The Canal Today
After traveling in the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens did little to advance the cause of transportation—much less tourism—by canal-boat when he committed his impressions to paper. He recounted canaling experiences that were better read about than lived through. “And yet despite these oddities,” Dickens allowed, ”… there was much in this mode of traveling which I heartily enjoyed.… The fast, brisk walk upon the towing path, between [dawn] and breakfast, when every vein and artery seemed to tingle with health; the exquisite beauty of the opening day, when light came glancing off from everything; the gliding on at night so noiselessly … all these were nure delights.”
The New York State Department of Tourism couldn’t have said it better. In 1985 the state earmarked $50 million to be spent over five years to advance the cause of tourism and pleasure boating along the Erie Canal. It’s a different canal from the one built in the early 1800s, though. In the first two decades of this century, the canal was widened and deepened and, over much of its course, relocated. The expanded waterway was completed in 1918 as the New York State Barge Canal, and much of it consists of dammed sections of the Mohawk River.
Since any canal built with public funds is, by law, a public highway, recreational craft have always had a right to be on the Erie. But state officials considered them a nuisance until 1958, when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened. Capable of handling oceangoing vessels, the seaway killed commercial traffic on the Erie. One lock operator near Rochester told a newspaper reporter recently that at least two barges a week used to pass through his lock, but now “I haven’t had a dozen all season.”
Conversely, more than one hundred thousand pleasure boats used the Erie in 1985, an increase of ten thousand over 1984. If recreational use of the canal can grow that impressively through word-of-mouth, once the state starts spending its millions the Erie’s status as a public highway may even be confirmed by Sunday-evening traffic jams. Charles Dickens might have had a thought to share about that.
