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

Water provides the central theme for Patrick McGreevy's geographical, historical, and at times overtly autobiographical narrative of Lockport, New York's origins, rapid nineteenth-century growth, and gradual twentieth-century decline. McGreevy, professor of history at the American University of Beirut and a Lockport native, describes in detail how Ice Age glaciers and rivers shaped the terrain of western New York State and provided a natural right-of-way that the Erie Canal's planners would use millennia later for their path between the lakes and the ocean. The flight of canal locks and the deep rock cut employed to pierce the Mountain Ridge, an escarpment that separated Lake Erie from the Atlantic Ocean watershed, brought the community of Lockport into being and shaped its identity as a technologically progressive and economically successful inland port. At the same time, McGreevy's narrative reveals the darker side of Lockport's commercial success. Class tensions, violence, postindustrial decline, and massive watershed degradation are all factors, he argues, that challenge the progressive master-narrative of the Erie Canal's creation and its central place in American history. Instead, McGreevy "argues against the inevitability of U.S. expansion, the inevitability of the Erie Canal, and the inevitability of the strangely forgotten place where the canal was completed, Lockport" (p. xiv).

The opening chapters focus on the geographical and social factors that influenced the location and development of Lockport in the early nineteenth century. Planners took advantage of natural watercourses along much of the length of the canal, but they faced amajor challenge when they encountered the Mountain Ridge. Engineer David Thomas finally settled on amassive rock cut, combined with side-by-side five-tiered locks, to transcend the sixty-foot elevation difference between Lake Erie and the Genesee River. The community of Lockport grew up around this massive construction project and serviced an army of itinerant Irish and African-American navvies involved in the excavation and construction of the "Deep Cut" and the "Lockport Five." While much of this part of the book is based on secondary sources, McGreevy does include an intriguing discussion of working-class life in Lockport, the site of two major labor riots during the waterway's construction. Using newspaper accounts and court documents, he details how ethnic and class tensions shaped an uneasy relationship between canal workers and Lockport's small, but prosperous, middle class.

McGreevy segues from Lockport's genesis story into a chapter-length discussion of literary and artistic representations of Lockport and the Erie Canal in nineteenth-century travelogues and artwork. He explores the various metaphors and concepts used by writers to explain the significance of the canal and its massive locks for American economic and social expansion. For numerous writers and artists, the canal represented the ultimate machine in the garden, and Lockport stood as a technologically sublime monument far surpassing the natural sublimity of nearby Niagara Falls. McGreevy attempts to deconstruct these metaphors and situate them within a broader nineteenth-century narrative of progress and manifest destiny.

McGreevy concludes his work by discussing the history of Lockport from the mid-1820s through the end of the twentieth century. He offers an intriguing, but far too brief, look at the industries that developed in Lock-port to take advantage of its inexpensive hydropower and ready access to transportation resources. His analysis of inventor Birdsill Holly's achievements in centralized steam heating and fire hydrant technology and the rapid growth of the Harrison Radiator Division of GeneralMotors Corporation at Lockport hints at the community's rich industrial heritage, but Mc-Greevy's primary focus on the social, economic, and environmental decline of Lockport into rust belt oblivion dominates the narrative.

Stairway to Empire builds on many of the themes that McGreevy developed in Imagining Niagara, his 1994 historical and environmental study of Niagara Falls. Historians of technology will appreciate his efforts to highlight the interconnectedness of environmental, social...