Thirteen feet below ground, in one of many forgotten tunnels that crisscross under this Industrial Age city, is what experts are calling a tremendous discovery — part of the original Erie Canal.
Two Union College professors, Andrew Wolfe and Denis Foley, spent three months investigating the tunnel, which was buried decades after barges first plied the waters of “Clinton's Ditch” when it opened in 1825. The team was asked by the city to look into the origins of the tunnel.
On a tour of the cave-like hall on Friday, the professors now say the 500-yard tunnel includes locks 37 and 38 of the original canal. At the bottom is the foundation of the canal, carved out of shale. Above it is a wall of rough-cut blocks cemented in place, and an arched ceiling of brick built by parties unknown decades after the canal was abandoned in favor of a bigger waterway.
“This made New York City,” said Foley, an anthropology professor. “By getting over the Cohoes Falls, New York City became the leading port” in the country.
The two professors have been working on unearthing traces of the state's canal since 1999. Last October, they announced they had found Lock 1 in an industrial area of north Albany.
The lock was a later incarnation of the canal, however, one that was built in 1843 in order to widen and deepen the canal.
The original 350-mile-long Erie Canal opened in 1825, a controversial and expensive link between New York City and Buffalo that was derided by many of the nation's leaders. But it took only a few years for the canal to dramatically open up upstate New York — and through it, the Midwest — by connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.
The canal was expanded again in 1918, but the entire system began to fall into disuse with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1955.
In Cohoes, the buried locks that recently were discovered had been abandoned in 1843 with the widening of the original canal. A few decades later, that section of the canal was sold to the Cohoes Power Corp., which used water from the canal to turn giant turbines that powered the Victory Mill. The mill, one of the largest in the country at the time, made textiles, using machinery powered by the largest cast-iron turbines ever made.
An unknown time later, the locks were capped and buried. For years, the tunnel was known only by the city maintenance department, which had access by way of a metal grate and a ladder.
Although Wolfe will be leaving Union at the end of the summer to teach at the SUNY Institute of Technology in Utica, the two professors plan to keep working together, looking for more traces of the canal in Cohoes and elsewhere around the state.
Ralph Pascale, director of the city Department of Community and Economic Development, said he'd like to see the tunnel turned into a tourist attraction.
“This is huge for us,” said Pascale, standing in the tunnel with water dripping over his head. “It's a wonderful opportunity. We're looking for ways we can utilize these resources.”