Rochester Subway Tours This Weekend

This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published October 04, 2013 and can be found here.

   I often get asked if there are tours of the Rochester subway. The short answer is no. The longer answer is while there is no official tour of the "subway," every October there is usually a tour of the "historic Erie Canal aqueduct." And it's coming up this weekend...

   As part of Rochester's River Romance Weekend this Saturday, you're invited to tour Rochester's most famous hole in the ground. Admission is free and several tour groups will depart from the lobby of the Rundel Memorial Library (115 South Avenue) from 12:00-3:00pm. Though I'm not sure how many tour groups there will be or what times they will leave exactly, because the     event web page

stinks worse than the subway itself. So if you're interested in going, play it safe and get there at noon.

Now, what's the difference between a tour of the historic Erie Canal aqueduct and a tour of the historic Rochester subway tunnel? There is none really. Except that the group leading the tour is the Canal Society of New York State, and they're     pushing

to see it filled with water and turned back into a boat canal. Therefore I can't imagine they're very interested in playing up the history of the subway.

   You and I both know this space has been a "subway" tunnel for nearly as long as it was a canal. With a $66 Million price tag--and in light of     another recent proposal    to preserve both the canal AND the subway history--I have to wonder the canal idea is dead in the water.