The Erie Canal's Eastern Gate

The Erie Canal opened on October twenty-sixth, eighteen twenty-five, and nothing in the interior of North America was quite the same afterward. The canal ran three hundred sixty-three miles from Lake Erie to Albany, and here, at Albany, it met the Hudson River and from there the water flowed south to New York Harbor and the Atlantic. The whole continent seemed to have found a drain.

The immediate economic numbers were almost comical. Before the canal, shipping a barrel of flour from Rochester to Albany cost three dollars. On the canal it cost seventy-five cents.

The cost of moving a ton of goods from Buffalo to New York City dropped by more than ninety percent in a single decade. Farmers in Ohio and Indiana who had been cutting timber into the nearest creek and hoping suddenly had a market. Albany had the lock.

The city built a thirty-two-acre man-made lagoon called the Albany Basin at the river's edge. A four-thousand-three-hundred-foot pier enclosed it from the river. At its peak the basin could accommodate a thousand canal boats and fifty steamboats simultaneously.

Planks of lumber from the Adirondacks and St. Lawrence watershed stacked higher than buildings all along the riverfront. By the eighteen sixties Albany's lumber district was the largest in the nation.

The Port of Albany eventually replaced the old basin in nineteen thirty-two. The Erie Canal's original eastern terminus now lies buried under Interstate Seven Eighty-Seven and the park you can walk through here by the river. A section of the old basin wall was excavated from the lagoon in that park in nineteen seventy-nine.

It is still down there, under the fill, underneath everything.