Union Ship Canal (Buffalo, New York)

USA / New York / Lackawanna / Buffalo, New York
 water, invisible

The Union Ship Canal was an industrial waterway dug from 1899-1900 to provide access for lake freighters to the ore docks of the Susquehanna Iron Company, which had built a large iron mill on what would become the Southern bank of the canal. Shortly after its completion in time for the 1900 lake shipping season, the canal's Northern bank became home to a large coal transshipment facility operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad, turning the canal into a heavily trafficked waterway as demand for both products handled along its shores boomed.

Remaining a vital piece of the industrial Buffalo waterfront for the next eight decades, the Union Ship Canal's days as an industrial waterway came to an end in January 1982 with the closure of the Hanna Blast Furnace, which had operated a pig iron foundry on the Susquehanna Iron Company's mill site since the early 1910's. Coupled with the collapse of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1970's, the Union Ship Canal was left in an idle and badly polluted condition which would persist until environmental remediation efforts on the waterway and its shores began in 1999.

Today, the Union Ship Canal has undergone a major rehabilitation and remediation and now serves as the centerpiece of both the Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park and the Ship Canal Commons, a 22-acre waterfront park ringing the canal. Now enclosed on its Western end by a pedestrian bridge, the canal is no longer navigable by anything larger than a kayak, allowing much of the canal bottom to be sewn with inverted tree stumps and root systems which will provide ample shelter for juvenile lake fish species as well as anchors for native sea plants.

www.ecidany.com/budc-projects-ship-canal-commons
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Coordinates:   42°50'4"N   78°51'14"W
This article was last modified 2 years ago