Erie Canal Greater Rochester

Rochester

Approx. Mile 256–265 along the Erie Canal

Barge Canal · 1918 — rerouted south of the city; the 1825 canal crossed the Genesee downtown. Which canal is this? →

Rochester is the anomaly of the modern canal. Where the original 1825 Erie ran straight through downtown and vaulted the Genesee River on a great stone aqueduct, the working Barge Canal bypasses the city to the south, arcing around the lower edge of town and crossing the Genesee at Genesee Valley Park — a genuine water crossroads where river meets canal. The result is a city with two canals: the through-channel out on its southern flank, and, hidden in plain sight downtown, the canal's most dramatic ruin.

That ruin is the Second Genesee Aqueduct, completed in 1842 and now doing quiet duty as the Broad Street Bridge. It once carried the Erie over the Genesee; later its interior sheltered the abandoned Rochester Subway. For the traveler moving by boat, bike, or boot, Rochester's story is precisely this tension between original and current alignment — and the Genesee Riverway Trail is the thread that stitches the two together, linking the canal to Corn Hill, High Falls, and Lake Ontario.

Every canal has to cross the rivers it meets, and at Rochester the Erie met a serious one. The Genesee comes down out of the Pennsylvania hills, runs north through the middle of the city, and pours over a set of falls on its way to Lake Ontario — a working river, wide and quick, cutting straight across the canal’s path. There was no going around it. To reach Lake Erie, the Erie Canal had to be carried over the Genesee, boats and all, on a bridge built to hold a river of its own.

The first crossing went up fast and did not last. Between 1821 and 1823 the state raised a stone aqueduct across the Genesee — some 802 feet of red Medina sandstone on eleven arches, coped with Onondaga limestone — a genuine marvel for its moment, and one of the sights that made Rochester famous almost before it was a city. But it was built in a hurry, on soft rock, and it leaked. Within a decade it was plainly too small and too troubled for the traffic pounding through, and the state resolved to do the job over.

The replacement is the one that still stands. Begun in 1836 and placed in service in 1842, the second Genesee aqueduct spanned the river on seven cut-stone arches of fifty-two feet each — roughly 800 feet end to end, wing walls included — a heavier, sounder structure that carried Erie Canal boats over the Genesee for the rest of the canal’s working life downtown. It has outlived nearly everything around it. When the twentieth-century Barge Canal was rebuilt, engineers gave up on threading the enlarged waterway through the crowded city and rerouted the whole canal south of downtown, sending it across the Genesee at Olmsted-designed Genesee Valley Park instead. That left the 1842 aqueduct high, dry, and suddenly useless — a great stone trough with no water and no purpose.

What happened next is the strangest chapter in the whole story. Rather than tear the aqueduct down, the city repurposed it twice over. A road deck for Broad Street was laid atop the old span in 1922–1924, so that traffic now rolls across the bridge on the roof of a canal aqueduct. And inside — down in the drained trough where boats once floated — the city ran a subway. The Rochester Industrial & Rapid Transit Railway, built largely in the abandoned Erie Canal bed, carried passengers from December 1927 until 1956, crossing the Genesee through the belly of the very aqueduct the canal had left behind. Freight rattled through the tunnel for decades more. Cross the Broad Street Bridge today and you are standing on a stack of three transportation eras at once: a canal that became a road that hid a subway, all in one piece of 1840s masonry.

Just downstream, the Genesee produced a darker kind of fame. On November 13, 1829 — a Friday the thirteenth, as the story is fondly retold — the daredevil Sam Patch came to Rochester to leap the High Falls, a 94-foot drop in the heart of the city. Patch was the most celebrated jumper in America, a former mill hand who had made his name plunging into the gorge below Niagara and lived to bow for the crowds. At Rochester he built a platform to add another twenty-five feet to the fall and announced a second, grander jump. Thousands gathered on the banks. He stepped off, and something went wrong in the air; he struck the water badly and did not surface. His frozen body was found the next spring, downriver near the lake. The river the canal had worked so hard to cross had, in the end, the last word.

Stand at Broad Street and the layers are all there at once — the vanished ditch, the surviving aqueduct, the buried subway, and the falls just beyond where a showman made his last jump. Not sure which canal crossed here, and when? Start with our guide to the canal’s three lifetimes.