Rochester would not be the size it is today without the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, and the Erie Canal would not have been possible without the aqueduct bridge that spanned the Genesee and carried water over water.
The Broad Street Bridge that is there today is not, in fact, the original bridge. That one was replaced about fifteen years after the first one was built. Completed in 1842, the new bridge still stands today, though much has changed above and around it.
Shortly after I visited the Broad Street bridge I was attending meetings at the Genesee Valley Club and there saw this lithograph that gives a sense of what Rochester looked like in the 1850s, with the canal at its center.
Rochester was a product of the Erie Canal. While the city’s waterfalls provided the power to grind the wheat that farmers up and down the fertile Genesee Valley were growing, it was the Erie Canal that actually provided a means to move this grain to large markets farther east. The 1820s, when the canal was built, were boom years for the town. Paul Johnson notes in Shopkeeper’s Millennium, his study of the religious revivals of Rochester during this period, that in the 1820s Rochester was the fastest growing city in the nation, transforming the area almost overnight from wilderness to boomtown.
Things have changed a lot since then, not only for the city generally but also for this bridge and its immediate surroundings. Most obviously, the Erie Canal that once flowed directly through the city was diverted further south with the completion of the New York State Barge Canal system in 1918. The old canal bed became the path of a railroad–the beloved and long-since vanished “Rochester Subway”–that stayed in operation until the 1960s as part of a street car, passenger, and freight network. I’ve been through the tunnels that remain from the Rochester subway, though getting to them is a little harder now that the Nathaniel apartments have been constructed near the Court Street bridge.
In 1922, a second set of arches was constructed on top of the aqueduct to support a roadbed for vehicular traffic. That’s what I walked over when my wife Ursula and I crossed on a frigid, February day. It was cold, covered with deep snow (as it was again on a second trip I made a couple of weeks later).
Next to the bridge on the northeast side is the vine-covered RG&E building number 6. I found very little online, so I’m not sure if it’s still in use. Does anyone know?
Up above, I always enjoy seeing the statue of Mercury on top of the old Aqueduct Building Created in 1881, the statue once graced the summit of a now-demolished tobacco factory that stood nearby. Perhaps appropriately, the Aqueduct Building will soon become the new headquarters of Constellation Brands, so the statue of Mercury created to adorn a building devoted to producing tobacco will now top a building that houses a business that has begun selling another mind-altering, smokable drug, in this case marijuana.
Closer to the ground, we noticed small adornments, like the logo of the City of Rochester, half covered in snow….
…and the silhouettes of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony on a light post.
On the west side of the river, if you go, make sure to check out the mural right below the steps leading up towards War Memorial Stadium on the west side of the river. The painting is starting to deteriorate, but it gives artist Corky Goss’s winsome impression of life during the heyday of the canal.
Just past the mural is an overlook of the abandoned subway.
But, of course, the most interesting thing to see on the bridge is the river, ever changing and, in this case, considerably iced over.
Bridges of the Genesee River 
Loved those new photos, especially the Mercury tower. and th Times Square sea shells
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