The Rochester Subway, A Canal Reborn Underground

After the Erie Canal was rerouted south of Rochester in nineteen eighteen to allow widening for the new Barge Canal, the city was left with something unusual: a long, flat, cleared corridor running right through the heart of downtown. The old canal bed sat there, an infrastructure ghost, waiting for a new use.

The city found one. In nineteen twenty-seven, Rochester opened a light rail subway line running through the former canal bed. For the two miles through downtown, the tracks ran in a cut-and-cover tunnel beneath what became Broad Street, making it the only underground portion of the line. The rest of the route ran on the surface in the old canal cut, naturally grade-separated from traffic the entire way.

It was a genuinely clever piece of urban improvisation, and it worked well for decades. At its peak the Rochester subway carried commuters and shoppers to downtown department stores, factories, and offices. But Rochester, like most American cities, began building freeways in the postwar era, and freeway construction consumed portions of the old right-of-way. Car ownership rose. Ridership fell. On the thirtieth of June, nineteen fifty-six, the last train ran.

Portions of the Broad Street tunnel survive underground today, abandoned and partly filled in, a relic of a transit network that lasted less than thirty years. Urban explorers periodically attempt to document what remains. The city has considered revival proposals for the corridor over the decades since closure. None have been built. The canal became a subway became a sealed tunnel, and Rochester still drives.