E11 Amsterdam

Lock E11 sits at the front door of a city the carpet built. Amsterdam ran the looms of Bigelow-Sanford and Mohawk Carpet for generations, and today its downtown reaches back to the water across the Mohawk Valley Gateway Overlook — a curved 511-foot pedestrian bridge whose glass mosaic deliberately echoes those old carpet mills. Boats tie up just downstream at Riverlink Park, in the pool held behind E11’s movable bridge dam, one of the eight that make navigation on the canalized Mohawk possible. The lift here is a gentle 12 feet at mile 39; the drama is on the banks, not in the chamber. Amsterdam was, in fact, the first municipality on an inland New York waterway to win state approval for a waterfront-revitalization plan, in 1993 — a city deliberately turning back toward the river that made it.