Lock One Found Whole: Albany Dig Confirms the Erie Canal’s Original Doorway Survives 18 Inches Underground

ALBANY, N.Y. — For more than a century it was a rumor under a parking lot. This month it became a fact. Archaeologists working in the shadow of Albany’s Central Warehouse have uncovered the southeast end of the original Erie Canal’s Lock One — and confirmed that the structure where the Erie Canal met the Hudson River survives, essentially intact, just 18 inches beneath the grass.

“It’s phenomenal,” said SUNY Polytechnic Institute civil engineering professor Andy Wolfe, who is leading the dig. “It’s in one piece. We found the whole lock. It ends where it’s supposed to end. It started where it was supposed to start.”

Twenty Years Between Two Ends of the Same Lock

Wolfe first exposed the lock’s north end more than two decades ago, when a 2002 excavation turned up its top stones. What followed was slower work: historic maps, surveys, magnetic imaging, and ground-penetrating radar, all pointing toward where the rest of the masonry should lie. This month, under a state-issued permit, a team of archaeologists and SUNY Poly students working with the nonprofit Albany Waterway Inc. dug at the predicted spot between the Central Warehouse and Interstate 787. The lock walls were exactly where the instruments said they would be.

Lock One was the eastern doorway of Clinton’s Ditch — the first lift on a 363-mile waterway that opened in 1825 and remade New York into the Empire State. It was buried and forgotten after the modern Barge Canal rerouted the eastern terminus north to Cohoes, leaving Albany’s original canal basin under fill, rail yards, and eventually highway ramps.

A Thirty-Year Vision, Suddenly Viable

The excavation is the first hard test of a plan the artist Len Tantillo began sketching more than thirty years ago. Phase one calls for restoring Lock One, building a marina and public plaza around it, and stitching the whole site into the Empire State Trail. Later phases would carry new canalways further into downtown Albany.

“We knew it was here, but we didn’t know the extent of it,” Tantillo said. “We decided that a good move would be find the other end, find out how many of the stones still exist — and that’s what this is about.” Albany Waterway chair B.J. Costello points to Buffalo’s Canalside as the proof of concept: a reclaimed canal terminus that now draws more than a million visitors a year and has drawn over $200 million in private investment and roughly 1,000 jobs.

The dig itself was funded by an $85,000 grant from the Albany County Legislature, which also covers a feasibility study. Officials who turned out to mark the find included Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy, Albany Mayor Dr. Dorcey Applyrs, Assemblymember John T. McDonald III, State Canal Corporation Director Ben Walsh, and Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor Executive Director Bob Radliff. State Senator Patricia Fahy tied the discovery to Governor Hochul’s $400 million Capital City investment, calling it part of a “historic transformation of the Capital Region.”

Intact Is Not the Same as Shovel-Ready

A sound lock removes the project’s biggest unknown, not its biggest obstacle. An engineering firm retained by Albany Waterway estimates phase one alone would cost more than $200 million, most of it from county and state sources. Assembling the site would require acquiring nearly six acres from seven private owners, through negotiation or eminent domain. Albany Waterway, backed by some 1,200 volunteers, has asked McCoy and Applyrs to lead that effort.

“Part of what we’re doing is seeing if this is a viable lock, and since it is, now the question becomes: how do we get the money?” Wolfe said. “That’s the big question, but that’s the politicians. I don’t have $200 million.”

In the canal’s bicentennial era, the find carries weight beyond Albany. By one common estimate, as many as 40 percent of Americans have ancestors who traveled the Erie Canal — immigrants, abolitionists, suffragists, and westward migrants who passed through this very chamber of stone. Wolfe will keep excavating weekdays from 1 to 4 p.m. through the end of August, and says visitors are welcome to come watch the Empire State’s first doorstep come back into the light.