announcer: Major funding for "America's Stairway" was provided by the Reid Group, the Grigg Lewis Foundation, Basil Automotive Group, and Roth Consulting Group.

Additional funding provided by... For a complete list of funders, visit AmericasStairway.com.

[birds chirping] ♪♪♪ David Stockton: As a school kid, I remember the canal as just a strip of olive green water that divided the city and, you know, all the bridges you would cross to get to the other side.

I always thought of Lockport as the city of bridges.

Patrick McGreevy: If you go back to the early 19th century, it was kind of a place where people stopped and looked and contemplated and kind of had a dialogue about what America meant, what progress meant.

Sara Capen: Whether it's used for recreation, whether it's used for commercial purposes, the Erie Canal stands consistently as a testament to progress.

Craig Bacon: It brought prosperity, people.

It brought the world.

That's what brought Lockport to life.

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, I think in America there's always been this tension between the idea of progress and then a more community-oriented spirit of place where people who live there have a sort of spiritual connection to their place.

Peter Welsby: When I first came to Lockport, it didn't take me long to realize that Lockport existed because of the canal; and I remember one day just stopping at the locks and looking down and realizing there was something there beyond the navigable canal, and I think it was then that I just thought that's something special.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ narrator: Lockport, New York is a small town of about 20,000 people with a proud industrial past.

It's uniquely centered about 30 miles east of Niagara Falls and 30 miles north of Buffalo, where the Erie Canal runs like an artery through the heart of its downtown.

It's a city whose origin story was blasted from rock and built with the hands of farmers and immigrant labor.

For Americans in the 19th century, it was a place that revealed both the promise and complexity of progress.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ narrator: The Erie Canal when first built, it was an unimpressive 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide, but its impact on the nation was profound.

It opened the Midwest to commerce and settlement, helped accelerate the pace of the nation's industrial and economic growth, and made New York City America's preeminent international port and financial center.

The idea of a canal across New York State was strongly opposed by both presidents Jefferson and Madison.

Jefferson had ridiculed the idea as a little short of madness.

Facing political opposition, financial battles, and daunting natural barriers, New York governor DeWitt Clinton willed it into reality with no federal assistance.

Spanning over 360 miles across New York State, the canal was dug mostly by manual labor.

It required the construction of 83 locks to navigate elevation changes and 18 aqueducts to cross waterways.

It was America's first major public works project and a celebrated achievement for the fledgling nation.

Patrick: If you go back to the early 19th century, all of the cities along the East Coast were trying to find a route into the interior and at that time canals were the best way to do it.

However, many of the cities besides New York were facing the Appalachian ridges.

So if you look at a topographical map of New York State, you can see there is this one gap in the Appalachian Mountains.

Carol Sheriff: People talked about it in terms of that God had left a gap in the Appalachian Mountains there because he wanted for Americans to have an opportunity to prove their mettle and to show what their their new nation based on republicanism was capable of producing.

Tom Chambers: The natural assets of New York allowed for the expansion westward that no one else had and that was our birthright, something that had been provided to us by the--a higher power.

Now, of course, the canal goes through area that is part of the Haudenosaunee land.

And so when you start to have land speculators, large corporations like the Holland Land Company that--with millions of dollars of backing from overseas capital purchased land and then resold it, that meant the Haudenosaunee gonna occupy this land in a very, very different way.

narrator: The first legislation for a canal in New York State was introduced in 1785 while the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy still governed much of their ancestral homelands; lands that housed organized villages, lands that contained hunting grounds, lands for growing crops, lands that provided traditional medicines, lands with rivers and streams that provided fish, lands that were essential to their traditions and way of life.

Meredith Alberta Palmer: What they needed to do was make sure that the United States government had jurisdiction over these lands.

So they rested title from indigenous people with the Treaty of Big Tree in 1797 and individually sold plots through the Holland Land Company, which was a consortium of six Dutch investing houses.

The US was not made state by state, the US was made county by county.

narrator: To private and public interests, the Haudenosaunee were seen as an impediment to the progress of New York and the nation and through a series of often suspect treaties indigenous territories were systematically taken.

By 1817, much of the Haudenosaunee lands had been appropriated; and in April of that year the Canal Act was passed, allowing canal commissioners to raise the money for construction using New York State credit and temporary taxes.

Three months later, on July 4th work began in Rome, New York.

Over the next 8 years, forests were cleared, mountains reshaped, and rivers crossed.

Brad Utter: It was a contour canal, so it was designed to follow the path of the geography, the landscape.

In little falls you see the canal goes right up along the side of the cliff and the rocks, and it's cut right into the wall.

So they used one side of the mountain as a side of the canal and the other side is on the edge.

And if you look over to the side, there's the Mohawk River flowing underneath.

And then you've got different aqueducts that cross rivers.

Aqueducts have been around for centuries, but to build them in an area where it's hard to get supplies, it's hard to get labor would have been very difficult.

narrator: At the western end of New York State on the shores of Lake Erie was the village of Buffalo.

At its harbor is where the canal would terminate and connect with the Great Lakes.

In close proximity to the village was the Seneca Buffalo Creek Reservation, which had been established under the Treaty of Big Tree in 1797.

Knowing the canal's terminus would eventually become a major port for commerce and trade, land speculators ratcheted up the pressure on the Seneca to cede their land and ultimately finish what the Treaty of Big Tree had started: the removal of indigenous peoples from their lands.

And through documented instances of bribery, intimidation, and deception, in 1838 a treaty was negotiated.

It was eventually ratified 2 years later.

Meredith: The 1838 Buffalo Creek Treaty determined that all land of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, which is what we now know as Buffalo and a little larger, and also the Cattaraugus Seneca Reserve, the Allegheny Seneca Reserve, Oil Springs, and Tonawanda were all to be no longer sovereign indigenous land and that all Seneca were to be removed to Kansas within 5 years of the signing of the treaty.

The Seneca fought this tooth and nail and within 4 years they had gained back much of these lands by fighting for this, but they did not gain back, of course, the Buffalo Creek Reservation.

narrator: As New York State maneuvered to take back the Buffalo Creek Reservation, workers and engineers faced the greatest construction challenge on the entire length of the canal.

Up to this point, they had overcome swamplands, forests, and multiple changes in elevation; but now at the western end of the state standing between them and the canal's terminus at Buffalo and Lake Erie was the identifying feature of the area's landscape: a massive ridge of solid rock called the Niagara Escarpment, the same escarpment that formed the falls of Niagara.

On average, the escarpment rises between 250 and 1,000 feet, except for one unique area.

At a remote frontier settlement just north of Buffalo, the rise was 60 feet.

Still, a daunting challenge.

The year was 1821, 4 years after construction of the canal began, and soon more than 1,000 workers would descend on the area.

The settlement would become the most famous port on the Erie Canal: Lockport.

The past four years of labor would pale in comparison.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ narrator: A canal lock is technology that dates back centuries.

They're used to move boats up or down through a change in elevation by raising or lowering the level of water in a locked chamber.

Before building locks to overcome the escarpment, workers first had to confront the challenge of carving out a 7-mile channel through it in order to be at the same level as the headwaters of Lake Erie.

The first 3 miles were through solid rock to depths of 30 feet.

The effort would come to be known as the deep cut.

Patrick: The big task here was creating a channel right through that escarpment to keep it at the level of Lake Erie.

So this was the biggest job in Western New York, was building this channel.

narrator: It was a massive undertaking as laborers were faced with the seemingly impossible task of removing thousands of tons of rock, and it would prove dangerous as well as deadly.

[explosion] narrator: Workers blasted through the escarpment using volatile black powder.

Small stones rattled down like hail while large boulders killed or maimed.

Patrick: Hundreds of people died.

It was like a meat grinder.

narrator: As Edna Smith, an early settler in the village of Lockport, wrote, "On some days, the list of killed and wounded would be almost like that of a battlefield."

The soldiers in this battle were mostly the Irish.

Brad: There wasn't that large scale immigration of Irish during the original construction, but out of all the immigrant groups the Irish were probably the largest number.

And so you get a large concentration of Irish workers in Lockport, and the connection is no one else wants to do it.

Tom: Immigrants were disposable labor at best, and, you know, think again that this is the most brutal, the most difficult kind of labor.

There were significant numbers of deaths.

And so you pick the lowest rung of the social ladder to do this work.

Irish immigrants were as low as it could get in the north in most cases, so using them for brutal labor was considered part of the acceptable social structure of the time.

narrator: In 1819 near Utica, New York, Irish laborer Timothy Gegan wrote home to his sister: "I don't know, dear sister, if any of us will survive.

Six of my tent mates died this very day and were stacked like cordwood until they could be taken away.

Otherwise, I am fine.

Your loving brother Timothy."

It took almost 4 years, but when the blasting was over and the smoke had cleared, more than 1,000 laborers had removed upwards of 300,000 tons of some of the hardest rock in New York State.

It was the summer of 1823 and as work finished on the deep cut construction began on what would be the canal's crowning engineering triumph: the Flight of Five.

Canal engineer William Webster wrote, "Here at Lockport, we are about to tackle the most difficult portion of the canal, which will require five double locks to enable barges to ascend and descend side by side thus conquering the Niagara escarpment.

The five double locks will look like a waterfall."

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ narrator: The change in elevation at Lockport was unlike anything engineers and laborers had faced before.

Boats would need to climb 60 feet over the sheer rock face of the Niagara Escarpment to reach the level of Lake Erie.

Patrick: Previously, most locks were--had pounds in between them, like little ponds.

So a boat could come up, it could pull over to the side.

Other boats could come down.

But it was too steep to do that.

And so the first engineer to make a plan here was named James Geddes; and Geddes came up with a different plan, is to have combined locks, staircase locks.

He proposed eight of them going up the escarpment.

The problem with eight locks in a row with no ponds or no pounds between them is it's going to slow down traffic.

You got to wait until the--one boat goes all the way up before another boat can go all the way down.

Then along came David Thomas.

He came up with a new innovation.

So he proposed two side-by-side staircases locked; one for up, one for down, like two one-way streets.

As far as I can tell, this may be the first time anywhere that someone created a divided transportation system.

narrator: Nathan Roberts designed and oversaw construction of what was at the time a radical new idea in canal technology.

A self-taught itinerant math teacher turned canal engineer, Roberts took Thomas' concept and created one of the most spectacular examples of engineering on the entire canal.

It would take thousands of hand-chiseled stone blocks to form the lock chambers and other structural features along with hundreds of tons of white oak to build the foundations and miter gates.

Completed in the summer of 1825, Lockport's Flight of Five was to many America's stairway, opening the nation's interior for commerce, settlement, and expansion.

Patrick: This is like the golden spike, the last place where the canal was completed.

People knew that.

When you reach the top of the Lockport Locks, you're at the level of Lake Erie.

People knew that.

And they knew once you got into the Great Lakes, eventually you could get all the way to Chicago.

There were 20 other cities named after Lockport mostly to the west, which shows that, you know, people knew Lockport.

It was--some people's minds, they--the most important piece of technology in North America.

Brad: Because of these locks which were man-made and monumental, but I think that the Americans that are seeing this hadn't seen other examples.

This is us.

This is American.

narrator: A celebration was held to mark the completion of the Flight of Five.

The event was memorialized with the placing of two capstones.

Today, only one survives and is kept in the New York State Museum's storage facility.

♪♪♪ [drilling] male: This was at the top of the flight, and it greeted visitors coming east; and then there was--the other one was at the bottom of the flight, greeting boaters coming west.

"The Erie Canal 362 miles in length was commenced by the 4th of July, 1817 and completed in the year 1825 at an expense of about $7 million and was constructed exclusively by the citizens of the state of New York."

narrator: Traveling west to Niagara Falls, English artist Thomas Woodcock copied into his journal the words of the lost plaque.

Thomas Woodcock: "Let posterity be excited to perpetuate our free institutions and to make still greater efforts than their ancestors, to promote public prosperity by the recollection that these works of internal improvement were achieved by the spirit and perseverance of republican freemen."

Carol: For the people who were there at the celebration at Lockport and the many other celebrations that took place along the canal where they also talked about republican freemen, I think what they meant really were the canal sponsors, the politicians, the engineers who had the vision and their political acumen to bring this to fruition.

A lot of the middle-class people who were there didn't think very highly of the workers who were building the canal.

And then later on once the canal was in operation of--the workers who kept it in operation, they saw them as not really befitting of sort of the moral virtue that people thought came with a republican society and then increasingly with a religious society.

It was an era of evangelical revivalism.

So I think that people were very ambivalent about progress and that it comes back to they wanted it, but they didn't want to bear its costs.

narrator: The Erie Canal opened on October 25, 1825.

With its completion came a new age of opportunity and prosperity for New York and the nation.

Tom: New Orleans was poised to be the economic center of the country, but the Erie Canal changes that narrative.

It brings goods from the west to the east.

New York becomes the place not just where those agricultural goods are then transshipped to Europe and other parts of the world but also the manufacturing entrepot that brings American goods into the countryside of the American west.

Without the Erie Canal, you don't have the East Coast of the United States as economically strong as it becomes.

narrator: The canal helped energize the nation and ushered in an era of optimism and achievement for Americans.

Westward expansion exploded, commerce surged, and religious and social reform movements such as Mormonism, abolition, and women's suffrage erupted along its banks and spread into the west.

It became a bustling highway for moving goods, people, and new ideas.

Carol: You do see a lot of reform movements that move out to the west along the canal.

So especially something like abolitionism, but--and the religious movements that helped to spawn that.

You'll see itinerant ministers who go along the canal out to the Midwest.

You'll see abolitionists who go out to the Midwest, and they're able to do that because there is this inexpensive and smooth transportation route to get there.

Brad: It was really the right environment for the movements that took place, and I think that's one way that the canal helped to share that.

It helped to push those movements because people were looking for connection.

Patrick: Most Americans at the beginning of the 19th century thought of themselves as Pennsylvanians or Virginians or something along those lines.

So the idea of nationalism was very incipient at this moment, and eventually it was given quite a boost by the canal and the power of New York State.

♪♪♪ Meredith: Haudenosaunee people remember that time very well.

It is talked about often.

It is written about often.

It is discussed and known as a period in history of tremendous change.

And the Erie Canal, for me at least, represents a tremendous influx of people that really changed the way we could flourish as peoples.

narrator: The belief that westward expansion was inevitable was firmly ingrained in the national psyche before the Erie Canal.

However, movement was greatly accelerated once the canal was in operation.

In 1790, there were approximately 1,000 non-native people in Western New York.

By 1850, there were 660,000.

Meredith: Most of these people were people who thought that our communities, our life ways were inferior to them.

And so that is a huge shift.

And with them they brought certain ways of living on the land, which included cutting down trees, using that land to create mills to produce for markets.

It was a very different way of being in a relationship with nature, one that was much more extractive than Haudenosaunee people were living.

Patrick: After the impact of the canal was well established, 1853, a man named Briggs wrote an article and he says Anglo-Saxons, quote, have a pattern from heaven to exterminate the useless tribes of the interior who encumber the land without improving it.

Meredith: And so the idea was that Anglo-Saxon people had a divine right to spread from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast and this meant, of course, the decimation of indigenous people along the way.

♪♪♪ [birds chirping] narrator: As the nation pushed further inland, the natural landscape was also falling victim to progress.

A group of American artists, including Thomas Cole and later Frederic Church, concerned about the loss celebrated the sublime beauty of nature.

Elizabeth McKinsey: The idea of the sublime got invested in landscape and the people started looking for it, and that's part of what made Niagara Falls so popular.

The unique features of the American continent like Niagara Falls became symbols of this new country.

And the Erie Canal was one of the earliest examples, the earliest manifestations of what was later called the technological sublime; and I'm sure that the Flight of Five was regarded as particularly sublime.

Joyce: Predominantly the image of Western New York, I think, sort of a myth--in the mythical status would be Niagara Falls.

Lockport is a locks.

The locks and the canal going through Lockport, it seem to be symbolic of an emerging America.

narrator: A pair of travelers from Michigan who visited Niagara Falls noted that the site was worth looking at, but they would go twice as far to see the noble stoneworks of Lockport.

Tom: Lockport was one of the key destinations.

People saw Lockport as a place to stop and something worth seeing.

The guidebooks would provide recommendations.

"When you get to Lockport, this is what you should look for."

Almost prescriptions for how you should respond to the sublime beauty of that series of locks.

Seeing something that had visual appeal but also had a story behind it that helped you understand what was distinctive about America is what made Lockport appealing.

It just wasn't that they were locks, it's that the locks meant something.

Here's America being able to do what it wants to do with nature to promote progress and economic growth and prosperity.

Patrick: William Lyons Mackenzie, a Canadian, thought that Lockport was a symbol of popular government, and he said, "Look what they can do.

The kings can't do that."

On the other hand, there are other people like Mrs.

Trollope, who's a British woman, who comes here and said, "The place is so ugly Americans don't know what they mean by progress.

I can't wait to get out of here."

All these things became sources of debate at Lockport, and of course what was interesting about it is that they often compared it to Niagara Falls because there was your symbol of nature and Lockport is your symbol of human art or human technology.

Anne Royall: "The neatness of the whole architecture strikes the traveler with nearly the same awe and admiration he feels at the grandeur of the Great Falls."

Anne Royall, 1827. narrator: With travel time from Albany to Buffalo reduced from 2 weeks to 5 days, the falls and points west were now easily accessible.

Elizabeth: Travel became so much faster and so much easier and cheaper than it had been before so that more and more people could go as far as Niagara Falls.

Niagara Falls and Lockport are fairly close geographically, so probably at this location the two were most closely linked in a traveler's mind.

When a tourist reached Lockport, he or she was confronted with this amazing technologically-sublime Flight of Five but also was anticipating the natural sublimity of Niagara Falls.

So I would mark the beginning of tourism as we know it to the completion of the canal.

Tom: People talked about Niagara Falls as the natural wonder.

Lockport was the artificial wonder.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ narrator: Before the end of the first navigation season, the canal proved more successful than planners had envisioned.

In 1836, with its $7 million price tag paid off, an enlargement was underway: expanding the canal and the locks to accommodate larger boats.

Craig: When that happens, Lockport just takes off.

♪♪♪ Craig: People have to live here, but then you need services.

So all of a sudden Lockport just grows exponentially as these bigger canal boats come into town.

Tom: It's one of the spots where people are building not just businesses to serve the transportation side of the canal, but they also harnessed water for different factories, for different production so that the city grows from just being a transit hub to a manufacturing hub and a residential center for much of that part of Western New York.

narrator: By the turn of the century, the growth of industry had transformed American society and 193,000 miles of railroad track crisscrossed the nation.

Lockport had become a bustling and prosperous industrial city.

And although the railroads had cut into its profits, the canal was still a thriving avenue of commerce, with nearly 2 million tons of goods passing through the Flight of Five.

To stay competitive in the new century, the canal would again need to be enlarged.

Renamed the Erie Barge Canal, construction began in 1905 and was completed in 1918.

President Teddy Roosevelt, the force behind the Panama Canal, was also the leading advocate for the enlargement of the Erie.

Brad: He felt strongly in the value of the canal, but he also knows that it can't be the small canal that it is.

It needs to get bigger.

narrator: Enlarging the canal meant enlarging the locks as well.

The downbound set of the Flight of Five was removed to allow for the construction of new, larger locks that could handle bigger vessels with increased freight capacity.

Lockport continued to prosper well into the 20th century.

male: Lockport was and still is one of the important ports on the canal.

A century ago, the cry low bridge rang out on wooden canal boats as settlers dodged under old spans on their way west.

The spirit of adventure that drove them on still rides the Erie Canal.

narrator: But canal technology had already been eclipsed by railroads and highways and the Flight of Five, once a symbol of American progress and the technological sublime, had itself become a victim of progress.

Elizabeth: I think for something like the Flight of Five the continual advancement of technology was kind of taken for granted.

It was part of the creed of progress, so they didn't think about what was lost in that transition.

narrator: By the 1970s, the Flight of Five and the canal itself were an overlooked part of the landscape; and as their importance diminished, so too did the city's connection to its history and its origin story.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Sara Capen: When you are connected to the past, you see the past, you can have a better understanding of the future; but you also understand what made a place, what went into the ingredients of shaping an area where people have lived, people who have worked, people who have played, people have sang, people have created.

Joyce: Preserving the past was always very natural and inevitable in the past.

It was--it would have been sacrilege to tear down a church, you know, and replace it with a mall, let's say, or something equivalent.

So it was always sort of na--human nature.

I think it's probably in the--maybe the 20th century that this rapacity for newness and change really gets momentum.

male: Now with urban renewal, what we're in effect doing is going back to the inner, the older, the decayed sections of our city and cleaning up.

Pete Welsby: I first came to Western New York in 1972 and my first glimpse of Lockport was I didn't know what I was looking at.

Main Street was piles of rubble and I just--I was confused.

I was--"What has happened to this city?"

♪♪♪ David Stockton: You know, when they're starting to take down buildings of the downtown that I grew up around, you know that horrible loss that I was feeling.

And I'm thinking they're making a horrible mistake, the city fathers and the people that made these decisions, but what can I do?

I'm just, like, a 19-year-old art hippie person, you know.

And so all I can do is go and capture this stuff and--the best I can.

This is right on the fringe of downtown Niagara Street by the big bridge and First Pres Church behind it.

That's the new city hall going up in the background, but this is--they were just tearing down that universalist church, cut stone church that was part of why Church Street was named Church Street and in more recent times it had been the Ford Gum company.

They actually made gum balls there.

So I was, again, just with my camera catching the demolition and I just caught this shot, which I think says a lot.

♪♪♪ narrator: As part of the 1949 Housing Act signed into law by President Harry Truman, the original goal of urban renewal was to clear slums and blighted neighborhoods and replace them with sound, better housing.

By 1954, it allowed for non-residential and commercial development.

Stacy Sewell: In a city like Rockport, they're concerned with their declining downtown.

The term blight might be used, but blight was very often a term used to talk about housing.

In the case of commercial structures, they would use the term obsolete and it just feels--it doesn't feel new.

David Hockfelder: The smaller communities that had urban renewal projects, you know, you take Lockport or any other small city, an urban renewal project is going to more dramatically affect a smaller place than a larger city just because it affects everyone in the city.

male: In my estimation at that point, Lockport had no identity.

It had been removed.

male: The decisions we make now or we make in 1960, whether to build a highway, whether it's to demolish an area, those decisions have consequences for the next century.

David: These iconic historic or late 19th, early 20th century buildings that were--they were just mowing them down block after block.

Things like Williams Brothers department store and--I'm sorry.

I'm starting to get emotional about it, but-- Sara: When you go to a place that has utilized urban renewal as a policy, people lack an understanding of what was there and want an understanding of what was there.

People are stronger when they are connected to the past; when they have a sense of their own personal history, what their family has experienced in generations, and how that shaped a place.

♪♪♪ Stacy: If you want to look at some of the upsides of urban renewal, I think it does kick off a preservation movement.

Sara: And in some areas, these almost tableaus where they'll have the old bank, or the old library, the old post office that still exist, that then anchor a community.

Craig: Urban renewal is a gaping wound in Lockport's history that is finally healing.

♪♪♪ Joyce: Well, I think in America there's always been this tension which continues right now to the present day between the idea of progress and then a more community-oriented spirit of place where people who live there have a sort of spiritual connection to their place.

narrator: The revitalization of the Canal Street district adjacent to the Flight of Five contains some of the city's only remaining canal era commercial buildings.

Richmond Avenue, today going by its original name Canal Street, is the site of the city's historic Harrison Radiator building.

The company was founded in 1910 and by 1918 had reached global proportions.

By the 1960s, it was the city's largest employer.

David: The front page on the Union-Sun one day said, "Report shows no history on Richmond Avenue."

"Right here above the Flight of Five where Harrison Radiator made their first radiators, but no history occurred here.

So let's tear these buildings down.

There's nothing significant to save."

You know, we still got a little bit of old downtown sitting there and it's like--so you're fighting.

Let's at least keep these rough blue collar buildings.

Let's see if we can at least keep these.

narrator: David Stockton and others were instrumental in the effort to preserve the Harrison building.

David: Red brick and cast iron facade is gone, but--of the much smaller building, but you still have the three canal stone, Niagara Escarpment limestone walls.

One on the east side is inside the new--this current building and--so you got the canal history tied in as these were--would have been quarried from the canal.

Michael Tucker: That company and particularly that building, 'cause that's where it all started there, had a huge impact on our community.

That was important to keep that building there.

David: You had to have a developer come forward and do offer to do something with them or you'd be right back with them being knocked down.

It was hard to do what we had success and they're still standing today, and it doesn't always work out that way with these things.

narrator: And the Flight of Five, Lockport's origin story, sat overlooked and undervalued.

Michael: I think it was a shame that for so many years that just sat there, you know, in disrepair and really had no respect and nobody really understood the history of it and how important it is to us, you know, as you say.

There'd be no Lockport without the locks.

narrator: In 2004, a grassroots committee was formed tasked with reclaiming the city's identity that for decades remained silently underfoot of passersby.

Pete: We had half a dozen masons and engineers from Washington, D.C.

come and take a look at the structure, and they were awestruck with what they saw.

For me, that was the genesis of the idea of restoring the locks.

Michael: Urban renewal has really left it--left an everlasting mark in our community.

I just thought it was time to do something different here, and I thought the opportunity--you know, here we had this man-made waterway splitting our city in two.

We had these old historic locks, were a great opportunity for us to do something different and put our city in a different light and moving in a different direction.

Pete: I drove to Albany and I visited the Canal Corporation, and I'd have to say that that initial meeting was awkward.

I didn't feel there was a lot of trust that a small community like Lockport could pull this off.

And I think by this time the mayor of Lockport had formed a committee and I had taken over as chairman of that committee and we just took it upon ourselves to take that to heart, and our initial mission was to restore the Flight of Five locks.

narrator: After 9 years and a successful series of state, federal, and local foundation grants, work began.

Michael: Today is the day that the restoration of these locks finally begins.

This is our heritage.

This is who we are.

This is what the Lock City it is--is all about, and today is a very, very historic day.

♪♪♪ Josh Repp: This project was ultimately termed a rehabilitation.

There was a major modification done in 1910 with the barge canal and that ultimately removed a whole set of the Flight of Five, and that's something we couldn't restore.

We couldn't go back and put in the old full set of Flight of Five.

So here in rehabilitation setting we wanted to preserve the Flight of Five throughout all points of history but focus on a certain period to rehabilitate the locks or restore them to that mid-1800s.

♪♪♪ Sara: To do a rehabilitation is as noble as an effort as restoration.

It's a fine balance; and it's not an easy balance, and you shouldn't necessarily judge one over the other.

Preservation is always a hybrid.

Pete: There was some pushback during the construction about the methods we used, and I think the biggest one was about the stone we wound up using.

Josh: One of the goals--the primary goals of the project was to make the lock functional, and that did involve us having a really close look at just about every stone on the site.

The original lock stone is much more durable than the concrete we have today.

The most notable thing is the amount of workmanship that would have been entailed with shaping and forming the stones together.

They detailed almost every stone and then hand-cut it on site by masons and placed it in, I'd say, very artistic fashion.

We don't see that type of detail in work nowadays in modern engineering practice.

But some of those stones were considered structural and where they were maybe unfit to perform structural tasks we had to make a difficult decision to remove those and replace them with new, more modern stones that could be safe and perform well structurally.

Pete: Believe it or not, we couldn't find any stone Lockport dolomite.

We couldn't find any locally that we could utilize.

The quarries--local quarries are all set up to sell aggregate.

They're not really set up to sell big 4 feet cubes of stone.

I think we wound up getting stone--very similar stone in a quarry from Michigan.

narrator: Wood and stone, ancient materials of the Flight of Five crafted by carpenters and masons to last generations.

Pete: And once design plans were approved by the state, the project went out to bid.

And the contractor that was selected, they were able to find a local carpenter who had never built anything that massive but they found a supplier of the wood and the carpenter by hand constructed those gates.

Waylon Edmister: There was white oak timber that we purchased from a company in Vermont.

They actually milled and made the components into their rough shapes and shipped them to us via truck and then we put them together, final finished all the mortise and tenon joints and recesses for all of the metal reinforcements that were fabricated in my shop.

Waylon: There were five of us working on these, and it took us probably a month and a half to build a set of miter gates.

I have such great pride in the end result.

Josh: The largest timber in the miter gate by far is the balance beam that's at the very top of the gate to which lock operators would push against to open and close the gate.

That might have been the most challenging section of timber to find.

I believe the balance beam weighs around 3,000 pounds.

Brad: To see it operate is really special.

Historically speaking, it keeps the connection with what used to be there.

We really don't have another place like that in New York where you can go and see the original locks operate in a manner that they did in the past.

David Chatt: People come here just to see the locks.

I spoke with a woman last year who was visiting and I asked, "Are you gonna--have you been to Niagara Falls?"

And her answer was, "No.

I'm not sure I'm gonna go.

I came to Lockport to see the locks."

I met a couple from Europe a couple of years ago and Lockport was a specific item on their destination of half a dozen cities in the Northeast.

So we're a destination now and it's--and that's because of the locks and the activity that's been done down here.

♪♪♪ Sara: Historic sites tell the stories of triumph.

They tell the stories of sorrow.

They tell the stories of resilience.

Historic sites define who we are as a people.

You value what was created before you.

You're determined to preserve it and provide that to the next generations so that they can be connected to the deep history of a place.

Hochfelder: Historic preservation is important to a community's sense of itself, especially, you know, as a historical legacy.

And I think a greater awareness of the time span, how long the decisions affect a place, you know, having an awareness that decisions about infrastructure last over generations, that's a good thing.

♪♪♪ Joyce: I spoke of the spiritual connection that people have with the landscape in the city, people would say, "Well, you're being sentimental, that there's no real spiritual connection."

But actually there is.

I think indigenous people probably felt that very strongly that their lands were something that were part of their whole embodiment, their souls.

Meredith: The sense of place is certainly altered for a lot of Haudenosaunee people as well as myself, but the connection to place hasn't been destroyed at all simply because technologies like the Erie Canal and, you know, the development of cities and towns has occurred but that doesn't mean our connection and sense of place is gone.

Today, we're still very much here.

♪♪♪ male: When we go to some place like the Flight of Five, we can say this is authentic American past.

It's a way in which we can connect with what the past meant and how we can maintain those places to give us meaning in our own world today.

It's something that provides us a physical reminder of community and its history.

female: One of the pieces that we often forget to tell is actually the voice of the landscape itself.

When you start with the voice of the landscape, which is the true origin story, what you're actually doing is you're empowering those layers of connectivity between multiple generations of people from indigenous people onward and how they interacted with that landscape.

♪♪♪ female: There's positive and negative consequences to the Erie Canal.

Telling the complete story allows everybody to sit at the table and find themselves in the story so that people see it in its fullness to better understanding who we are as people but also understanding how places are shaped.

♪♪♪ male: If you go back to the early 19th century, Lockport was a place where people stopped and looked and contemplated and got a dialogue about what America meant, what progress meant, what technology meant versus other things about nature, about social issues.

Lockport became a site where people talked about these issues.

So when people come here today, they could think of Lockport as a point of departure where we could revive those debates.

narrator: The Lockport Locks survive as a living monument to a moment in history that transformed the nation.

As the pivotal engineering achievement of the Erie Canal, the locks lifted the country toward a future of limitless possibilities.

Today, the Flight of Five, America's Stairway, is a place to reflect on the people, struggles, and ideals that form our national story.

♪♪♪ announcer: Major funding for "America's Stairway" was provided by the Reid Group, the Grigg Lewis Foundation, Basil Automotive Group, and Roth Consulting Group.

Additional funding provided by.... For a complete list of funders, visit AmericasStairway.com.

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