Cataract Development Corporation

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A DARING MOVE

Historic daredevil barrel takes trip down Third Street in the Falls

•MARK SCHEER

MARK.SCHEER@NIAGARA-GAZETTE. COM

A 12-foot barrel that carried two people over the Horseshoe Falls in Canada in 1995 made a short trip down Third Street in Niagara Falls on Thursday morning.

The barrel, made from welded water heaters and reinforced by Kevlar and a styrofoam coating, was placed on a flatbed truck and driven down the street so it could be displayed inside the new location of the Niagara Falls Daredevil Museum.

“It’s always stressful when you are moving a 2,000-pound piece of history,” the museum’s owner, Gaelen Baillie, said following the barrel’s successful delivery.

The barrel carried daredevil Steve Trotter and his girlfriend, Lori Martin, over the Falls on June 18, 1995. The couple became the second duo to successfully survive the plunge. It marked the second time Trotter went over the Falls and came out alive. He previously survived the Falls in 1985 when he went over in “The Rig,” a craft made from industrial pickle barrels that was reinforced with fiberglass and balsa wood and surrounded by truck tire inner tubes for added shock absorption.

Baillie, who also owns the local bike and scooter rental company Site See Rentals, acquired the piece years ago from Mike and Mark DiFrancesco, the former owners of the original Niagara Falls Daredevil Museum, which closed in 2013 after several years of successful operation at the corner of Rainbow Boulevard and Third Street.

Last May, Baillie converted 1,200 square feet of space inside a storefront he previously used for his bike rental business at 468 A Third St. into his own daredevil museum. The space showcased Trotter and Martin’s barrel, the jet ski 39-year-old Robert Overacker used in his unsuccessful attempt to tackle the Horseshoe Falls on Oct. 1, 1995, and an extensive collection of photographs, books, paintings and pieces of Falls history.

This year, Baillie moved all of the items in his museum’s collection to a new location just up the street, inside the space formerly occupied by The Gold Bar at 435 Third St.

Trotter and Martin’s barrel was the last piece to go. It also presented the biggest moving challenge.

Employees from American Glass were called in to remove the front window from the museum’s former Third Street location so the barrel could be lifted out onto the street. Two operators from Frontier Towing used a winch to pull it through the window space and load it on a flatbed truck so it could be driven down Third Street to the museum’s new location.

After the move, a relieved Baillie described the morning experience as “nerve-wracking.”

“It’s just getting it here successfully and not breaking any windows as we were moving it and getting out of the one shop and getting into this shop,” he said.

Baillie’s new museum space offers several advantages that the old one didn’t, including a bar. He’s applying for a beer and liquor license and hopes to be able to start serving drinks to museum visitors later this year. The Niagara Falls Daredevil Museum is scheduled to open to the public at its new location on May 1.

“We want to hold events, parties here,” Baillie said. “This will be a lot cooler space where we can have that kind of stuff in the offseason. It has more of an art gallery feel to it for the museum. We are going to have a really cool layout and we also have some new exhibits.”

More items will be on display at the new location and Baillie said he’s planning one exhibit dedicated to the history of organized crime in the Falls and Buffalo during the era of Stefano Magaddino.

He has also added to his museum’s collection numerous items from the old Imperial Garage, a former Third Street bar and blues venue owned by Toby Rotella, the late founder of the Niagara Falls Blues Festival. In its time, the popular bar played host to numerous blues legends, including Muddy Waters, John Lee Ho**er, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

“We have some really cool photographs from the Imperial Garage that will be permanently displayed behind the bar,” Bailie said.

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