Upstate Attractions

- It's amazing.

I can't believe how beautiful it is, and how close you are.

We just saw a ship go by, and I was like... I've always seen it from the ship.

And I always thought, you know what, it is close enough.

I could pass over a tray of cookies and reach the people on the viewing platform - [Announcer] Production funding for "Upstate Attractions" is provided by Franklin County Development, Allegany County, Oswego County Tourism, and the Watkins Glen Chamber of Commerce.

With daily flights to Boston Logan International Airport, Massena New York offers access to locations such as the Adirondack Mountains, the Saint Lawrence River, and destinations in Canada like Ottawa and Montreal.

Online at fishmassenany.com.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] In this episode of "Upstate Attractions."

Our hidden gem location is part of what's been considered an engineering marvel and a monumental gateway to the world.

It's also a significant tourist attraction and a pedagogical learning environment.

Well, you're right up close to a salty, an ocean-going ship that may be arriving from one of the world's important maritime trade routes as you can see on this map.

What makes our upstate attraction unique is that it's part of a major economic gateway for shipping, but it is not at a major seaside port.

It's over 700 miles inland, away from the Atlantic Ocean.

Yet, about 13% of the world's commercial shipping passes right through here.

The world-famous Great Lakes Saint Lawrence Seaway, a 2,300-mile marine highway connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

You're looking at a bird's-eye view of the Eisenhower Lock, at the town of Massena, NY, which is where our hidden gem is located.

The Eisenhower Lock and the near-by Snell Lock play a key role in allowing ships to bypass the Long Sault Rapids on the Saint Lawrence River, and they stand as a monumental gateway to the system, through which billions of dollars in goods pass each year.

Our hidden gem draws over 100,000 visitors annually, and is located directly beside the lock.

While these locks and the seaway are a shipping gateway connecting the Midwest to the world, our feature, the Dwight D Eisenhower Lock Visitors Center, serves as a gateway to learning and understanding.

A place where the story of the seaway's legacy, history, and significance is told.

The Eisenhower Visitor Center originally opened in 1961, and recently underwent a major renovation, with a brand-new facility that opened to the public in the spring of 2024.

The updated center now features modern exhibits, interactive technology, and a renewed focus on the Saint Lawrence Seaway's legacy and impact.

It's a must-see, especially if you enjoy watching massive ships navigate the lock from the observation deck.

In the next half hour, we'll explore the state-of-the-art visitor center and see how it presents a new era of discovery and education, a behind the scenes look at the place that presents the stories regarding one of the significant engineering achievements of the 20th century.

- This is the culmination of about 10 years of work.

- this is new and cutting edge.

From ceiling to floor, you have murals that are interactive displays that allow visitors to come and practice navigating ships through using virtual reality.

- I have sailed through here numerous times, and was so excited when they started building the new building.

- That is the moment that we came for.

Students love watching the ship go through and seeing it up close, all the mechanics.

- I'm an instructor of indigenous history at Clarkson University, and this place is a great resource for me to be able to educate the students on the impacts of the environment and engineering.

The visitor center is like a museum, and this is the first room that you come into after you walk through the door.

We have many people come in and say they didn't realize the greatness of the system, how big it was, where it got you, and you could actually get all the way in to the Great Lakes from the Atlantic by passing through these locks.

So we outlay and give a great orientation right at the beginning of the museum, right in the first room, which sets us off to kind of delve into the rest of the change that the locks brought.

And that's one of our themes here, is change.

- [Narrator] The changes that Amy is referring to began on May 13th, 1954, when President Eisenhower signed the Wiley-Dondero Act, authorizing the US Government to work jointly with Canada to create a deep-water navigation channel in the Saint Lawrence River, between Montreal and Ogdensburg, New York, a decision that enabled oceangoing vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean through to the Great Lakes of North America, as far inland as Duluth, Minnesota, at the west end of Lake Superior.

To get more details about the seaway beginnings and the infrastructure, we reached out on video chat to Tony Fisher, the Deputy Administrator of the Great Lakes Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, which is an arm of the US Department of Transportation.

- So, absolutely, this project was a tremendous feat of engineering.

It was envisioned in statute in 1954.

That's when our agency was authorized.

It was done in partnership between the US government and the Canadian government.

You can imagine it was authorized in 1954.

It was appropriated.

We broke ground in 1957.

And by 1959, we were done.

The seaway was open.

This is a 423-mile seaway.

The amount of engineering that went into the construction of the 15 locks is absolutely mind-blowing.

And if you think about it, at the time, they weren't doing this work with modern power tools.

They didn't have AutoCAD to do the engineering.

The construction, the design, the actual workmanship that was done, it was literally work in some of the harshest conditions on planet Earth.

The amount of effort and ingenuity that went into the construction of the seaway is just absolutely mind-boggling.

When you look at it from today's standards.

We operate these locks, built in the 1950s, built within a two-year time frame and over 99% effectiveness.

What that means is 99% of the time, during the shipping season, these locks are working.

This engineering feat, carving out waterways to allow boats and ships to come through for goods and services.

And hourly, we see this engineering miracle.

These ships come in and the water level being lowered or raised to go from one side to the other side.

And we've just lived with it in our backyard here.

- We put through about 13% of the world's shipping through this lock right here in Massena, NY.

So just to put that in perspective, the Great Lakes in a whole, all economic impact, it's the third largest economy in the world behind US and China.

- [Narrator] The economic ripple effect is enormous, including the creation and support of hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the seaway system, and in North Country.

- When the seaway was built, this region alone grew in size.

It really changed the whole landscape of the North Country here.

So, the seaway kind of quietly operates in the background.

Unless if you're on the river, you're not going to see the ships, but they quietly roll through.

Yet, it doesn't happen by coincidence.

It takes a lot of hard work to maintain these structures.

- When I first started here about twenty years ago, we did traditional tie up, with lines.

So a lot of the people we'd hire here had to have some seamanship skills, and they still do.

But this day and age, with leveraging technology in different aspects of the job, we were one of the first to pioneer hands-free mooring.

- My father worked here at the seaway when it first opened up in 1959.

In fact, my brothers and I were very, very young when we attended the reception when Queen Elizabeth came through.

My father worked as a Snell Lock operator.

They had operators here, both at the Eisenhower and the Snell Lock.

So of course, we spent a lot of time coming down and visiting, etcetera.

The seaway here is very, very important to our school system, to our businesses, to everybody coming here.

Very, very important.

It's a big industry.

- We support about a quarter million jobs across the region, just what we do here in Massena, and what our Canadian partners do as well across the border.

But we knew that for the next generation of visitors to the seaway and to the North Country here in Messina, we wanted to have something more impactful, more educational, to really explain to people what the seaway is all about, what kind of careers there are in maritime, and how it impacts everybody's daily life.

- [Narrator] So, on the 70th anniversary of the Wiley-Dondero Act, May 13th 2024, the new Seaway Visitor Center at the Eisenhower Lock was opened, welcoming a new generation of visitors to the seaway, and providing a world class tourist attraction for the region.

- I would say the building here is really a beacon, kind of a light shining up here on the Saint Lawrence River.

It really captures all of our history up to this point, and I think it relaunches things for future generations so that we can continue to share what we're up to here at the seaway, the different things that we impact, economic impact, maritime industry, careers for people in the maritime industry, reconciliation.

Akwesasne has been part of our story.

- So, the visitor center is really helpful because where I teach about indigenous history of the region, in particular, my home community of Akwesasne, which was affected by the seaway and all the construction there with the power dam and also the locks itself.

This becomes an area where I can showcase to the students more than just a big vista of river or just the infrastructure.

They can actually come to the visitor center where they can actually see the history and the overall impact within the region.

- The Seaway Visitors Center is a showcase, and the presentation museology is broken down into three main areas, experiential learning, tours and Workshops, and of course, witnessing the seagoing vessels in person, all designed to celebrate the seaway's legacy while offering valuable educational resources and community engagement opportunities.

- What we've built here are two floors of state-of-the-art exhibits that describe how the seaway was built.

Where did it come from?

Why do we have a seaway?

And what kind of people make up the seaway?

So what kind of jobs are out there?

What does it mean to everybody here in our local community and across the region throughout the Great Lakes?

- [Tony Fisher] So, one of the reasons that we built the visitors center is for young people who come and visit to be inspired by the maritime industry.

- I teach seventh grade science.

When students come visit the center, there are many opportunities for them to get their hands on learning processes that they wouldn't otherwise be able to see.

Example, they can stack a load on a ship, or go to the interactive screens where they can visualize the whole process happening.

They can see a whole model of the seaway itself, so it's really an engaging process.

It's not just sit there and listen, but go and get involved.

- I am a teacher at the Brasher Falls Central School district.

I teach 3rd grade, and I come here with my three children all the time.

One of the best parts about coming here is they have a lot of interactive exhibits that they didn't have in the old version of visitor center.

This game gives the kids a chance to drive a boat through the new modern locks.

There's a game similar to this on the other side of the visitor center that has the old rapids, and you would think that this would be easier than going through the rapids, but it takes a lot more skill to slow down and go through those giant doors without getting bumped into something.

- [Narrator] And here's a shot of the real thing.

Like Cara said, it takes a lot of skill to move these giant ships through the locks, with only inches to spare.

- This was one of my favorite exhibits because, when I brought my students here, I realized that I could turn this into a Lego project.

The Lego project would be students going back to the classroom, designing their own lock, and then building it, and seeing how they maybe could recreate the process of going through.

- [Narrator] While the experiential design of the Eisenhower Visitor Center actively introduces the story of the seaway and the maritime industry to educators and students, it has become a significant connection for North Country community stakeholders as well.

- The Saint Lawrence Seaway Visitor Center has been a fantastic addition for our program.

For us, it's that educational piece as well.

So a component of our program is STEM.

And so this provides us the engineering and the physics side of things.

Now that this new visitor center is here, and the fact that they invested this money into this region, this area, and the different demographics of people from all around that this can impact, it creates different memories for different people.

- [Narrator] The impacts even touched the people who worked on the building's planning and development.

- There's a lot of thought that went into and trial and error even, of what works and doesn't work.

It's hard for me to pick a favorite exhibit.

Certainly the ones that I keep coming back to and thinking about are the more hands-on ones.

Being a father here, I have a couple of small kids, grade school.

And showing them those exhibits, I could see the spark in their eyes and interest.

From a personal level, that gives me a sense of pride and satisfaction to see that.

So exhibits like "Don't Tip The Ship," which... That actually has a little back story of how we got to that exhibit and how it became what it is today.

The original concept was to be kind of like a claw machine that you would see in an arcade.

But there was a lot of challenges with getting that to work smoothly.

Well, I guess just like the arcade machine, sometimes it kind of fidgets and it's not as precise, but also the amount of time it would take for a visitor to go through that experience, it might take too long and create kind of a log jam.

So, we came up with a different idea of, well, just trying to manually load it by hand with blocks.

And that actually worked out really well, I think.

- There's a number of opportunities for youth and families.

For example, we're here at the "Don't Tip the Ship" exhibit.

And so what this is, is the blocks represent cargo on a shipping container.

And so it gives people the opportunity to kind of learn about the importance of stability on a ship, the buoyancy.

And so, for example, we've got a number of cargo blocks here.

And so, what we wanna do is try to fit as many as we can to try and balance out the ship.

However, once it starts to lean, I'll show kind of example here.

So as soon as it starts to lean, you see where the stability gets tested, and you lose all your cargo.

So, for us with our program, when we were here visiting, it became actual competition between a couple different kids.

Everything is competition, whether it's sports or what's going on.

So this was really neat, and I know this was a big draw for the youth that we serve.

- [Narrator] The educational resources at the visitor center expands well beyond just the exhibits.

The center also celebrates the seaway's legacy through community engagement opportunities that draws both locals and tourists to experience the seaway's rich history and significance.

- The Saint Lawrence Seaway and the visitor center here actually has a very big connection to our work at the Saint Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce because our work is to help promote a strong business climate and economy here in Saint Lawrence County and to bring tourists to the area, and it has a connection in both of those areas.

It is definitely an undiscovered gem that people should really come see.

- Today we were invited to come to the visitor center, the Eisenhower Lock Visitor Center, for a book signing.

So book signing, meet and greet, and I'm going to do a little talk presentation, PowerPoint presentation with pictures.

- [Narrator] Book signings and story telling with a world famous chef, who has worked on ships that have sailed the Great Lakes and through the locks, is just one of the many community outreach engagements at the visitors center.

- The building is kind of a representation, for me, of the international aspect of our area.

Because to be in the North Country, it's like, yes, we're very rural, but our neighbors are Canadian and they're just right across the bridge.

And these international waters here, it's something that everybody uses, and it's just... Yeah, it's like a coming together.

Our goal with tourism is always, what is the most authentic initiative to our way of life.

- I have memories back to my youth of coming here to watch ships come through with my dad.

It was a pretty regular weekend experience.

And to this day, we bring our own children out here.

We camp right here at Robert Moses, and the kids always want to come and watch the ships come through.

I don't think people realize the significance of these ships and the things that they carry coming from all over the world.

As a history teacher at one point, teaching them that the Mediterranean Sea was the international, the trade superhighway.

We really have that right here in our own backyard.

Goods and products coming back and forth, and the economic component to it, but also the natural beauty of it all.

- [Narrator] Which leads us to the third focus of the visitor center, the ships, massive freighters that are guided through what some may say is a miraculous waterway system 700 miles inland.

Moving goods to and from world ports, and creating maritime benefits and career opportunities right here in Massena's back yard.

- So, maritime careers in your backyard.

I'm living proof of it.

I'm from Fort Covin in New York, which is, I don't know, 30 miles east of here.

Again, very blessed to join the US Coast Guard, attend SUNY Maritime on Long Island, and be fortunate enough to have a job here at the seaway and progress through what I've done in navigation and operations.

There's so many opportunities in the maritime industry right now.

- [Nicole] And the careers, you've got your line handlers, and we've got some great jobs that the seaway provides.

But even the specialized, nuanced jobs, like a pilot for example, the folks that get onto the ship just to drive it through the lock system, such as specialized, neat job because they get to board everyone of these ships and come across these people from all over the world that make up the crew of these ships just to navigate them through this system of locks and waterways.

- [Narrator] As the saying goes, simplicity is often the result of hard work and expertise.

The smooth operation of the seaway is no different.

- So, we have a dedicated workforce here who have a wide range of experience and knowledge.

My division, we oversee all the engineering and maintenance that's involved with the day-to-day operation.

So a lot of people actually think that we pump water into and out of the locks, to raise them, but these locks are just like any other lock in the world, and they just operate via the same basic principles, water always flows downhill, use of gravity.

So, for example, we're here at Eisenhower lock.

This lock allows ships to either be raised or lowered about 40 feet.

And so it's actually pretty simple in the design of how it works, and there's actually some beauty in that simplicity.

- [Narrator] To take this engineering simplicity of the locks one step further, the center has a display that demonstrates just how high the ships have been elevated as they progress through the system.

It's quite incredible.

- So, basically, to give you an idea of the water level of all these locks in the system, when you start at lock one, which is basically around sea level, and you get to lock eight in the Welland Canal, it's 168 meters of a raise above sea level, is what it is exactly.

Then you go up into Lake Superior where the Army Corps of Engineers are.

They're like another 180 meters above that as well.

So just to paint the picture.

- [Narrator] Now, let's get a picture of what today's visitors think.

- I'm a teacher in the community, and I think that this visitor center is a great resource.

I had a student last year tell me when the boat came through, this is the best field trip he's ever had in his life.

- It's amazing, the ships, the lakers, the salties that go through.

It's such history by itself.

- I can't believe how beautiful it is, and how close you are.

We just saw a ship go by, and I was like... I've always seen it from the ship, and I always thought, you know what, it is close enough.

I could pass over a tray of cookies and reach the people on the viewing platform.

It's beautiful, worth the trip.

- This experience is a lot more intimate in some ways.

I mean, the facility here is beautiful, but it's not that big.

So you come here, you're right up close with the ships.

Myself, I can't believe how... I mean, it's right there.

You feel like you can reach out and touch it.

I mean, earlier when we were up on the deck, there were these guys painting the ship, and people were just yelling out like, "Hey, where are you coming from?

Good job guys."

The guys on the ship were like, "Yeah, cool."

So it's- (horn blaring) Okay, so I hear a horn right now, so I think the ship is coming.

Do you mind if we pack it up?

Cool.

Thanks.

(horn blaring) - [Narrator] The Saint Lawrence Seaway is one of the world's maritime superhighways, linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

And our hidden gem, the Eisenhower Lock Visitor Center, inconspicuously sits 700 miles inland on that waterway, beside the lock located at Massena New York.

It's a beacon.

Celebrating the seaway's legacy of engineering significance, economic impacts, and community engagement, drawing tens of thousands of visitors each year.

Join us next time as we bring you another upstate attraction.

- [Announcer] Production funding for "Upstate Attractions" is provided by Franklin County Development, Allegany County, Oswego County Tourism, and the Watkins Glen Chamber of Commerce.

With daily flights to Boston Logan International Airport, Massena New York offers access to locations such as the Adirondack Mountains, the Saint Lawrence River, and destinations in Canada like Ottawa and Montreal.

Online at fishmassenany.com.

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