210 Market St

The Lockport Locks represent one of the greatest engineering achievements of nineteenth-century America — the solution to the most dramatic engineering challenge on the entire 363-mile Erie Canal. When surveyors laid out the canal route across New York State in the 1810s, they confronted a seemingly insurmountable obstacle at Lockport: the Niagara Escarpment, a sheer limestone ridge rising 60 feet above the canal level below. Engineers Benjamin Wright and Nathan Roberts devised a solution of breathtaking boldness: a double flight of five paired locks — one for eastbound traffic, one for westbound — cut directly through the escarpment's solid limestone bedrock.

Completed in 1825 as part of the original Erie Canal, the "Flight of Five" locks raised or lowered boats the full 60-foot height of the escarpment in a single dramatic sequence. The locks were hand-cut from the solid limestone ridge, a feat accomplished by hundreds of immigrant workers — many of them newly arrived Irish laborers — over several years of brutal labor with only hand tools and black powder.

The limestone cut through the escarpment, still visible today, is itself an extraordinary artifact: a canyon up to 30 feet deep and nearly a mile long, its walls showing the marks of hand drilling and powder blasting from 1823. The original 1825 lock structures, though later modified and supplemented, established the industrial character that gives Lockport its name and identity.

The locks attracted visitors from the moment of their completion, and the town of Lockport grew up almost overnight to serve the traffic they generated. Today the Erie Canal Museum in Lockport and the adjacent Lockport Cave and Underground Boat Ride preserve the history of the locks, while active modern locks continue to lift and lower recreational boats on the current Erie Canal.