Stand on the Big Bridge in downtown Lockport and look east. What you're seeing looks like a waterfall. It isn't. It's a staircase, five stone chambers stepping down a cliff, and it's the reason the Erie Canal ever reached Buffalo at all.
The cliff nobody could go around
The Erie Canal had one geological problem it could not talk its way out of: the Niagara Escarpment, a rock wall running across Western New York with a rise of roughly sixty feet. Everything east of it could be dug. This had to be climbed.
The engineer who solved it was Nathan S. Roberts, and his answer was almost stubbornly simple. If one lock lifts twelve feet, build five of them in a row. Then, because he was thinking about traffic, not just physics, build the whole thing twice. Two parallel staircases side by side, one for boats heading up, one for boats heading down, so eastbound and westbound traffic never had to wait on each other.
Ten chambers. Sixty feet. Work began in 1823.
"1000 men wanted at Lockport"
Roberts advertised for labor in 1822 with a line that has aged into something close to poetry: 1000 men wanted at Lockport, twelve dollars per month, room and board included. The men who answered were largely Irish immigrants, along with Scots and locals, and many of them never left. A good share of Lockport's first families arrived holding a shovel.
The locks were the glamorous part. The brutal part was the Deep Cut, a trench blasted straight through solid Lockport dolostone so that water from Lake Erie could actually flow to the top of the flight. A state marker credits 1,200 workers with carving it. The methods were DuPont blasting powder, horse-powered timber derricks, and, when nothing else worked, letting winter do it, flooding the rock and waiting for the freeze to crack it open.
It was the last, hardest, and most expensive stretch of the entire original canal. Boats were already running east and west of Lockport a full year before this town's piece was finished.
Lafayette got a 21-blast salute
On June 6, 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette, sixty-eight years old and on his farewell tour of the country he had helped create, came to see the locks. He arrived while they were still under construction.
The workers gave him the only salute they had. His secretary described hundreds of small powder charges, set by the men quarrying rock, going off almost simultaneously across the cut. Lafayette ate dinner with Colonel Asher Saxton, shook hands with veterans and townspeople, and boarded a canal boat called the Rochester.
The locks were completed nineteen days later, on June 25, 1825. The canal formally opened that October when DeWitt Clinton rode from Buffalo to New York Harbor and poured a keg of Lake Erie into the Atlantic.
What sixty feet of climbing was actually worth
Here is the part that explains Buffalo.
Before the canal, Midwestern grain traveled roughly three thousand miles: down the Ohio, down the Mississippi, out through New Orleans, then by sea. The canal cut that to about five hundred, and freight dropped from around $70 a ton to $10.
Grain moving through Buffalo went from 173,000 bushels in 1831 to over two million by 1841. Within a few more years the city was taking in more grain than New Orleans. Every one of those bushels was hand-shoveled between lake vessels and canal boats by crews of mostly Irish laborers, a bottleneck so miserable that a local merchant named Joseph Dart eventually invented a steam-powered elevator to fix it, and gave Buffalo the skyline of grain silos it still has.
None of that happens if boats can't get over the escarpment. The whole grain economy of the Great Lakes ran up five steps in Lockport.
Why five became three
The original chambers were rebuilt bigger during the state's canal enlargement in the middle decades of the 1800s, growing from 90 by 15 feet to 110 by 18, enough to take a boat from about 75 tons to 240.
Then the twentieth century arrived. Building the modern Barge Canal meant tearing out the southern staircase in 1910 to make room for two enormous new locks, E34 and E35, which opened in 1918 and still lift boats about forty-nine feet today. The northern staircase was simply left where it stood, no longer navigable, gradually taking on the job of a spillway.
That's the waterfall. It's a hundred-and-eighty-year-old lock flight with water running through it.
They're bringing it back
The Lockport Locks Heritage District Corporation, formed in 2014, has been restoring the surviving flight chamber by chamber. Locks 69 and 70 were rehabilitated in 2014. Lock 68 followed in 2019. Three of the five are watered and working, with the remaining phase still moving through funding: a $1 million federal line approved this past January, on top of $1.2 million in state grants.
The work involved researching three different heights of historic lock gate and rebuilding them in timber with balance beams, because the whole point is that they open the way they always did: by hand. The original tenders muscled five-ton wooden gates for a living, and there are life-size sculptures of them on the tour to prove it.
You can watch it happen. Volunteer lock tenders run free public demonstrations every Saturday through October 3, 2026, locking a Durham-style boat called the Erie Traveler through the flight. Docent-led Lock Tender Tours run daily through October 2: about an hour, a quarter mile, and some steep stairs.
The district calls this the largest intact section of the historic Erie Canal left anywhere. Standing at the bottom of it, that's easy to believe.
Wear the locks
Our Flight of Five design was the first piece we drew for Lockport, and it's the one we keep coming back to: five chambers stepping down the escarpment, the way they were meant to be seen.
The rest of the town is in the collection too: the Upside-Down Bridge, the Big Bridge, and the Palace Theatre. Four landmarks, one small city, all of it built on the back of a canal that had to climb a cliff to get here.