Transportation and Commerce

Rochester long served as a crossing place, from the Seneca fording place to the aqueduct and bridge. The Erie Canal helped the city grow, but by 1919 its downtown route had become dangerous and congested with horse, trolley, automobile, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic, and in 1912 Main Street was known as the "Aisle of Death." The canal was rerouted out of the city, leaving a right-of-way that the city used beginning in 1921 to build a subway in the old canal bed, completed in 1927, while a second level over the canal aqueduct was built for automobiles and named Broad Street. The subway operated from 1927 to 1956. In an early twentieth-century view looking south, South Avenue, the aqueduct, Erie Canal, Johnson and Seymour Dam, and Genesee River are visible; the Public Library stood near the canal's right-angle turn, and the subway later ran under the library through the canal bed. The Osburn House hotel was demolished in 1959 for the Broad Street extension, and an expanded public library was built on the site in the 1990s. A canal boat stood in the weigh lock in 1915, where the Erie Canal's weigh lock building determined tolls by comparing a boat's registered empty weight with its loaded weight, and a nearby warehouse, once Cheney Stove Works, was said by canal boat captains to be haunted because wind whistled through its broken windows. Around 1905 to 1910, the Court Street Bridge carried wagons, cars, and a trolley over the Genesee River between the Lehigh Valley Railroad station and the Erie Railroad station. The Genesee River feeder, originally intended to bring water from the river into the Erie Canal, became a bypass for boats entering the canal from the river. Castletown, a pioneer settlement built where river rapids blocked farther northward travel, once prospered by transferring cargo from boats to wagons bound for the Erie and Genesee Valley canals or Lake Ontario, but lost that business when river boats began using the feeder and is now part of the city's 19th Ward.

Rochester, New York · United States