Quoted Text

ROTTERDAM
Future bright at old Lock 23
Grants can now be accessed
BY TATIANA ZARNOWSKI Gazette Reporter

    Someday, local fourth-graders learning about the Erie Canal will be able to walk into a park and see a real lock from the 1800s.
    The old Lock 23 has been covered by brush and trees despite efforts twice each year recently to keep the growth at bay.
    But now the lock off Rice Road has received designation to the National Register of Historic Places, meaning the people who care about it can now access grants to turn the abandoned boat lock and surrounding area into a park and resurrect its history.
    “My wife and I used to walk down here. You’d never know that this was here,” said Frank Renna, gesturing to the two-chambered lock that was made obsolete in 1918 when the barge canal opened on the nearby Mohawk River.
    Renna, the Rotterdam Sunrise Rotary Club secretary, involved club members in clearing brush from the site and has worked with Union College history professor Andrew Morris on that initiative for three years.
    On Saturday, about 20 people from several different organizations pitched in to clean up the old lock, which was known as the “Gateway to the West” and among the busiest of the Erie Canal’s 83 locks.
    The Rotary, Union College students from the fraternity Sigma Phi, members of ECOS: The Environmental Clearinghouse, Friends of the Mohawk-Hudson Bike-Hike Trail and the town’s Highway Department worked on the site.
    Having town Supervisor Steve Thommasone involved has been a big help, Morris said.
    “His enthusiasm has been really instrumental,” Morris said.
    Town machinery was especially helpful in clearing trees and brush from the 220-by-18-foot lock.
    “People have been trying to do stuff out here in the last decade or so,” Morris said. “And it’s been onagain, off-again.”
    The canal gained attention several years ago when a Union College civil engineering professor, Andrew Wolfe, adopted it as a project and had students build a wooden pier and bright yellow locktender’s hut based on historical photos and documents. But then Wolfe left the college.
    That’s when Renna convinced Rotterdam Sunrise Rotary chapter members to adopt the project. As a town planning commission member, Renna knew about the building and convinced club members to come out and help cleanup efforts.
    “It was kind of an overwhelming project,” he admitted.
    That’s why it was nice to get the college students involved, Morris said.
    But clearing the fast-growing brush twice a year isn’t enough to make the area into a usable park, he said.
    “I ride by in June [and] I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t see anything.’ ”
    People who care about the lock project will celebrate its listing on the national register Saturday with a ceremony at 11:30 a.m. at the lock.
    In February, it received a designation from the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation as an important engineering landmark in Schenectady County.
    Next, permanent signs identifying plant life along the adjacent bike trail will be installed.
The Sunrise Rotary raised $3,200 to have the signs produced, which should be vandal-proof and have artists’ sketches of plants for easy identification.
ECOS brings local students to the trail every spring and had used temporary signs, Renna said.
“One of our members saw that and thought, ‘This is nice. We should get involved and maybe get permanent sign identifiers.’ ”
“There’s a lot of stuff that grows here wild,” said Dave Rey of Rotterdam, president of the Sunrise Rotary.
    The involved groups ultimately hope to install interpretive signs for the lock itself to explain its role in history for area grade students who learn about the canal in their elementary school curriculum.
    People strolling or riding on the bike path also will be able to stop and look at the old lock.
“The bike path is so heavily used,” Morris said. Future work might include removing a land bridge under which a water main was installed. The main is no longer used. Lock 23 was built in the late 1830s to replace smaller locks with a larger double-chambered lock. Now, it is in better shape than most of the abandoned locks in the area, Rey said.


PETER R. BARBER/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER
Union College student Jude Mason throws sticks and twigs into a pile while he and other students and members of the Sunrise Rotary Club conduct the annual spring cleanup of the lock in Rotterdam Junction Saturday.

PETER R. BARBER/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER
Charles Cummins of Rotterdam, uses a weed trimmer along the fence line of the top of Lock 23 in Rotterdam Junction Saturday, May 3, 2008.