Most people who cross the Big Bridge have no idea they did it. There is no rise, no span to notice, no moment where the road narrows and the ground drops away. There are storefronts, lanes of traffic, two parking lots, and the Erie Canal running underneath the whole arrangement. The state had to install a marker to tell drivers what they were standing on.
Read the marker
The New York State Education Department put one up in 1932. It is four sentences long and it is the reason anybody knows the numbers:
Big Bridge. One of the widest bridges in the world; 399 ft. in width, 129 ft. in length. Built 1914.
Read that twice. The width is three times the length. This is a bridge that is wider than it is long by a margin that would be a typo anywhere else.
Note also what the marker actually claims. One of the widest. The state hedged in 1932 and it is worth hedging now. Modern measurements of the structure don't line up neatly with the 1932 figures either. Quote the marker as the marker. It is a fine piece of writing and a mediocre survey.
How a bridge ends up wider than it is long
Geometry, mostly. The canal cuts through downtown Lockport on one line and Main Street wants to cross it on another, and the two lines meet at a sharp angle rather than a right one. A crossing built square to the canal would have dumped traffic sideways. So instead of a bridge, the engineers built something closer to a slab, a deck wide enough to swallow the whole skewed intersection and set it down on the other side pointing the right way.
What sits on top of it now is not one road. It is Main Street, Saxton Street, Cottage Street, and two parking lots, all riding the same structure. HistoricBridges.org, which catalogs this sort of thing for a living, calls it an extremely unusual design of arch bridge, and that is about as excited as a bridge database gets.
The effect is that the bridge disappears. A span you drive across announces itself. You feel the approach. A bridge that is essentially a paved plaza with a canal under it announces nothing. People park on it. People have coffee on it. The canal boats pass underneath and nobody upstairs looks.
What was there before
A second marker, this one from the state canal system, tells the earlier story, and it is a better one than the numbers.
The first crossing at this spot was a log bridge. Wide enough for one-way traffic, with a log laid along either side for a guard rail. The canal it crossed was forty feet wide at the time. That was Lockport's only bridge over the water, and they called it the Main Street Bridge, the same name people still use for the thing that replaced it.
In 1843, during the first enlargement of the Erie Canal, the town built a wooden replacement 105 feet wide. It was already the "Big Bridge" by then, and already odd: the marker notes it was built west of the direct line of Main Street, which is the sort of decision that gets explained by a document nobody kept.
Then the part that makes the whole thing make sense. By 1851, a portion of the bridge was being used as a marketplace. That is what the extra width was for. Lockport did not accidentally build the widest crossing in the region. It built a piece of downtown that happened to have water under it, and then it kept doing that. The 1914 structure with the parking lots on it is not a departure from tradition. It is the tradition.
"Widest in the world," according to the postcards
You will see the bigger claim everywhere in Lockport, and it has a real source: the period postcards. There are printed cards captioned Big Bridge, (Widest Bridge in the World), Lockport, N. Y. It was sold to tourists, mailed all over the country, and about as authoritative as tourist postcards ever are.
It is a good line and the town earned the right to use it. Just know whose line it is. The state marker said "one of." The postcards said "the." Both of them are still around, and only one of them was trying to sell you something.
The bridge turned 100 in 2014 and the anniversary got noticed locally, which is more attention than it usually gets on an average Tuesday, when people drive over one of the widest bridges in the world without lifting their eyes from the road.
Wear it
Our Big Bridge design gives it the treatment it never gets in person: drawn from the canal, from below, where it finally looks like a bridge.
Stand on it and look east and you are looking at the Flight of Five, the lock staircase that put the canal up the escarpment. Look the other way and there's the Upside-Down Bridge, whose truss sits under its deck. A short walk from either is the Palace Theatre, open since 1925.
The rest of the region is in the full town-by-town guide, and every design lives in the ALL America City collection.