The Erie Canal Comes to Clinton Square
Near Syracuse, New York
Clinton Square is the broad open plaza at the heart of downtown Syracuse, with the fountain in summer and the ice rink in winter. What you are driving through used to be open water.
This stretch of the Erie Canal ran right through the center of town. Clinton Square was the weighlock pool, the holding basin where boats queued to be weighed and assessed for tolls. The Weighlock Building, completed in eighteen fifty and still standing two blocks east as the Erie Canal Museum, was the only surviving canal weighlock in America. Boats were floated into a large wooden cradle inside the building, lifted on a giant scale, and assessed for tonnage. In the canal era, that building processed hundreds of boats a week.
The canal itself was a marvel of political will. When Governor DeWitt Clinton championed the project in the eighteen-tens, critics called it Clinton's Folly and Clinton's Big Ditch. The entire three-hundred-sixty-three-mile route from Albany to Buffalo was dug largely by hand, through swamps and bedrock, by a workforce of immigrant laborers. It opened on October twenty-sixth, eighteen twenty-five. DeWitt Clinton sailed from Buffalo to New York harbor in the ceremonial boat Seneca Chief and poured a cask of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic, the Wedding of the Waters.
The canal dropped freight costs by roughly ninety percent. A ton of goods that cost one hundred dollars to move from the western territories to the coast moved for six dollars after eighteen twenty-five. New York City became the dominant American port. Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Utica became cities almost overnight. The salt Syracuse had been producing in the millions of bushels suddenly had a highway to every market in the country.
The canal was rerouted and eventually filled in through downtown Syracuse in the early twentieth century. Clinton Square became a plaza. But the weighlock building survived, rescued from demolition when Interstate Eighty-One was planned in the nineteen fifties, through a campaign by the Junior League of Syracuse and canal historians who convinced the state to reroute the highway. It opened as a museum in nineteen sixty-two and has been there ever since.
