Rochester Wants to Fill Part of Erie Canal Bed ROCHESTER, NY (WXXI) - The City of Rochester says it will have to close one of the four lanes on West Broad Street this month, and the fix is to fill in the abandoned subway tunnel that lies beneath it.

Broad Street is built on top of a hidden bridge over what was at first the Erie Canal, and later became the Rochester subway line. North of Main Street that structure holding up Broad Street turns from concrete to steel. The city says gaps are appearing in the right northbound lane because the underlying steel structure is deteriorating.

Mayor Robert Duffy says the city needs to spend between $12 million and $16 million to fill the tunnel north of Main Street. The mayor says there's a risk the roadway will collapse and injure someone.

The city says it costs a million dollars a year to maintain the tunnel from Main to Brown Street and it shouldn't keep spending money on patching it up.

But groups interested in either re-watering the original bed of the Erie Canal through downtown Rochester or in running a new trolley line through the canal bed and across the Broad Street Aqueduct are saying "not so fast."

Christopher Burns of the Subway-Erie Canal Revitalization Group says filling the north end of the tunnel blocks its possible re-use for either of those plans. Burns says doing away with the canal bed would eliminate real estate vital to either concept.

But Mayor Duffy says it will be years before plans for the old canal bed are ready to move forward, and the tunnel can be dug out again when the city is ready. Duffy says he's not a fan of filling landmarks with dirt, but this is the most practical solution.

The Subway-Canal group organized two years ago, when it successfully blocked Mayor Bill Johnson's administration from filling in the entire tunnel. Burns says it's gearing up a new campaign to "chill the fill" again.

Burns says the city pledged a study of the entire Broad Street corridor before acting, and it hasn't delivered yet.
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