Boom and Bust Transcript
- [[Voiceover]] Opened in 1825, the Erie Canal was the first empire builder in our history. It was from the beginning of golden cord and bond in our national growth, at both ends, East and Midwest. And in the middle, it rubbed Aladdin's lamp. America awoke, catching for the first time, a sweeping look at its limitless future.
♪ Let us pause in life's pleasures ♪
♪ And count its many tears ♪
♪ While we all sup sorrow with the poor ♪
♪ There's a song that will linger forever in our ears ♪
♪ Oh, hard times, come again no more ♪
- Yeah, you're rubbing the wood on the stern, and about three on the bow.
- [Ralph] Well, there's no more of these left, this is the last one of these. It's like anything, you just don't want to give up the ghost, let's put it that way. You should've been able to see it, and you didn't. The tonnage kept dropping down and down and down. It was dying from 1950 on. And as far as commercial, this canal is dead.
- [Bruce] These locks are responsible for the entire development of this part of New York state. And for much of the Midwest of the United States, they don't look like much now, but in their day, they opened up this whole territory. So when I look at this, I see that there's a beautiful simplicity of those steps of stone behind us, but it also resonates for me, to all those ghosts of the people who thought of it, who first saw drawings, and looked at those flat, two-dimensional drawings, and were able to see what we're standing in now. And you look at the press of the time, people said this was crazy, it was a huge waste of money. It was stupid, it's not gonna accomplish anything. It made America rich. It made America rich, it made America powerful. It was an act of genius.
- Rosie and Seneca, if you want to run up and get locked through, it'd be fine with me.
- [Male Over Radio] Sounds good.
- I've been on the Canal now for 20, going on 29 years. Been on this boat for 11 years, the Seneca. Before that, I was on a bunch of other ones.
- We always talk about how special those times were. And, you know, what we saw firsthand, the equipment we saw dig, that no longer does the work that it did do. We talk about this all the time. We got to see the dipper dig. When you pull up to it in the morning, didn't it look like some big prehistoric...?
- It was- every part of it was alive.
- Yeah, yeah, it was amazing.
- It was groaning. You'd see the steam go up, and we'd go, "She's ready." Somebody looking the other way, saying, "I didn't hear anything." And then you'd hear the whistle. 'Cause it was a mile out, you know, it took a good, almost, five seconds. You could test me, I swear to God, you can test me with at least 10 different steam whistles. And I'd pick that one out. Oh, boy. Yeah, good afternoon, this is the Seneca, I'd like to go through North.
- [Man Over Radio] All right, we'll be ready for you.
- Thank you.
- [Bruce] All these cities up here, which before had been viable, only as farms, small farms, some boating stuff. All of a sudden have potential of becoming centers of industry. And it's all because of water. One is the water in the Erie Canal that made raw materials from the West, manufactured goods from the East, be able to go back and forth. Second was the water that powered the Niagara Falls generators, which made it possible to put inexpensive large industry here. Ore came from the West, it was made into steel here. In a lot of ways, you could say that much of the energy, thrust, and wealth of 19th century America, grew out this single engineering project.
- [Doris] I get a call from the employment, and said they had a job. I went for the interview and stuff. I knew I was gonna fail the interview, because I had never done any manual labor such as that. So I didn't think they were going to hire me, and they did. You had to pick the machine up, at first, I thought the machine was very, very heavy. So, you know, you try to carry it and stuff, you know? So then one day the foreman says, "Now, either you pick this machine up, or you're gonna have to just go out that door." Well, something inside of me said, "My kids need sneakers, we need to eat," because I was a single parent. So I don't know where the strength came from, but I picked that burner up, and I picked it up from then on.
- The blast furnace, it was an adventure that I had not seen at that level. And it was something to remember, I would always remember. Molten steel runs like actual water, like you would tap your faucet in there, running in trenches. We had on leather leggings, goggles, all type of protection. When I heard that whistle blow, and they say, "The furnace is being tapped," you get all kinds of sparks, it's like 4th of July.
- [Doris] You might be off for a week, and they'll call you back. Lay you off, you might be off for two weeks, three weeks, and they'll call you back. And then they don't call you no more. How was it says..."indefinite". That was the terminology that was used for when you got laid off, and you know, possibility to return was indefinite. So, "indefinite" meant never.
- [Anthony] You'd never visualize a plant as big as Bethlehem gonna go bottom up. And you just frame your mind, when you working at a place, for any length of time, that this is the job, you know, "I'm gonna be here maybe for retirement." Then they say, "I'm gonna close the door." Boom. So now I'm saying to myself, "Well, what else can you do, Tony?"
- There's no place more historical than a waterfront. It gets written and rewritten, and etched and etched again by changes. And you see that very clearly along the Erie Canal. And it's written in the piers and the warehouses and the old docks, that were vital as recently as 60 years ago. But are today, relics, of what they once were. The natural beauty that we see along the Erie Canal today is somewhat misleading, because we see all these trees, and plants, and it looks almost like a wilderness. We know there's something fishy about this wilderness because it's absolutely straight as an arrow. That's because it was dug to be straight as possible. And on both sides, if you'd come here in 1850, you would have seen tow paths, you would have known that there were trains only a couple hundred yards away. When there were towns and ports built up along the canal path. All that starts to disappear in the early 21st century. And you forget what an incredibly vital place the Erie Canal and upstate New York were. When you look at a map, it looks like New Orleans should be the Queen City of North America. It sits at the mouth of a huge river system that flows down from the Midwest of the United States into the Gulf of Mexico. But New Yorkers looked at that and saw another opportunity. They saw that if they built a canal from the Hudson River, west to the Great Lakes, their city would become the Queen Trading City of North America. Their city would have a water route from the Atlantic Coast, deep into the North American continent, to make New York the great port of North America. For the people who were living in the rural areas of upstate New York and the Midwest, the Erie Canal made a connection to New York City that wove those people into the market system. People who lived relatively isolated, rural lives, growing crops to feed themselves and their families, primarily, suddenly found themselves as farmers enmeshed in a big market system, growing for stores, warehouses, businesses, hundreds and hundreds of miles away. That could mean great prosperity to a farmer. But when there was any kind of economic depression, that could mean that a farmer could be dragged down with it, suddenly, in a devastating way that they'd never quite seen before. That was gonna be difficult in ways that were very different from the past. In the middle of the 19th century, there are many sad sentimental songs, but Stephen Foster's "Hard Times" is about hard times that are much bigger than one individual person's problems.
♪ Tis the song, the sigh of the weary ♪
♪ Oh, hard times come again no more ♪
- In the 19th century, people are riding an economy of booms and busts, but when de-industrialization came to upstate New York, and to other industrial areas, the hard times stayed permanent. Because the factories and the stores and the businesses that once kept people thriving economically, were gone.
- [Bruce] This is still used, but you know, people still use the canal. I know descendants of people who dug this goddamn thing. I mean, 'cause they're around Buffalo. I know descendants of people who hauled stuff on this thing. I know people who haul things on it now. So this is part of our past, but it is also very much a part of our present.
- [Steve] There it is, there's the dipper dredge right there. You have a person that rides right here and dumps the load. There's a cable that opens up the bottom of the bucket. Then there's the guy that called "the monkey", or they used to, anyway, Ernie, he was the operator in here. He had levers that swung, and then the other guy would control the depth of the dig. So everybody had to work in unison to make this do what it had to do. When you- once you see it dig, it's just- it's an amazing piece of equipment that's no longer. There is no more. And that was the last one of a kind. There's Don Carney and Ernie Pearl, those are the two guys that were most responsible for the dipper dredge working correctly. Ernie was something else, he's the one that lost his teeth in the canal. So every time they saw a fish, "Hey, Ernie, I think that one had your teeth! I'm pretty sure that fish was smiling at you." "Oh, will you knock it off." Oh, and Kenneth Beagle. They'd have a meeting, so Ernie'd say, "Okay, Beagle, come here." And then Beagle couldn't help it, he could not sit without interjecting. Somebody would just move, and just- you'd hear... Beagle would go, "Quiet, the chief's trying to talk, give the goddamn guy some respect, will ya?" And he'd swear and yell. And then he'd say, "Go ahead, chief, you got the floor, head honcho." And then he'd stay right on it. But watching the thing work, it was like a work of art. It was like something from another world, you know? But usually, like, my voice cracks on this, 'cause it's just good memories, you know? "On levers is Ernie, his bucket he'll guide, with four yards of spoil riding inside. The crane-man is Carney, we all call him Don. He lets go the load from the boom that he's on. And Kenneth R. Beagle, the ghost of the dipper," I told you, "the ghost of the dipper, his hammer still singing the song of the chipper. The scows are now empty, the boiler is down. Nothing but memories, no whistle, no sound. The waters are rising, the current is slow. The powers of steam have nowhere to go. Dipper dredge 3, I'll say most sincere, was the best bloody digger I've ever been near."
- I think, in a lot of ways, the Erie Canal brings together many of the grand themes of American history. I've often thought of the 1840s in upstate New York as having many parallels to the 1960s in the Bay area. The 1960s, you had the women's movement spilling out of the civil rights movement. You had the spread of sort of utopian hippie communities. In the 1840s, you have very much of a parallel going on. You have the abolitionist movement, the women's movement is born, in part, out of the abolitionist movement. The 1848 women's rights convention held here in Seneca Falls. And all of those things made this a real hotbed for evangelical reform. The religious fervor was so intense, you think of the fires of religion as sort of burning the district over and over, sweeping through here. But the combination of prosperity, spiritual fervor, optimism, a fairly young population, all of those things that came together in the '60s, came together in a somewhat parallel way in the 1840s. If you look at the 20th century, in many ways, it's the story come full circle. De-industrialization, of an emptying out of population, of a movement to the Sunbelt, away from the Rustbelt, of globalization and the impact of that on the American economy. This textile mill is a very good example, because a lot of textile mills, in parts of the Northeast, moved to places like North Carolina, because they could get cheap labor, they didn't have to worry about unionization. The development of air conditioning, because it made places like Dallas, Texas, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Tucson, places people would want to live and work. You think of this mill as having been flourishing, vibrant, filled with young women from the area, many Italian and Irish immigrants, who had come in. In many ways, it represents sort of the peak of the moment of vibrancy of the Industrial Revolution, in the mid-to-late 19th century. And now look at it, with the boarded up windows, pigeons roosting. I think what you see here is the migration of certainly the whole textile industry, but to a large degree, industry in general. And I think you see that migration now in the boarded up factories, like the one we're standing in.
- [Fran] I think the most important thing is you have to realize what the mill accomplished. It was actually the last mill running in the Northeast, and their products went all over the world. Big contracts with the military, their socks went to the Moon. All NBA players wore 'em, these socks were famous. Everybody wanted Red Jacket socks.
- Right, I worked in the spinning department.
- [Patty] I also was a tie-er. That second back building up there, yeah, it was a very, very noisy place. You learned to talk very, very loud. And then we would tie the knots in 'em when they finished. And there was usually, what was it about, 30 bobbins in a row that we had to keep going?
- Mm-hmm.
- I mean, it was like a balancing act. You had to start at one end, and work to the other end of the machine. And by the time you got the end finished, the beginning was running out, so you have to go to the other end. And I remember I had a permanent groove in my finger where I would cut the yarn, where I would break it off. And you probably had that, too.
- Yes, I did.
- I mean, I think anybody could tell, if you met somebody on the street, if they worked at the mill as a spinner, because you'd look, and they'd have this big groove cut across their finger.
- [Fran] At one time, Seneca Falls was the richest per-capita area in the United States. In Seneca Falls, we had over 300 industry, at one time. I mean, you name it, it was made here in Seneca Falls. The Irish came because of the labor. I mean, of course the Germans, the Dutch, and the English were here first. In 1890, there were no Italians in Seneca Falls. By 1960 census, over 63% of the population claimed some Italian heritage.
- [Bruce] I think the canal created a world for immigrants. Our grandparents came here with nothing, to nothing. They didn't know the language, they worked with a shovel, they worked with a sewing needle. They worked long hours, they were screwed by their employers. Their kids went to high school, their grandchildren went to college, their great-grandchildren are making this film right now.
- The lowering of the freight rates, the cost of shipping 100 pounds of flour declined 97%. So the Erie Canal made it possible for farmers to go to the very fertile lands of the Middle West, grow wheat, ship their surplus to Buffalo, where it could be ground into flour, and then shipped on the Erie Canal. Put on an ocean liner across to England, offloaded in England, put on a canal there, brought to some English village to a bakery, and baked into bread, and put on an English laborer's table cheaper than an English farmer could produce it and put it on the table. The Erie Canal helped create, you know, a chain of cities, but in particular, the two cities that really affected where the cities- in fact, at either end. It made New York City the entrepot of the continent, and it made Buffalo, because we were one of the terminuses, a thriving city, because we were a break-up bulk point. Larger ships on the Great Lakes couldn't navigate the canal, canal barges can't navigate the lake, so everything has to stop. You have to exchange stuff, you have to unload your freight, you have to unload your passengers. And where that happens, people come together, and ideas come together, industries come together, and pretty soon the grain surpluses are coming in. It can't be simply piled on a wharf, if it gets wet, it spoils, so people have to think, "How can I store this stuff?" And you know, very soon a grain elevator is invented, a warehouse where grain can be shunted around on an endless belt. And then these things get bigger and bigger. They have a disturbing propensity to burn and explode, so there's this effort to create a fireproof form. And pretty soon, that effort leads to the creation of the grain elevator that's in our mind. And what we're seeing here on the Buffalo waterfront, these tall rank cylinders of reinforced concrete. And Buffalo, through the Second World War, becomes the greatest grain port the world's ever seen. The grain scoopers were actually in the hold of the ship, and the marine leg would go inside. And at the bottom of the leg, spinning around, is this belt with the buckets on it. And the grain scoopers would scoop grain toward the bottom of the leg that's in there. And, you know, they would have hand shovels, but they would also have these enormous power shovels, which were much larger. And they would be dragged by machinery, scooping much larger loads there, so that's what the scoopers did. They essentially were scooping grain into the maw of this marine leg that was elevating it to the top of the grain elevator.
- My father worked on the grain elevators, I worked on the grain elevators. My oldest son worked there for awhile.
- [Frederick] If you grew up in this neighborhood, a few grew up here in the First Ward, it was easy to come out of school, and get a job, to come over here to the waterfront, and there was always work.
- Or the steel plant.
- And more-so, before my time, that much easier. I mean, there was always, I think, periods where it was boom-bust, but for the most part, it was mainly boom.
- I graduated from high school, and my father said, "The superior elevator," which is this elevator here, "is gonna get a car rush. You're gonna be working seven days and three nights." So I scooped over here, and made big money right here. And there was, under that car shed, there was three pits that they unload boxcars. I tell you, I scooped at this elevator three weeks in a row. You worked 21 days, seven days a week, three nights.
- [Male Speaker] These were all railroad tracks, in through here.
- There were railroad tracks going from where we're standing-
- Right there, you can can see one sticking out.
- Yeah, you can see one right there. And there'd be a string of maybe 60 cars. And you'd spot 'em, you open the door, you'd go in. And at the... And here, you threw the car back- threw the shovel back, right, Bert?
- Yeah, you threw it back.
- I would get the shovel, and I would throw it as far as I can to the back of the car, and they were 40-foot box cars. And he would put it in the grain, and then it would automatically come out. And then I would grab the shovel and keep doing that.
- Look at that, I can still do it.
- [Robert] These tracks would be loaded, boxcars will be empty. I mean, you had railroad people working here. You had the suppliers to the boats. This thing had a lot of business, a lot of boom.
- [Frederick] Mid '60s, I think that's when a number of the elevators started to close up. And I started scooping in 1970, there were 200 members . And we lasted until 2003, and we had 34 members at that time. I remember the last day, the last ship that we unloaded. On one hand, you look at it, you know that it's the end of something that was unique, because we were the only people in the country that unloaded in this fashion. And so there was that sense of history that was fading away, just as has in all other sorts of different industries. At some point, there's an end to it. And that was- it was bittersweet, especially for me, as I said, you know, being fourth generation. And when you think of how much employment this provided, at one point, you know... Just a sign of the times, I guess, right?
- [Bruce] There's a whole kind of farm of these beautiful old grain elevators, and they're beautiful architectural objects. And they're as much part of the urban visual landscape as the Frank Lloyd Wright houses, the Louis Sullivan office building, the Frederick Law Olmsted Parks, the H.H. Richardson Psychiatric Center, which is a big thing of the cultural tourism. A lot of people come here to look at the architecture. Well, this is a part of our architecture, and our history, I think, is really important. So I've been photographing. I like Greece, I like Rome. You look at a ruin, that you have some sense of the context of, and it puts you in touch with time, and it helps create what your present is.
- [Tim] So it is bittersweet, it's a symbol of a former peak time. But if you look at European cities, they had their moment in the sun, and it's how cities remain worthy to the people who inhabit them through time. I mean, Florence is 400 years past its peak, and Amsterdam 400 years past its peak. And yet those cities still are vital, still contribute to their local culture, still contribute to the world culture. And I think Buffalo had its moment. And you know, the people of upstate New York, whether it's Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, still have things to contribute, and they do have this wonderful legacy. And actually, a lot of the legacy is a direct result of the Erie Canal.
- [Bruce] Okay, now the canal is dead. The canal is over, the canal that created the life of these cities is gone. But ironically, this very spot where we're standing, at the commercial slip, is part of a major waterfront rehabilitation project. In fact, it's the heart of it. It's one of the most important pieces, they're building a tourist center about it, but also a historical center. There's a museum going behind us. So the Erie Canal, which created this city, is now part of the rehabilitation and rebirth of the city.
- [Wendy] The story of the Erie Canal is really one of de-industrialization, of an emptying out of population. But I don't think it's an entirely hopeless story, because if you look at what's happened to the canal, up and down, the canal communities are trying to make use of the canal in new ways for tourism, and other kinds of things. So it's really a story of America reinventing itself. I mean, in many ways, that is our story.
- [Steve] In the old days, a coal-driven tug was coming through, blowing black soot all over the place. The canal was shunned, it was a dirty, nasty place, and nobody wanted anything to do with it. It was a commercial waterway, end of story. But the deal is, in the end, there's gonna be a trail that goes everywhere along the canal; bike path. It just tells you it's worth working for, in the end. So the canal is constantly reinventing himself, and that's the way we see the canal, is it just keeps right on getting born again, you know? You paint, it rusts, you paint, you rust again, it's a never-ending battle, so the canal is living. That's about the best way I can describe it, the canal is a living thing. This tug, our only goal is to make sure that the next guy can enjoy this tug as much as we have. We're in charge of this museum piece. If we don't preserve it, who's gonna?
♪ So many days ♪
♪ You have lingered around my cabin door ♪
♪ Oh, hard times ♪
♪ Come again no more ♪
