Main Street had a waterfront
For nearly a century, the Erie Canal was a working street of water through the middle of Utica, Rome and every canal town between. Boats tied up a block from Genesee Street; warehouses, weighlocks and mule barns faced the channel. In Utica the canal ran along the corridor that is now Oriskany Street — which is why that street is so wide and so flat.1
When the Barge Canal opened in 1918 and moved shipping into the river, the old ditch became a health nuisance and a traffic obstacle. Cities began filling it in the 1920s — in Utica the job wasn't fully finished until the 1940s — and the towpath world of bridges, basins and boatyards vanished under asphalt within a generation.12
Reading the ghost
Once you know the alignments, you spot them everywhere. Unusually wide east–west streets a block or two from the river trace filled channels — Utica's Oriskany Street follows the original line, while Rome's Erie Boulevard follows the enlarged canal's 1840s reroute through downtown.13 Buildings that seem to turn their backs on the street were built facing the water. And outside the cities, the enlarged canal survives wet and walkable for 36 miles at the Old Erie Canal State Historic Park between DeWitt and Rome — the best place in the region to stand on a real towpath.4
Have a photograph of the canal era in your family albums — or a memory of what stood along Oriskany Street before the arterial? That's exactly the material our community collection is for.