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Erie Canal
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Dewitt Clinton was also governor of New York. The video in this section tells how important he was in the development of the Erie Canal, which was instrumental in the rise of New York City.
 
 
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  The most important interpretation of why New York City becomes the dominant city in the world is the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal is both the result of nature, or God, and the work of men. New York potentially had this low–level, all–water route to the West. If you go up the Hudson River to Albany, Troy, Renselear, and hang a left to Buffalo, there's a valley, the Mohawk Valley, that runs all across New York. It is one of the few gaps in a line of mountains that block the east coast from what is now the Midwest. Unfortunately no river exactly follows this valley. The Erie Canal took elements of rivers and dug a canal to connect everything so that Buffalo would be connected by water with New York City.

The Erie Canal is a relatively unimpressive ditch, never more than forty feet wide, often less, usually less than four feet deep, so you could have walked it if you wanted to. But the Erie Canal had a greater impact on the development of the United States economically than any other single public improvement probably until the passage of the interstate highway system in 1956. It was an enormous success, but they took a chance when they started building it. The political issue was who should pay for it? DeWitt Clinton, who was the Governor, was important. He pushed the project through the New York State Legislature and New York State undertook what was for the time in the first quarter of the 19th Century, a staggering bond program to borrow money to build this canal. They began digging in 1817, and they finished it in 1825. It was so successful that they paid off the bonds within a few years, the entire cost.

Why was it so successful? Well, it was successful because the cheapest way then and now to move goods is by water. The Erie Canal relied on a series of locks, because Lake Erie is higher than the Hudson River. Let's say we have two bathtubs, so one boat is at the bottom and wants to get to the top. You open this gate and close this one, so that the water will be level here. The boat floats into the lock. Then you close the gate behind it at the level it came in on. You lock that gate and you slowly raise the gate on the other side, which lets water in from the higher level, the boat rises to the higher level. When it's up there then it just floats out. And that's the way you equalize water height. It takes a lot of time to go through the locks, but it was still faster than going by land because one person can pull a lot more stuff, or one horse can pull a lot more stuff, on water than on land.

How much did it drop the cost of travel? If it cost one dollar to move a bushel of wheat from Buffalo to New York in 1815, it cost only five cents to move that same bushel of wheat in 1825. The price of moving goods falls by ninety–five percent, which means that the Erie Canal becomes a kind of highway, a highway between New York and the Middle West. It opens up the Middle West, so that if you were an immigrant to the New World in let's say 1835, you went up the Hudson River and across the Erie Canal.

Anyway, the immediate result was the growth of cities all along the Canal. Places like Rochester, Syracuse, Schenectady and Buffalo go from being villages of relative insignificance to important cities. No one disputes the importance of the Erie Canal. But the Erie Canal does not really answer the question of New York's growth, because think about it for a minute. The Erie Canal opens in 1825, but New York surpasses Philadelphia as the largest city in 1810, 15 years earlier.

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Content excerpted from The History of the City of New York: Colonial City; Revolutionary Battleground, with Ken Jackson.