From the towpath it reads as a mistake. The steel that ought to be arching over the tracks is sitting underneath them, and the train crosses on top of a structure that looks like it was installed the wrong way up. Lockport has called it the Upside-Down Bridge for generations, and if you ask anyone in town why it looks like that, you will get the same answer. The railroad did it on purpose.
Through truss, deck truss
Most old railroad bridges you can picture are through trusses. The train runs down the middle of a steel box, with diagonals and verticals rising on both sides, usually with cross-bracing overhead. You pass through the bridge.
The bridge over the canal at Lockport is a deck truss, and an inverted one at that. Every piece of ironwork hangs below the rails. Nothing crosses above the train at all. At eye level from a boat it looks flat wrong, because the part of a bridge you expect to see is the part that isn't there, and the part you expect to be up in the sky is hanging down over the water instead.
Only trains cross it. There is no road on it and never was. You can drive past it, walk under it on the towpath, or float beneath it on the canal, but the only thing that has ever gone over the top is a locomotive.
The story Lockport tells
Here is the version every kid in Lockport grows up with. At the turn of the last century the railroad and the canal were rivals, fighting over the same freight, and the railroad was winning. When the railroad needed to cross the canal, it did not build the bridge the normal way. It flipped the truss and hung the steel low over the water, on purpose, so the canal boats could not get under it. Cut off the boats, protect the railroad. Spite, cast in iron.
That is the story. It has been passed from grandparents to grandkids, from tour boat captains to tourists, and from Lockport natives to anyone who stops long enough to look up and ask. Whether every detail of it would hold up in an engineering seminar is beside the point. It is the story the town owns, and the bridge looks exactly like a thing built out of malice, which is most of what a story needs.
Rock helps
A deck truss has to fit its steel somewhere. The depth of the truss lives in the gap between the rails and the water, which means you need height to spend and something solid to land on. Lockport has both.
The canal here does not run through dirt. It runs through the Niagara Escarpment, a channel blasted out of dolostone, with rock for banks. That is the same geology that made this the hardest, slowest, most expensive stretch of the original Erie Canal to build, and it is why the town is called Lockport in the first place. It also happens to be an excellent place to set a bridge that keeps its skeleton underneath.
The details that stay fuzzy
For a landmark this recognizable, the paperwork is thin. Bridge records kept by railroad and structure enthusiasts date it to 1902 and put it on the New York Central, and that is the year you will hear repeated locally, but it isn't carved on anything official, so take it as a strong best guess rather than a settled fact. If 1902 is right, the bridge went up the year before the Wright brothers got off the ground at Kitty Hawk.
Sources also disagree about the truss subtype. Some call it an inverted Howe, others an inverted Baltimore. Both descriptions are in print, from people who care a great deal about the difference. Inverted deck truss is the phrase that survives every version of the story, so that is the one worth using.
What nobody disputes: it still carries track, it still crosses the canal, and it has comfortably outlived the rivalry that put it there.
Wear it
Our Upside-Down Bridge design is drawn from the water, which is the only angle where the thing makes sense: truss below, train above, open sky where the steel should be.
It has neighbors. Downtown, the Big Bridge hides in plain sight under Main Street, and the Palace Theatre has been putting on a show since 1925. Underneath all of it is the reason there is a town here at all: the Flight of Five, the lock staircase that carried the canal over the cliff.
More towns and more landmarks in the full town-by-town guide, or go straight to the ALL America City collection.