Well, I’ve written Donn Esmonde, local columnist/activist, of the Buffalo News.  I’ve asked Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, the big development organization in Western New York.  I’ve spoken to people I know.  In all cases, I’ve found little enthusiasm or interest in being part of an effort to at least apply and quite possibly fail to have the 363 mile long historic Erie Canal be declared as a World Heritage Site.

As I wrote earlier, I believe it has all the qualifications.  The Canal laid the ground work for Westward expansion, immigration, commercial development, and overall growth on the US-Canadian portion of North America.

I have not given up with the lack of local interest.  I’ve communicate with UNESCO office in charge which is locatedin Paris, France.  I hope to find out if  Canal would be worthy of consideration as a World Heritage Site.  We’ll see if I get a response and whether it is favorable or not.  I will let you know.

Dear Sir:

I am writing to you to determine if  the story and continued existence of the Erie Canal, located in the State of New York USA, is worthy of UNESCO consideration as a  World Heritage Site.  The 360 mile long canal has recently been declared a  United States National Heritage Corridor.

Here are some materials on the Canal and its History:

http://www.history.com/shows/america-the-story-of-us/videos/building-the-erie-canal#building-the-erie-canal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_f7S4BojGI

http://eriecanal.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6dpiDBz1M0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ULkQddXqsw

http://immigration-online.org/403-canals.html

http://www.eriecanalway.org/documents/ERCAunigridfinal.pdf

I look forward to hearing from you.

Michael Wrona

Since May I’ve been working for Mike and Sharon Murphy.  They are the founders and owners of Lockport Locks and Erie Canal Cruises which is located in the picturesque small Niagara County, NY city of Lockport.  As one of the tourist season deckhands I’ve been shared the responsibility of ensuring that all the visitors have a safe and enjoyable 1 1/2 to 2 hours (depending on lock activity) over a stretch of the history Erie Canal.  The Erie Canalway has been recognized by the United States as a National Historic Corridor.

Over the past 12 weeks I have had the opportunity to speak with travelers from across the United States, Mexico, Canada, Eastern Europe, Turkey, India, South Africa, China, and Brazil.  I think my favorites have been bikers from their late 40s to early 60s who have appeared in numbers over the last 3 weeks.  There was a couple up from Oklahoma who were on their way to the Canadian Maritime provinces.  Interestingly on the same trip was a couple from Missouri who were on their way to Canada to ride the roads along the north shores of the Great Lakes to Minnesota and then home.  I got the two introduced and they departed the boat together.

Just this past was a group of over 30 riders who belonged to a group called Venture Rider.  They came from all over the USA and were pretty much single minded in their mode of transportation.  Their web site proclaims:

Though VentureRider is dedicated to the Yamaha Venture, Venture Royale, Royal Star Venture and Royal Star Tour Deluxe motorcycles, we have members who ride many different makes and models. All are welcome.

This was a friendly gregarious, outgoing, personable and inquisitive bunch of people.  For me there is nothing better than visitors who get on the boat and want to know about history, people and places. I sure enjoyed them, I hope that they really enjoyed themselves.  They seemed like they did.

I mention this sort of thing because locally too many people don’t realize the great variety of travelers that come through and enjoy the area and what it has to offer.  All too often we get carried away with the criticism we receive about out winters, even though like Vermont and the Rockies we have a winter sports industry that supports thousands of jobs, and presume people don’t want to come here.

Those people are wrong and people like those affiliated with VentureRider are on track.  It’s a big country with plenty to see and do.  We here in the Niagara Region are just as viable attraction as most other places.

Between 1817 and 1825 New York Governor DeWitt Clinton set in motion a 363 mile canal  construction project dug between the 17th century American city of Albany and a tiny community situated at the mouth of a non-descript creek at the confluence of it, Lake Erie and the Niagara River.  The construction, derogatorily called “A Ditch” by many went on to become a 1500 mile route from the Atlantic Ocean to the very far western reaches of the Great Lake named Superior.  Upon completion the Erie Canal began the transformation of North America.

That little village, Buffalo NY, grew to the 8th largest city in the USA by 1900.  Along the way to Buffalo the dynamic cities of  Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Rome, Schenectady equally grew and prospered. The canal became America’s original Gateway to the West.  Untold thousands of immigrants from across the globe made their way to new homes in the great American cities of Duluth, Green Bay, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland and Erie; or, built new lives on what would become Midwestern farms and aided in the economic development of Canada’s Great Lakes shoreline.

Gerard Koeppel, author of the book ”Bond of Union” makes these points on Erie’s effect:

It is not generally acknowledged that Erie was a messy thing. But it was, in many ways.

• The canal was proposed in anonymous newspaper essays by a bankrupt merchant in debtors’ prison. If his anonymity had been lost, the busted dreamer’s wild notion of a canal across the breadth of upstate New York would likely have been fatally scorned.
• Benjamin Wright, the country surveyor who emerged as Erie’s chief engineer (and is honored today as the Father of American Civil Engineering), was nearly fired for avoiding hazardous Erie fieldwork and neglecting his Erie work generally for outside jobs. His peers also didn’t like him very much.
• Conflict of interest was an unborn term in Erie’s day. Men who served as     Erie canal commissioners and engineers pursued healthy speculative profit in remote lands made more valuable by the canal’s passage.
• Waste of public moneys in the service of private interest flowered on the eastern end of the Erie Canal: commissioners and engineers conspired to make the canal unnecessarily crisscross the lower Mohawk River on two risky aqueducts, instead of taking a more direct and much cheaper route between Schenectady and Albany. As one incredulous and knowledgeable observer put it: “crossing the river, in order to pay the county of Saratoga a compliment; and . . . recrossing again to convince the public how easy and practicable a matter it was.”
• Money was also wasted trying to save money. The spectacular aqueduct carrying the canal over the raging Genesee River at the new village of Rochester was hailed upon its completion in 1823 as “a structure of admirable solidity and beauty” and “the most stupendous and strongest work in America.” Ten years later, the country’s longest stone bridge was “in a state of rapid dilapidation.” In another three years, it was “nearly in ruins.” Why? Against engineering advice, the canal commissioners had ordered the aqueduct built of local but soft and porous sandstone; a new aqueduct of proper but expensive limestone had to be built alongside the splendid wreckage of the first.
• The canal was an instant success in generating wealth for the state (largely via tolls) and for the nation generally in moving people and manufactured goods west and produce and raw materials east, but it was too small. Just nine years after the canal opened, chief engineer Wright admitted: “in the size of our canal . . . we have made great errors, very great indeed.” The original canal cost $7 million; the tab for the enlargement (to seventy feet wide and seven feet deep) over the next three decades was $43 million.
• Erie was a fantastic success (despite the cost of two constructions) but its success induced many more failures. The Panic of 1837 and the ensuing six-year national depression were fueled by a collapse in financing for Erie-inspired state and private canal projects that never should have been started. Erie was the herald of the nation’s first technology boom and bust.

The point is not that Erie was a terrible boondoggle. It was not. By joining east to west, Erie was the first bond of a continental union. The point is that it was an extraordinary risk with real negatives that were overwhelmingly minimized by extraordinary positives.

Two centuries later, we’ve become a risk-averse nation. Fearful of catastrophic failure, our greatness slowly ebbs. We deteriorate by a thousand small failures. But, if we recognize the past as having been as messy as the present, we can set realistic and hopeful goals for the future: it becomes easier to do better.

With this in mind and in the memory of  the non-memorialized workers who toiled with little more than iron picks, wooden shovels, and some War of 1812 gun powder in their daily work..  A little know fact is revealed by the internet site History Central 

“9,000 workers were engaged in the building of the Erie Canal.  Many of the laborers were Native Americans.”  

This information is complement by another Internet site titled “Upstate New York Genealogy” which makes the point: 

“It is said by historians that the Erie Canal was dug by New England farmers that worked for what was considered very high wages paid by the state and they primarily worked in the off farming season.  For those of you that have heard that “The Irish dug the Erie Canal” you would be referring to the 1850′s period of the canal widening, which of course attracted many of the recent famine immigrants to good jobs?”

While the United States has not gone so far as to identify any portion of the canal as a National Park, maybe it is time the community take a much bigger step.  The Canal may be a National Heritage Corridor but it is deserving of greater recognition.  That could be a designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Since it’s birth this canal has made it possible for people from all over the world establish news lives for themselves, their families and their countries all across the 1 million square mile of North America accessible to the Great Lakes and its tributaries.  A distinction few other man made bodies of water could claim.

It would help if you contacted your New York State and United States government elected officials and asked that they cooperate in nominating the Canal for its much deserved recognition.  Click here to read and/or pass along the UNESCO World Heritage Information Kit.

For years Americans in general and Canadians in smaller amounts have characterized the people of Mexico as unwanted nare-do-wells looking to get into the country to take our jobs.  Jobs that we don’t want but it is politically correct in many places to use the phrase “Our Jobs.”

As this out the illegal campaign grows increasingly shrill, Mexico has been growing its middle class, and like all people of the middle class, they want better lives and will spend to get it.  The Mexican Middle Class could very well be on the verge of establishing itself as the largest population group in Mexico.

MÉXICO — (Washington Post) A wary but tenacious middle class is fast becoming the majority in Mexico, breaking down the rich-poor divide in a profound demographic transformation that has far-reaching implications here and in the United States.

Although many Mexicans and their neighbors to the north still imagine a country of downtrodden masses dominated by a wealthy elite, the swelling ranks of the middle class are crowding new Wal-Marts, driving Nissan sedans and maxing out their Banamex credit cards.

The members of this class are not worried about getting enough to eat. They’re worried that their kids are eating too much.

“As hard as it is for many of us to accept, Mexico is now a middle-class country, which means we don’t have any excuse anymore. We have to start acting like a middle-class country,” said Luis de la Calle, an economist, former undersecretary of trade in the Mexican government and the co-author of a new report called “Mexico: A Middle Class Society, Poor No More, Developed Not Yet.”

The new stereotype is no longer an illegal immigrant hustling for day labor outside a Home Depot in Phoenix. The new Mexican is the overscheduled soccer dad shopping for a barbecue grill inside a Home Depot in booming Mexican cities like Queretaro.

Source:  Reflejos BiLingual Newspaper -

What is attractive about Mexico and the Mexicans is that we can have an entirely workable symbiotic relationship.  The Niagara Region gives them an alternative to Summer time heat, and Mexico gives us an alternative (other than Florida) to winter cold.

Maybe a Bi-National Niagara Region effort would work in securing a low cost Mexican airline like Volaris to service Niagara Falls International Airport or Buffalo-Niagara International Airport.  Mexican vacationers and businessmen would have free, no visa required, access to their NAFTA partners right here on the Niagara River with excellent connections to the Greater Toronto Area.  While we get access to Cancun, Mexico City, Guadalajera, Los Cabos, Monterey, Oaxaca, etc.

Mexican low-cost carrier Volaris is tweaking its US operations after making an aggressive push into transborder markets in 2011 in the aftermath of Mexicana‘s collapse. The airline is cutting flights from Guadalajara to San Diego, a route it launched a little over a year ago in May-2011, and is suspending Mexico City to Oakland at least temporarily, as it evaluates switching those flights to San Francisco. At the same time Volaris is growing its domestic network, with a particular push from its third largest base in Guadalajara.

Mexico‘s four remaining major carriers – Aeromexico, Volaris, Interjet and VivaAerobus – seized on the opportunities created by the collapse of Mexicana in Aug-2010. Initially the four carriers expanded domestically but in early 2011 began expanding in US markets. Expansion in the US in the immediate aftermath of Mexicana’s collapse was not possible due to US FAA Category 1 restrictions, but these were lifted at the end of 2010 when the FAA upgraded Mexico back to a Category 1 safety rating.

Volaris has experienced the most pronounced transborder growth following Mexicana’s exit and has built up a US network that by 15-Jul-2012 will encompass eight destinations and nearly 20 transborder routes. Orlando is set to become Volaris’ eighth US market on 14-July-2012, when it launches two weekly flights from Mexico City.

Orlando will be the carrier’s first destination on the US east coast. Back in 2009 Volaris evaluated serving Fort Lauderdale from its Toluca base, which is 70km from Mexico City and serves a secondary airport to Mexico City International. In filing for Fort Lauderdale traffic rights in 2009, Volaris estimated it would carry about 600,000 annual passengers in the market during 2010. But Volaris never used its Fort Lauderdale traffic rights and for now Volaris has settled on Orlando, which is a large tourist and convention destination, as its first US east coast market.

Currently, Chicago Midway is Volaris’ eastern-most destination. The majority of its US routes link five cities in California – Los Angeles, San Diego, Fresno, San Jose and Oakland.

Some of Volaris’ route authorities to the US were secured on a temporary basis and may have to be returned to Mexicana should Mexicana resume services. Volaris and other Mexican carriers may also have to return slots at Mexico City, some of which are used for transborder services.

Source:  CAPA Center for Aviation -

One could only dream, but, with tourism on the rise on our Canadian brother’s side of the border, and Buffalo-Niagara making the top 20 in U.S for destinations visited by International travelers, it really is time that we got aggressive and pursued tourism as an opportunity for growth for Bi-National Niagara.