America's Stairway

About this title

The epic story of how one of America’s first successful public works emboldened a nation to move westward. The film places the historic Flight of Five locks on the Erie Canal in Lockport, New York, squarely in the American narrative as a symbol of a young and developing nation. The Lockport Locks were regarded as a modern engineering marvel at the time that the Erie Canal was originally opened in 1825. They enabled water-borne commerce and passengers to travel from New York City to the Great Lakes via the Hudson River and the man-made inland waterway system, opening up the Midwest to development.