairs and told customers that the tickets also gave them admission to Barnett's museum. Barnett would send angry ticket holders to the police. Eventually the feud developed into gunplay, and one of Barnett's employees lay dead.

"It's actually a great script for a movie," said George Bailey, a local historian, photographer, author and one-time marketing director for the local parks commission. Known locally as "Mr. Niagara," Mr. Bailey was transported here at the age of 4 when his father took a job piloting one of the Maid of the Mists tour boats that chugs to the edge of the Falls' spray. He began his own work on Clifton Hill as a freelance photographer.

"Great spot to go and seek the ladies," Mr. Bailey explained. "I used to have a camera with no film in it at the time and I'd take pictures of them. Of course, I never had any film, but I'd always get their addresses to find out where I could deliver it later."

It was the creation of the Parks Commission that cleaned up the area around the Falls and drove the commercial craziness up the hill.

Today, the legacy of Saul Davis and Thomas Barnett lives on Clifton Hill, though nobody's taking hostages, the gunfire is confined to attractions such as the Criminal Hall of Fame Wax Museum and families are, by and large, highly entertained.

"A lot of people think negatively of the carnival side of things, but really that's part of our history, it's been there since the very beginning. Since the days they were bootlegging on the ice in the middle of the Niagara River," said Nicholas Tritchew, director of interactive marketing for HOCO Entertainment and Resorts, the largest company on the Hill.

HOCO runs a city block of Clifton Hill, with a hotel, game arcade known as the Great Canadian Midway, the Movieland wax museum, and plays landlord to a host of eateries, a bowling alley and its newest attraction, the Sky Wheel. It's a 175-foot-high Ferris wheel with 42 six-passenger gondolas, and it serves as something of a giant metaphor.

Tourists rise to view the timeless Falls below and, as they move on, are confronted with the Clifton Hill vista where the architecture fairly cries out "20-minutes-ago."

For the frantic pace, locals seem to love Clifton Hill.

"When you live in Niagara Falls, you don't have to travel all over the world because the world comes to you," beamed Elisabeth Senese, who was shuttling tourists into the Sky Wheel gondolas.

She worries, though, about the rainbows. Rainbows are a huge issue in Niagara Falls. Mr. Bailey, the former marketing director for the parks, came to know every turn and bend along the river to the point that he could pinpoint the precise location where the water's spray would create a rainbow visible from the roadway.

Once, driving Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his family through the Falls on an official visit, Mr. Bailey picked up his cell phone and jokingly called in a rainbow.

"Would you please turn on the rainbow for Mr. Mubarak and his family," he said. "And soon as I drove 20 feet -- voila! The rainbow appeared."

With high rises and towers jutting up along the fringes of the park, though, some locals now worry about the vista. Already, Marine Land has put up a massive tower that intrudes on the Falls profile.

What to make of a place that balances the natural glory of a waterfall with the determinedly unnatural agglomeration of fright houses and high rises?

Ms. Senese thinks it over for a moment.

"Consumed by our consumption?" she ventures.

Then she presses the button and a visitor rises 175 feet and sees past, present and, of course, the casino to his left.

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Correction/Clarification: (Published Aug. 3, 2009) A caption with this story as originally published on Aug. 2, 2009 should have said the photo showed the American side of Niagara Falls, not the Canadian side.