Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we bring you a short history lesson about the amazing Erie Canal.
I’ve had a lot of fun experiences in my years as a reporter.
I took tennis lessons from Venus Williams. I practiced yoga with Deepak Chopra. I traveled to Brazil to meet with a bikini maker.
I will now add to this list the hoisting and holding of a line around a cable on the side of Lock 3 of the Erie Canal in Waterford, NY, one of five locks in a “flight” that raises boats over 100% ( and lower). 50 meters in just over a mile – the most dramatic water level change in the shortest distance in any lock system in the world. (It’s twice the Panama Canal elevator.)
This was one of many memorable moments from the two days I spent on Geraldo Rivera’s boat as he and his brother Craig Rivera cruised the Hudson River and Erie Canal—the first two days of their eight-day journey from the Hamptons to Cleveland .
Was it as cool as playing tennis with Venus (if you can characterize my on-court performance relative to hers as “playing tennis”)? Nothing can match that.
Yet I was disarmed in awe as we rode north from Manhattan on the mighty Hudson, as the state of New York unfolded before us. And I was amazed as we drove across the state, slot by slot through the Erie Canal, a waterway I had previously only known about from high school geography class. I now consider it an emblem of American ingenuity and perseverance.
Yes, I’m a little obsessed with the Erie Canal – a result of reporting this story I never expected.
Since much of my article on Geraldo Rivera was supposed to be about Geraldo Rivera, the floor of my editing room is littered with details about the Channel. Aren’t you a little curious about Governor DeWitt Clinton’s 300-mile trench, once derided by the press as “Clinton’s Ditch” (the cynicism of the press goes back centuries), but recently billed by Geraldo as ” the most important public works project ever’? ”?
Me too, let’s discuss.
In 1817, workers in Rome, New York, broke ground on a project that would bring to life a vision promoted and propelled by Clinton: a constructed waterway stretching from the eastern shore of Lake Erie in Buffalo to Albany, on the headwaters of the Hudson River. Its purpose was to allow the transportation of goods and agriculture back and forth to the Midwest.
According to historians, the construction was overseen by an Irishman who learned about canal building in England before coming to America, and much of the work was completed by Irish immigrants. It would cost $7 million. Construction was funded entirely by the state of New York, with no subsidy from the federal government.
A system of locks, or water lifts, was built to help boats on the canal manage the steep, nearly 600-foot (180 m) elevation difference between Lake Erie and the Hudson River. The “gravity locks” are modeled after the locks invented by Leonardo da Vinci.
When it was completed about seven years later, the Erie Canal was 360 miles long, 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep, according to “A Brief History of the Erie Canal,” published by the New York State Canal Corporation, which manages the buildings and maintains. the channel system. (The New York Power Authority has fiscal ownership and oversight of the current canal system.)
Not only could DeWitt Clinton dig a trench (or have others do it in his name), he could also envision budget cuts. He believed the greatest transformation would be felt from the waterway about 140 miles south of Albany: in New York City, which he predicted would become the center of trade and manufacturing.
When the work was done, he celebrated by filling two barrels of water from Lake Erie and boarding a boat named Seneca Chief, which was pulled by mules on a towpath from Buffalo to Albany. He then sailed down the Hudson River to New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean.
When he reached port, Clinton dumped the Lake Erie barrels into the Atlantic with much fanfare. (The visionary Clinton, with a photo op decades before the advent of newspaper photography!) The crowd gathered. Guns were fired. The spectacle was named ‘The Wedding of the Waters’.
According to the Canal Corp. the Erie Canal’s economic success was almost immediate, and within nine years the state had recouped its construction costs through tolls paid by boats. In 1837, 500,000 bushels of wheat were carried across the channel, and by 1840, New York Harbor was the busiest port in the nation, surpassing Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans.
The historical relevance of the Canal is not only enhanced by its role as an economic engine, according to my colleague Wm. Ferguson, writing for The Times in 2021 about cycling the 360-mile Erie Canalway Trail from Buffalo to Albany. The canal, he wrote, “not only opened the nation to commerce, it was also a kind of psychic highway that attracted a steady stream of 19th-century freethinkers: abolitionists, Mormons, spiritualists, Adventists, and suffragists can all trace their roots to this fertile vein of New York State.”
About a century after the construction of the original canal, New York expanded and modernized the locks to accommodate large ships and reconfigured and enlarged most of the canal to integrate rivers and other waterways.
Today, the New York Canal System is a contiguous, navigable waterway that brings together the Great Lakes, Hudson River, Lake Champlain, and the Finger Lakes. There are local communities and tourist attractions everywhere. The modern canal system has a total of 57 locks, including 35 along the Erie Canal.
Today, the Erie Canal is primarily—but not solely, according to spokespersons—a recreational waterway.
Next summer you might see me on a boat floating over it.
Weather
It’s a mostly sunny day around the low 90’s. The evening is mostly clear, with temperatures around the mid 70’s.
ALTERNATE PARKING
Effective until September 16 (Rosh Hashana).
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METROPOLITAN Diary
Green suede wrap coat
Dear Diary:
By the age of seventeen I had saved enough money to buy a green suede fox collar wrap coat. For me it was wonderful.
My hometown, Rockville Center on Long Island, seemed too small for my fancy coat. So I devised a plan to drop out of school and take the Long Island Rail Road, myself and my coat, to the city where it belonged.
After getting off the train at Penn Station, I went east to Fifth Avenue and then north to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I lit a candle and said a little prayer, asking forgiveness for the sin of truancy.
Saks Fifth Avenue was my next stop. My coat was worth a stroll through that wonderful shop.
From there I went to Tiffany. My coat and I stopped at every counter on the first floor before going upstairs to the silver section to buy a small pen for my purse.
Costs? Seven dollars. It was 1967.
The jacket and I visited several other stores, had a grilled cheese sandwich at the Automat, and made it back to Rockville Center without getting caught.
A few years later we moved to Manhattan and had many adventures over the next few years.
— Carolyn Russel
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send your entries here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. James Barron will be back tomorrow. — KR
PS Here’s today’s one Mini crossword And Game match. You can find all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday..
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