The Erie Canal contrasted with the pace of public works in California

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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This week, one of the country’s earliest and most important community projects, 363 miles of Erie Canal connecting the Hudson River with Lake Erie, celebrated its 200th anniversary^th anniversary.

There was only minor media and political attention. This is unfortunate because the opening of the canal in 1825 completely transformed the nation’s economy and fueled its expansion from a few sparsely populated former colonies on the Atlantic coast some 3,000 miles west to the Pacific Ocean.

The rugged mountains prevented westward expansion from the coastal plain into the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes region. But New York Governor DeWitt Clinton saw an opportunity for New York to become the nation’s commercial capital, surpassing rival Philadelphia.

The New York Legislature authorized bond construction in 1817, and just eight years later, after being dug mostly by hand, the Erie Canal opened. Tolls paid off all of its construction debt in the first year.

Eventually, of course, the commercial importance of the canal was superseded by railroads and later highways. But it continues to work for pleasure and excursion boats and remains a symbol of how well-timed public works can have a big economic impact.

A quarter century after the opening of the Erie Canal, California was admitted as a state. In its early decades, it was somewhat isolated, with an economy based on resources – gold, timber, agricultural produce, cattle, fish and, eventually, oil.

However, as California entered the 20s^th century, massive public works projects emerged to encourage economic expansion and transformation, particularly in Southern California. Los Angeles and Long Beach created deep-water harbors from what had been coastal mud. Los Angeles secretly touched the Owens River 250 miles from the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada and built an aqueduct to carry its water to the city, making its meteoric population growth possible.

The Great Depression spawned other historic public works projects that not only benefited themselves but created much-needed jobs.

The federal government built Central Valley Projecta 450-mile network of dams, including Shasta Dam, and canals to provide water for valley farms.

The state built paraplanned bridge over San Francisco Bay while a consortium of counties built the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. Both were completed in just a few years.

World War II was a massive public works project in California, while billions of dollars were poured into military bases, aircraft factories, shipyards and other instruments of war, turning the state into an industrial powerhouse. The post-war era brought construction of highways to manage the traffic from the state’s population explosion.

The middle of the century also saw the state’s last truly transformative public works project, the California Water Plan. It encloses Feather River near Oroville with an aqueduct to carry water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Southern California.

The last decades of the 20^th Century and the first decades of the 21st^St were a period of stagnation in public works.

Projects like tunnel to carry water under the delta and on Dam Sites to divert and store large flows of the Sacramento River have been moving for decades. It appears the sites are finally on their way, but the tunnel is struggling to overcome opposition from local landowners and conservationists.

And then there is arrow train to connect the northern and southern halves of the state, first proposed half a century ago and approved by voters in 2008 — but limping along, neither fully alive nor dead, with some construction underway but no solid financial footing.

In retrospect, it is amazing that the 363-mile Erie Canal could have been dug by hand in only eight years, or that the two San Francisco bridges were erected in just a few years. The contrast with 21^St The age-old drag is palpable.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.