In the early 1920s, the city of Rochester, New York, faced a unique urban planning dilemma coupled with a golden opportunity. The famous Erie Canal, which had fueled the region's industrial growth for nearly a century, was being rerouted south of downtown as part of the massive New York State Barge Canal project. This left a deep, empty ditch slicing directly through the heart of Rochester's commercial center.
At the same time, surface streets were horribly congested with a chaotic mix of automobiles, delivery wagons, and interurban electric streetcars bringing workers in from surrounding towns. City officials realized that digging an underground subway from scratch like New York City or Boston would be prohibitively expensive due to dense local bedrock. However, the dried-up canal bed offered a pre-excavated channel waiting to be used.
Rochester purchased the old canal right-of-way from the state and embarked on an ambitious engineering project. Between 1922 and 1927, construction crews converted the canal trough into the Rochester Industrial and Rapid Transit Railway. In the dense downtown core, workers built a heavy concrete deck over the ditch, creating Broad Street on top while running rapid transit trains underneath through the original canal path, including the grand Broad Street Aqueduct over the Genesee River.
For nearly thirty years, the subway effectively separated trolley traffic from street-level congestion and served as a vital freight bypass between major trunk railroads. As post-war suburban sprawl took hold, car ownership soared, and interurban trolley networks collapsed, ridership precipitously declined until passenger service ceased in 1956.