Ellicott Creek moves through Williamsville without much drama for most of its length, and then at the eastern edge of Glen Park it falls off a cliff. The drop is roughly thirty feet (sources put it at 27 and at 30, depending on where you start measuring), and it is the most consequential thirty feet in Amherst by a wide margin.
The rock came first
Glen Falls exists because of the Onondaga Escarpment. The Onondaga Limestone is Middle Devonian rock, laid down roughly 390 million years ago, and it surfaces across New York in a long east-west line that generally forms a ridge: out of the Hudson Valley, across the Finger Lakes, through Erie County, and on into Ontario. Hard rock sitting on softer rock is the standard recipe for a waterfall. The creek scours the soft material out from underneath, the hard cap keeps its edge, and you get a step instead of a slope.
Williamsville sits directly on that line. Ellicott Creek loses close to fifty feet crossing the village, and Glen Falls is where most of that happens at once. The same limestone that makes the lip of the falls is the limestone Williamsville quarried, and the same limestone that got burned and ground into natural cement here during the Erie Canal years. The waterfall and the local economy came out of one seam of rock.
Free horsepower
Before turbines, before the grid, a thirty-foot head of water was a factory you did not have to fuel. That is the entire reason a village is here rather than a mile up or a mile down. Jonas Williams ran mills on both sides of the creek at the falls, and the name of those mills, Williams Mills, is where the name of the town came from.
What a drop like this actually buys you is a raceway. You tap the creek above the falls, run it in a channel along the bank, and deliver it to a wheel with most of that head still intact. Williamsville built that system out and kept extending it; the channels are still cut into the ground around the park, and the mill they fed is still standing on Spring Street.
The years the falls had a roller coaster
This is the part that surprises people who only know Glen Park as ponds and paved paths. From the early 1940s, the falls were the backdrop to Harry Altman's Glen Park Casino and Amusement Park. The casino itself was a theater-restaurant, and over its run it booked a genuinely national slate: Sammy Davis Jr., the Mills Brothers, Josephine Baker, later Ike & Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, and Sly and the Family Stone.
Around it was a free-admission amusement park. By the accounts of people who grew up in it, that meant a small roller coaster, a merry-go-round, self-propelled cages, and tickets at a nickel apiece or twenty-two for a dollar, two tickets a ride. For four or five years in the mid-to-late 1950s there was also a zoo on the grounds: white-tailed deer, mountain goats, mountain sheep, llamas, peacocks, rhesus monkeys, and a pen where children could feed the lambs. Next to a waterfall. In Amherst.
It ended in fire. The casino, by then a rock club called the Inferno, burned in September 1968. A second fire in September 1973 took more of what remained. In 1976 the Village of Williamsville and the Town of Amherst turned the roughly ten-acre site into the park that is there now (ponds, concrete walkways, stone foundations left in the grass), and the falls went back to being the only thing on the property that was never going to close.
It is not Glens Falls
One piece of housekeeping, because this happens constantly. Glen Falls, singular, no S on Glen, is the waterfall in Williamsville, Erie County. Glens Falls is a city in Warren County, better than 200 miles east, down at the southern edge of the Adirondacks. They are not related and they are not close. If your directions have you passing Utica, you have picked the wrong one.
Going to see it
Glen Park is free, open year-round, and unusually accessible for a waterfall: paved paths get you to the overlook without a scramble. Spring runoff is the loud version; late fall is the version where you can actually see the rock. While you're standing there, the red building downstream is the Williamsville Water Mill, which is the falls' oldest customer, and the story of how the crossing became a town is the Mill Village. More of Western New York is mapped out in the full town-by-town guide.
Wear it
The Glen Falls tee is for the water, not the gift shop: a thirty-foot ledge of 390-million-year-old limestone that put a village on the map and then outlasted the nightclub built next to it. It's part of the ALL America City collection, one real Western New York landmark per shirt.