Black Rock Lock

The Erie Canal’s celebrated western terminus is here in Buffalo — the reconstructed Commercial Slip at Canalside, where Governor DeWitt Clinton boarded the Seneca Chief on October 26, 1825, bound for New York City with a keg of Lake Erie water for the ceremony that would become the “Wedding of the Waters.” But a boat bound for the lake today doesn’t finish on the old canal; it runs down the Black Rock Canal and steps through the Black Rock Lock, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ship lock built between 1908 and 1913 to bypass the rapids where the Niagara River spills out of Lake Erie. An earlier lock held this spot as far back as 1833. The modern chamber is a giant — 650 feet long, 70 wide — the last step up to Lake Erie and the open West.