Fairport & Pittsford

Two pretty villages and two engineering oddities

Of all the towns the Erie Canal made, few wear the water as gracefully as Fairport and Pittsford. Their downtowns press right up against the channel; their sidewalks end at the towpath. But look past the patio umbrellas and the packet-boat crowds, and this eleven-mile reach hides two of the strangest structures on the whole canal — one a bridge that refuses to be a normal shape, the other a stretch of water that runs along the top of a man-made mountain.

The bridge that won’t sit square

Fairport’s Main Street lift bridge is the kind of thing you keep staring at because your eye can’t quite finish it. Built in 1913–14 by the Lackawanna Bridge Company of Buffalo for roughly $75,000, it replaced an earlier fixed span pulled out when the canal was widened for the Barge era. The trouble was geometry. Main Street and the new, wider canal simply refused to meet at a convenient angle, and the land on the two banks sat at different heights. Rather than force the road to bend, the engineers bent the bridge.

The result is an irregular decagon — a ten-sided structure in which no two angles are alike and not a single corner is square. It crosses the canal on a rakish 32-degree skew, and it tilts: the south end rides noticeably higher than the north, a gentle four-percent slope built into the deck itself. Every line that should be parallel isn’t; every joint that should be a right angle isn’t. It is a genuinely peculiar piece of engineering, and Fairport is rightly proud of it.

The village is proud enough, in fact, to have wrapped it in legend. You will hear that it is the only bridge in New York built at such an angle, and that its odd geometry earned it a spot in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Both make for a good story, and both should be enjoyed as exactly that — fond local folklore rather than documented fact. The verifiable marvel is the bridge itself: the skew, the slope, the ten sides, and the century of Main Street traffic it has carried without ever once settling into a tidy shape.

The canal that rides a ridge

Just west of Fairport the canal pulls off a quieter, older trick — one that stopped travelers cold in the 1820s and still ought to. For a stretch, the waterway does not sit in the land at all. It rides across the top of the Great Embankment, an earthen causeway that carries boats roughly 65 feet above the floor of the Irondequoit Creek valley. Passengers on the early packet boats found themselves gliding along a ridge of packed earth, water and all, looking down on the treetops of the valley below.

The idea was old before the digging started. Surveyor James Geddes, one of the canal’s pioneering route-finders, identified the crossing as early as 1808, and the embankment was completed in 1822, three years before the full canal opened. Bridging the Irondequoit valley was considered one of the original wonders of the entire enterprise — proof that Clinton’s “ditch” was as much a feat of building up as of digging down. The modern Barge Canal still follows that same made ground today. (If you’re wondering which canal you’re actually standing beside here — the hand-dug original or its twentieth-century rebuild — that’s a story of its own; see which canal is this?)

Down at the landing

The reach ends in the gentlest way possible, at Pittsford’s Schoen Place — a restored canal landing where old coal towers and freight buildings have become shops, restaurants, and a tie-up wall. From here the replica packet boat Sam Patch still pushes off for lock cruises, working the same water that once carried grain and passengers west. Two villages, two oddities, and a landing to end on: the Erie Canal at its most quietly astonishing.