the Way of the Turtle

The Sad State of the Erie Canal Village
Friday, August 19, 2016

For as long as I've been familiar with the Old Erie Canal State Park (16+ years?) I've been vaguely aware that the Erie Canal Village is at the eastern end of the trail in Rome. Never actually made it that far before, though I did get within a few miles on one ride. In any case I knew that it was a living history park & museum, basically replicating a canal town along the Clinton's Ditch Erie Canal, and I'd always imagined it was a lot like the Genesee Country Village near Rochester (another place I've never actually visited, but I've seen it when visiting the Genesee Country Nature Center right next door) or like Mystic Seaport down in Connecticut (which I visited a long time ago on an elementary school trip.) I wasn't planning to tour the Erie Canal Village today, but I figured I'd at least finally get to see it as I rode through the area.

It was quite a surprise then to pull up and find an empty parking lot, a fairly shabby and definitely closed visitor's center (complete with a sign in the window giving the hours that the village is supposedly open), a bridge across the old canal barred by a locked gate, and a crumbling packet boat "docked" next to the bridge. Not at all what I was expecting and a major disappointment.

A bit of research once I got home revealed that while the site was originally owned by the city of Rome, roughly 20 years ago it was turned over to private management. It seems to have limped along until recently, though it seems a number of the buildings were assessed as unsafe and closed. Over the last two years a new company expressed interest in reviving the site, but seems to have run into all sorts of problems in doing so - after having the grounds open for several festivals last summer, it never re-opened this year. It seems like a major point of conflict is the removal and storage of the various historic artifacts that are in the buildings so the buildings can be renovated - the artifacts are owned by the city, which says they can't be removed before being inventoried, and there's no place safe on site to do the inventory, and without removal of the artifacts the owners can't renovate, etc etc. A recent  summary of some of the issues can be found here.

And so a piece of New York State history sits there, rotting away. As of two years ago, the estimated cost of bringing the site back up to code was something like $2 million... let's face it, that's not likely to happen any time soon, unless someone with deep pockets and a interest in local history takes an interest and decides to fund the project.

It's particularly sad in light of next year being the 200th anniversary of the start of construction of the canal.

JMH