A Man, a Plan, a Canal... Buffalo?

How many times have I taken cousins of this picture? Welcome to Love Canal.

Today's theme is holes in the ground—ditches, primarily: Erie, Love, and one you can't quite see that is crucial to the continuing functioning of America as a First World country. New York and backhoes: puhhhhhfect together.

That the opening of the Erie Canal was one of the great turning points in American history—the moment when water power, capitalist ambition, and some convenient geography combined to connect the hinterlands and the coastal ports like never before—is not a thesis I need to belabor. The canal made the country at once larger, with Midwestern products making their way east with never before seen ease, and smaller. Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Duluth—all newly accessible to the East Coast. It may look modest and underused today...

...but it was the railroad and the highway avant la lettre. We took a look at a road that goes under the canal near Medina, and we also got a nice look at the canal locks that give Lockport its name.

The Erie Canal was the greatest canal of its time, but it sure wasn't the only one. In the late nineteenth century, one William Love thought that digging a canal from the Niagara River at the south end of the town of Niagara Falls, New York, around the Falls themselves would prove to be a gold mine. He might have been right, had he not run short of funds and had not Congress made it illegal to do exactly what Love intended to, in order to preserve the flow of water over the Falls. Consarned gummint meddlers!

The short ditch that Love left filled with water, was used as a dump, and became a more or less toxic wetland. Well, that's the American Dream, isn't it? It isn't? Perhaps I was misinformed. Anyway, said wetland was eventually used as the final resting place for an ungodly assortment of capitalist chemicals and by-products, exposure to which could give you a third nipple on your ear. But you know, everything's got be somewhere.

The major problem with the Love Canal site had its roots in the decision in the early 1950s to fill it all in and build houses and a school on it. America in that era thought it could do anything. For the first couple decades, people apparently didn't think all that much about the weird black fluids leaching out of the ground and the nauseating odors. But in the late 1970s things took a much worse turn. Before you knew it, the neighborhood had been almost entirely bulldozed, and the bulk of it fenced off as permanently irremediable and uninhabitable. And here we are today.

What the hell does this have to do with baseball? What can I say—we've been visiting America all these years, the good, the bad, and the eliminated. You can't really appreciate the goodness of baseball without also giving some thought to its occasionally wretched context. They're not actually playing baseball on the field that is now Love Canal, but in my mind we kind of all are.

Overawed by an intake tower

Before we cruised Love Canal, we sought out the markers of an actually existing canal that was built under the town of Niagara Falls in the late 1950s by the frequently maligned Robert Moses. On the Niagara River just upstream of the Falls stand two monolithic and unmarked intake towers, which mark the spot where ungodly amounts of water are diverted around the Falls, just like Love envisioned, but this time with government license.

Really, there's a huge canal down there.

At the time, this stop was mildly disappointing—or, rather, impervious to full understanding—but it loomed larger on our return two days later to the Robert Moses Niagara Power Station (which will have to wait for coverage of that day, someday). Suffice to say that without these intake towers and this impossible-to-see canal, we'd have a decidedly weaker power grid than we do right now. So once again, let me say, on behalf of America, thanks, Robert Moses.

Other stops this day included Buffalo's Silo City, which is being very slowly hipsterfied...

The Nickel Plate Line was a mighty good road.

...and the home of the Prophet Isaiah.

Really one of the nicer houses-as-art we've seen, even if they're a bit ho-hum by now.

Our eventual destination was Erie, Pennsylvania, to see the Sea Wolves.

[obligatory baseball picture goes here]

Erie did not reveal all that much to recommend it, though we did learn that (a) just like in New Orleans, open drinking of alcoholic beverages in the streets is possible there; (b) baseball is a love...

Ainsworth Field, Erie, PA, speaks truth.

...and (c) that if you want to find Billy Hughes, it shouldn't be too difficult.

That's mostly it from Erie, which, incidentally, was not named after the canal.