Craig Williams grew up in Fayetteville, before Interstate 690 was built atop what used to be the old New York Central railroad tracks. As a child, he would ride with his siblings in the back of a station wagon on the way to their grandmother’s home in Syracuse, and he remembers being fascinated whenever they passed an Erie Canal monument in the median of Erie Boulevard, near Teall Avenue.
Built from actual blocks used in the long-buried canal, it carried two impressive bronze plaques. They explained how the boulevard was once the site of the nation-changing waterway, opened in 1825 — and how “the products of New York state’s fields and factories, from Lake Erie to the Hudson River, were carried on it.”
The scene ignited the little boy’s imagination. Williams was the kind of kid who could see, say, “the skeletons of old canal boats along Burdick Street” in Fayetteville and feel the mysterious pull of a way of life that once commanded the same landscape — and then disappeared, except for “glimmers.”
He grew up to become curator of history at the New York State Museum. He is retired now from that position, though he remains the tireless vice-president of the board of trustees for the Canal Society of New York State, a guy who routinely travels across Upstate as part of that civic passion.
What friends and colleagues emphasize, point-blank, is the kind of praise Williams always tries to dodge: They call him one of the greatest living experts on the history and legacy of the Erie Canal. That monument on Erie Boulevard was a touchstone for it all. Driving past it still brings Williams back to that sense of childhood wonder.
That only intensifies his sadness when he sees it so “forlorn.”
Designed by then-city parks commissioner William Barry, the monument was built in 1935 — about a decade after the canal was filled in. The plaques went missing years ago, an absence that former city parks commissioner Pat Driscoll recalls as going back to at least the 2000s. Exactly 200 years after the canal changed everything about what Syracuse would become, there is nothing — no interpretative markers or signs — to tell travelers what that big stack of stone blocks really means.
Owen Kerney, deputy commissioner for planning and sustainability in Syracuse City Hall, said the area around the monument was landscaped and improved — a patio added, and some benches built – during a $20 million Erie Boulevard safety and beautification project that included construction of bike lanes along the median for the Empire State Trail in Syracuse and DeWitt, several years ago.
Even so — two centuries to the month after the “wedding of the waters” in New York City formally opened the canal — a child passing by that monument today has zero reason to feel any burst of awe or imagination.
As Williams reflected: “There’s nothing to say this was the Erie Canal.”
True enough — though some historians hoping to improve that situation represent two Syracuse museums Williams remembers with deep affection.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several conversations with Natalie Stetson, director of the Erie Canal Museum, and Derrick Pratt, the museum’s director of education — as well as with Lisa Romano Moore, executive director of the Onondaga Historical Association, and Bob Searing, the association’s curator of history.
One of those sessions, with all those officials, included a journey to the monument in a cold-to-the-bone October rain. We tried to ignore that weather while admiring how the name “Kasson,” representing a 19th century contractor who supplied Onondaga limestone from the Split Rock Quarry, is still clearly engraved in one block of stone, along with a year: 1848.
Those museum leaders agree, enthusiastically, that some kind of interpretative signage is needed to tell travelers exactly what that monument represents. They even dreamed out loud about using the stone walls as a canvas for, say, an historical light show — something to send the message that amid the commercial sprawl and parking lots of the boulevard, “this was a special place,” as Kerney puts it.
They intend to work together in an attempt to find the plaques — and they were supportive when I mentioned I might call David Haas, the beloved “Syracusehistory” Instagram star who has hunted down missing artifacts before. In a particularly fitting effort, he located a lost plaque for the downtown “Rock of the Marne” memorial, a tribute to recall this week for Veterans Day, since that monument honors soldiers of the 38th Infantry Regiment whose desperate stand helped decide World War I.
When I spoke with Haas on Sunday about the canal monument, let’s just say this: He was intrigued.
As for leaders from the OHA and the Canal Museum, they say there’s powerful 21st century symmetry in a monument reminding the community of the transformative repercussions of the canal, both positive and damaging — at a time when Micron’s proposed chipmaking factories in nearby Clay would profoundly change the region, if they’re built.
For Stetson and Moore, a quieter aspect of their museum alliance is also the idea of putting to rest — once and for all — any last flickering iota of an institutional estrangement that was particularly fierce just after the 1950s rescue of the Weighlock Building, almost doomed by then-impending construction of Interstate 81.
The civic effort to save that landmark — built in 1850 as a canal weighing station — helped ignite the preservation movement in Syracuse. But it also raised the immediate issue, more than 60 years ago, of what to do with that historic building, once it was safe.
In 1962, according to clippings in Stetson’s files, seven trustees of the new canal museum destined for the Weighlock, owned then by Onondaga County, quit in a fury after Frank B. Thompson was appointed director. Those leaving included Richard Wright, then-director of the OHA, who — according to clippings and letters of the time — had believed for years the Weighlock would fall under OHA jurisdiction.
The result was a long and initially bitter separation between two museums for whom collaboration made tremendous sense. Williams was deeply familiar with both: Embraced by Wright and his wife Carolyn as a young researcher at the OHA, Williams eventually worked for Thompson as a curator at the Erie Canal Museum.
Decades later, Williams speaks with warmth and gratitude of both institutions — and is pleased to hear how closely they’re working together.
Ask anyone who’s been around Syracuse for a long time, and they’ll have memories of how intense that separation was, years ago. The division wore off as the decades went by — Searing, who arrived at the OHA in 2017, said he’s heard the stories but never saw any hint of hostility — but Stetson and Moore both say the organizations are now working together as closely as they ever have.
They offered this reflection: If you include Lauren Kochian of the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology and the Everson Museum of Art’s Elizabeth Dunbar, the four major downtown Syracuse museums, for the first time ever, all have women as their top administrators.
The bottom line, said Moore and Stetson: They’ve forged a tight working alliance. Last month, for instance, the OHA chose the canal museum as the main honoree for a special “Our Glorious Workplaces” gala that celebrated the bicentennials of the canal and the village of Syracuse with a gathering beneath a big tent at Clinton Square.
It was a memorable night, which both organizations see as a template.
“It’s about time,” Stetson said.
One immediate goal: Working together to find the missing plaques for the Erie Canal monument — which they hope weren’t destroyed or melted down — then coming up with something striking so travelers, by car or bike or foot, know what all of it represents.
Stetson and Searing say there are only five spots where you can actually touch remnants of the original canal within the Syracuse city borders — which, if you think of it, would come together as a good biking or hiking tour:
In addition to the Weighlock Building itself, those spots include excavated pits that reveal old canal walls at Clinton Square; the stone walls of an Erie Boulevard West railroad bridge, in the West End, that once contained the waters of the canal; a hidden and architecturally dramatic Onondaga Creek stone culvert that still bears 21st century Erie Boulevard downtown traffic, and really ought to be a celebrated part of Creekwalk – though state transportation spokesperson TeNesha Murphy says a new pedestrian overlook will allow easier viewing of that bridge, as part of the impending downtown Interstate 81 transformation …
And then there is the prominent stone memorial on the boulevard, near Teall. It was erected in 1935 behind William Barry’s dream that every child might feel the same wonder that would soon inspire the young Craig Williams, this sense of awe that what now serves as a busy commercial boulevard was once the route for a waterway, built by sweat and mule and shovel, that changed a nation.
To feel that way, as Williams said, requires knowing what it is.
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