Stairway of Empire: Lockport, the Erie Canal, and the Shaping of America (History)

by Patrick McGreevy

Publisher: State University of New York Press; Reprint edition (July 2nd, 2005).

Hardcover, 309 pages

“For many, Lockport clearly functioned as a symbol of art, a futuristic emblem of the amazing things being accomplished by human ingenuity. This was clear in the rhetoric surrounding the canal’s opening celebration, and we have already seen a number of travelers’ accounts that equate Lockport with art. Caroline Gilman wrote that ‘here, the great Erie Canal has defied nature and used it like a toy.’”

Much was said in the early 19th century of the little city that became known as Lockport. Once upon a time it was a bustling city, full of trade and industry. Now it is sinkhole of human trash and indolence. The once great aspirations and artifacts of their proud ancestors have been allowed to decay and rot away in a whirlwind of human waste, alcoholism, and drug abuse. The current population, a direct product of chemical abuse and inbreeding, are like Lovecraft characters from The Shadow over Innsmouth, barely recognizable as human and unable to communicate beyond one syllable words. And I should know, my mother is from there. I have a host of bizarre cousins, running about with deformities, nibbling like rats on the corner of papers, and infesting this ghost of greatness.

One of the locks in the city.

The development of the city Lockport is tied, like all of Western New York, to the construction of the Erie Canal. In fact, you might say that the entirety of that state, up to the present day was fundamentally shaped by this monumental construction. Both physically and ethnically, as many of the laboring races (primarily Irish and Welsh) settled down in the places created by the canal. The city of Lockport itself was founded around the creation a double row of locks (one set for raising and the other for lowering) on the waterway. For those who don’t know, a water lock is a method of raising and lowering boats between stretches of water of different levels on the canal. The distinguishing feature of a lock is a fixed chamber in which the water level can be added to or removed from. This allows a boat to be moved up and down treacherous drops.

Essentially there isn’t much to this story. Not much drama, just men planning an audacious project, on which the city was one stop. The author lets a lot of other people’s work do the heavy lifting for him, and then stretches out the material as far as he could. The last fifty pages of text (not the appendixes) could easily be jettisoned. The reality is that there wasn’t much to talk about. Even the two workers riots just didn’t have enough documentation to add more beyond the fact that they occurred.

Opening of the Erie Canal

The author tries to hard to dredge up some social justice relevancy in his findings. It’s obvious he’s grasping desperately around looking from some emotional racial foothold on which he can make a grand statement. But he can’t find it, so he makes a lot of little snide remarks about the kind acts that other’s performed back during the time of the construction, implying that they could’ve done more. Overall, it comes across as a lazy work on a topic of minor interest (even the locals of the city didn’t care enough to buy the book).

           For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.