Whirlpool State Park
— the green water that turns on itself.
Not only on a wall.
Whirlpool State Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The Niagara River, having fallen over the brink upstream, slams into a hard right turn and folds back on itself. The resulting pool is the Niagara Whirlpool, and the state park above it is mostly cliff, hemlock, and gorge edge. The water is the same milky jade as the river above the falls, only slower and colder. On a still afternoon you can hear the rapids from the rim trail.
The place, in three passes.
Whirlpool State Park sits on the New York rim of the Niagara Gorge, about three miles downstream of Niagara Falls in the town of Niagara Falls, Niagara County. The park overlooks the Niagara Whirlpool, a basin roughly 1,700 feet across where the river makes a sharp right-angle turn and reverses direction. The gorge wall drops about 350 feet from the rim to the water. The site was preserved as part of the Niagara Reservation system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1880s.
The whirlpool forms because the river, after passing through the Whirlpool Rapids upstream, hits a buried bend in the gorge and is forced to turn nearly ninety degrees. The flow then circulates counterclockwise across the basin before exiting downstream toward Lewiston. The colour is the same pale jade as the upper river, carried by dissolved minerals and very fine suspended sediment. The Aero Car, a cable trolley built by Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo in 1916, still crosses the basin from the Canadian rim.
The park is on the Robert Moses Parkway north of the falls, with free parking and a short paved path from the lot to the rim overlook. The Whirlpool Rapids Trail and the longer Niagara Gorge Trail drop from the rim to the water along a steep stone staircase first cut in the 1930s; the descent is about 300 feet and the climb back is harder than it looks. Open year-round, with the gorge trails closed in winter when ice makes the stairs unsafe.
