AHC: The canals of New Amsterdam

Having just taken a 36-hour layover in Amsterdam on the way back from Lagos, I'm wondering why North America doesn't have any "canal cities" where waterways are an integral part of the street grid. There are certainly places where this could have happened - lower Manhattan, for instance, is prime canal territory, and the founders of the city were Dutch, so the idea wouldn't have been foreign to them. Does anyone have an idea why there aren't any American equivalents of Amsterdam, Venice or Bruges, and can anyone suggest a POD which would lead to such cities existing? Bonus points if there are gondoliers.
 
Having just taken a 36-hour layover in Amsterdam on the way back from Lagos, I'm wondering why North America doesn't have any "canal cities" where waterways are an integral part of the street grid. There are certainly places where this could have happened - lower Manhattan, for instance, is prime canal territory, and the founders of the city were Dutch, so the idea wouldn't have been foreign to them. Does anyone have an idea why there aren't any American equivalents of Amsterdam, Venice or Bruges, and can anyone suggest a POD which would lead to such cities existing? Bonus points if there are gondoliers.


Because there is absolutely no reason for Manhattan to have Canals. And there were Canals, hence Canal Street.
 
Some american cities do have canals and waterways as an important part of the urban fabric-Seattle, I think for example, or some neighborhoods where they're popular for walks or recreation like Georgetown. If you want something more exstensive.
I don't think there are many American cities that are that mainly built on reclaimed lands and the ones that are old enough to be Venice-analoges are on somewhat hilly coastal areas. You have to remember that Manhattan is much, much flatter than it used to be for instance, having been heavily graded down. The other major cities on the east cost are likewise hilly because they are mostly on the fall lines of rivers.
One way this seems doable is to have the railroad delayed enough somehow that canals are actually useful when some of the Great Lakes port cities develop. Another way to apply this to DC, incidentally, would be to find a way to keep the Washington City Canal from becoming stagnant and an open sewer, maybe by linking it to the C&0 Canal or by diverting the mouth of Rock Creek into it. This would probably require Washington to remain a fairly substantial port and the PoD mentioned above of delaying the spread of the railway somehow.
EDIT: New Orleans might also be a good candidate for this treatment-old enough to fit the kind of image the OP seems to be looking for and low-lying enough for canals to be viable. But with that city it'd be especially difficult to minimize health hazards so they don't get filled in at first opportunity.
 
Because there is absolutely no reason for Manhattan to have Canals. And there were Canals, hence Canal Street.

The Canal Street canal was built to drain a swamp, not as a public thoroughfare. Although that could potentially be a POD - the swamp is drained earlier, and a few more connecting canals get built so the ships' boats can bring cargo directly to the warehouses.

If you want something more exstensive.
I don't think there are many American cities that are that mainly built on reclaimed lands and the ones that are old enough to be Venice-analoges are on somewhat hilly coastal areas. You have to remember that Manhattan is much, much flatter than it used to be for instance, having been heavily graded down.

Granted - I'd forgotten about that. But on the other hand, part of lower Manhattan is built on reclaimed land (the shoreline is considerably farther out now than it was at the time of settlement) and the reclamation started in the 17th century. Compare 1660 and 1766 on this map.

It actually seems, from the same map, that Peter Stuyvesant did dig a couple of canals, along what are now Broad Street and what looks like Beaver Street. So the trick is to keep and expand them as more land is reclaimed, rather than filling them in. Would it be enough if the Dutch kept New Amsterdam a couple of generations longer?

Rio de Janeiro also has a lot of reclaimed land, and was founded in 1565. Maybe the Dutch could win out against the Portuguese in their struggle for Brazil, or a Portuguese governor could get the idea from them.

The other major cities on the east cost are likewise hilly because they are mostly on the fall lines of rivers.

Boston's pretty flat, and the Charles, like the Hudson, is an estuary for the last few miles of its course. And Back Bay is built on reclaimed tidal flats, although they weren't filled in until the 19th century.

One way this seems doable is to have the railroad delayed enough somehow that canals are actually useful when some of the Great Lakes port cities develop. Another way to apply this to DC, incidentally, would be to find a way to keep the Washington City Canal from becoming stagnant and an open sewer, maybe by linking it to the C&0 Canal or by diverting the mouth of Rock Creek into it. This would probably require Washington to remain a fairly substantial port and the PoD mentioned above of delaying the spread of the railway somehow.

Hmmm. Some of the Great Lakes cities - Buffalo, for instance - were starting to develop before the railroad came in. There's about a 20-year window between the opening of the Erie Canal and the first through railroad to Albany. Maybe the Erie Canal project could include some city canals? The topography is right, but it would require earlier local industry so that Buffalo would be more than a transit point.

New Orleans might also be a good candidate for this treatment-old enough to fit the kind of image the OP seems to be looking for and low-lying enough for canals to be viable. But with that city it'd be especially difficult to minimize health hazards so they don't get filled in at first opportunity.

NOLA is too low-lying, maybe - it would be hard to flush the canals, and they'd get stagnant. Amsterdam is a meter or two above sea level, and even there, some of the canals became unhealthy during the 18th century. I'm not an engineer, but I'd suspect that a city actually below sea level would increase the problem significantly.

EDIT: How could I forget Mexico City? There were extensive canal systems at Tenochtitlan and Xochimilco, and although Mexico City is at a high elevation, the terrain is flat and the central city is mostly landfill. The trouble is that Mexico City isn't a seaport, so there'd be no reason to keep or expand the canal system (except for recreation, as Xochimilco is used today).
 
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Yea, I'm not saying you couldn't have canals in costal cities-just that they would probably be a small-to-moderately sized group of neighborhoods and not a mainly canal-centric city. Again, though, the tricky part is "what do we do with these canals?" It's one thing if we can use them to transfer things between boats(Warehouses tend to be right on the waterfront, correct?) or if your entire city starts out as marsh, but that doesn't help with all cities(which is why I mentioned the Great Lakes cities) and there need to be quite a few canals so they don't all get filled in quickly.
 
Interestingly, during the Middle-Ages, almost all the towns had canalised rivers or even canals inside the walls in order to provide water but also for the force it could give for mills, for "industries", etc.

André Guillerme called the medieval cities "some Little Venice".

Here's a map to show it.

qFfGf.png
 
Again, though, the tricky part is "what do we do with these canals?" It's one thing if we can use them to transfer things between boats (Warehouses tend to be right on the waterfront, correct?)

Canals can extend the waterfront. The warehouses in Amsterdam and Bruges were on the canals - many of the fancy-looking Amsterdam canal homes were warehouses in the 17th century. You can get quite a bit more convenient warehouse space in a canal city than in a city where the only waterfront is on the harbor itself.

Maybe the problem is that American cities were still very small in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Amsterdam already had more than 100,000 people at this time, while the largest British North American city was barely a tenth that size - in the 1737 census, the population of Manhattan was 10,664 - and none of the colonial cities handled anywhere near the trade volume that Amsterdam did. If the existing harborfront was enough to accommodate the American cities' warehousing needs, then it wouldn't have been worth the effort to dig canals in order to expand the available space.

If so, then we need the canals to get built at a time when the cities are bigger - for instance, during the 19th-century landfill expansions of lower Manhattan or Boston. As you say, that would put the canals in just a few neighborhoods rather than the whole city, but as Amsterdam shows, the canal districts can still be pretty big, and might become prized residential areas as the neighborhoods change.

Of course, there's also the 20th-century option of "canal chic" combined with less automobile travel - Venice, California was built with canals, but most of them were filled in to accommodate the growth of vehicle traffic. If American cities grew in a way more oriented toward public transportation, maybe the canals would have stayed open, and other similar suburbs might have been built as playgrounds for the upper middle class.

Interestingly, during the Middle-Ages, almost all the towns had canalised rivers or even canals inside the walls in order to provide water but also for the force it could give for mills, for "industries", etc.

Interesting, especially since many of the cities on your map are inland cities. I didn't know that large canal systems were so widespread - I assume that the canals in places like Troyes or Provins paralleled the course of rivers from higher to lower elevation. Do they still exist today?
 
What about Mexico City? There were canals there preconquest, no?

I mentioned Mexico City a few posts ago. There were canals in at least Xochimilco and Tenochtitlan; the Xochimilco system still exists and is used recreationally. The trouble is that there was no incentive for the Spanish conquerors to maintain or expand the canal systems. Mexico City isn't a seaport, so there's no need for an expanded waterfront to accommodate warehouse space, and there isn't enough of an elevation differential at the base of the valley to provide force for mills or waterwheels. I'd guess that canals need to be connected to some other waterway (either sea or river) to be economically viable; otherwise, you're just transferring incoming goods from carts to boats for no good reason.

Hmmm. Let's say the Aztec dams on Lake Texcoco were never destroyed, leading to less of a problem with flooding in the 16th-17th centuries, and the lake is never drained. Instead of a single large city built on reclaimed land, several medium-size cities grow up along the shores and on the islands of the lake, and travel between them is primarily by water. In that case, it might make sense to keep and extend the canal systems for commerce and transport.
 

HJ Tulp

Donor
Keeping the canals might be the biggest problem actually. Let's not forget that even in Amsterdam the canals were almost filled up in the '60s to accommodate car-traffic.
 
Philadelphia, being between two rivers, relatively flat (atleast if we're speaking about Center City, the Susquehanna is surrounded by Hills further Northwest of the city), and is a port city.
Perhaps Penn decides to seperate his city from the surrounding land to become an 'Island of Peace, Tolerance, and Brotherly Love'. Alternatively Penn was against Philadelphia becoming a large city, instead fancying it to become something like a rural English community.

Or you could screw Penn all together and have the Dutch/Swedes keep the area. Rather than a city between two rivers, it was a city which controlled the mouth of the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers. In which case, there is an incentive to use canals as transportation, and the prior knowledge of how to build canals (especially if the Dutch keep it).
 
Keeping the canals might be the biggest problem actually. Let's not forget that even in Amsterdam the canals were almost filled up in the '60s to accommodate car-traffic.

Oh dear. That's giving me images of a 19th century canal mania as a parallel to the interurban railways. Hell, it could even be focussed in the same area with lots of very rural canals that end up abandoned financial disasters being built feeding into the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers along with lakes Michigan and Erie. Might even be plausible with some kind of accelerated Midwestern settlement (possibly muck around with the outcome of the Revolution and 1812 a bit) and somewhat slowed railway investment (the thought crosses my mind that you could have some kind of southern oriented canal mania intended to drive trade toward the Mississippi and New Orleans as a kind of ultimately failed competition with the railroad's eastern focus - might have some interesting butterflies on the Civil War).
 
Oh dear. That's giving me images of a 19th century canal mania as a parallel to the interurban railways. Hell, it could even be focussed in the same area with lots of very rural canals that end up abandoned financial disasters being built feeding into the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers along with lakes Michigan and Erie. Might even be plausible with some kind of accelerated Midwestern settlement (possibly muck around with the outcome of the Revolution and 1812 a bit)

This actually was one of the reasons why Chicago emerged as the predominate Midwestern metropole. Early on, Chicago became a center real-estate speculation anticipating future profits stemming from a canal connecting Lake Michigan to the Mississippi river. Said Canal got built, but its mercantile impact was somewhat underwhelming. Eastern investors were much more interested in Chicago's latent potential as a rail hub.
 
Didn't someone just use those exact same words a few posts up?

Yeah, it's one of a new breed of spammers, who apparently do nothing but quote lines from previous posters in the thread.

Anyway, on the topic at hand, it seems like in most places there won't be enough time for a city's canals to become iconic enough to be worth preserving before they're rendered obsolete by trains and then automobiles. So I think the best bets would be sites that are going to be settled early on, or taken over from the previous owners--New York and Tenochtitlan seem like obvious candidates, as previously mentioned.

I'm also intrigued by the possibilities of New Orleans, since it's sited at the mouth of a major river and should have a lot of water traffic anyway. Wikipedia lists its foundation as 1718--is there anything that would make it a plausible settlement site before then? It'd be a stretch, but perhaps the Mississipian cultures somehow weather contact better, in which case *New Orleans could be a valuable place for a European power to control...
 
Having just taken a 36-hour layover in Amsterdam on the way back from Lagos, I'm wondering why North America doesn't have any "canal cities" where waterways are an integral part of the street grid. There are certainly places where this could have happened - lower Manhattan, for instance, is prime canal territory, and the founders of the city were Dutch, so the idea wouldn't have been foreign to them. Does anyone have an idea why there aren't any American equivalents of Amsterdam, Venice or Bruges, and can anyone suggest a POD which would lead to such cities existing? Bonus points if there are gondoliers.

Hey Jon, glad to see you on here.
Honestly, if there's any cities outside of New York that could use canals, why not New Orleans or somewhere in south Florida?


(P.S. I know that this is off-topic but I really liked your work on 'For All Nails' Good stuff, man. :D)
 
Fogel's Railroads and American Economic Growth claims that canals could have been just about as efficient for long-run transport as railroads in the 19th century US. It sounds crazy, but having read about half of it, it makes a lot more sense than I would have expected.

Maybe a Midwestern city could end up with canals, as some sort of local boosterism/attempt to expand river warehousing capacity? Say, St. Louis or Kansas City?
 
Fogel's Railroads and American Economic Growth claims that canals could have been just about as efficient for long-run transport as railroads in the 19th century US. It sounds crazy, but having read about half of it, it makes a lot more sense than I would have expected.

We used them quite a lot here in the Netherlands for transporting goods.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Hey Jon, glad to see you on here.
Honestly, if there's any cities outside of New York that could use canals, why not New Orleans or somewhere in south Florida?

(P.S. I know that this is off-topic but I really liked your work on 'For All Nails' Good stuff, man. :D)

Canal Street was supposed to be a Canal, that is why it is so big. They even started work on some Canals, but they were not economical. IMO the biggest reason why the USA does not have canal cities is technology. When the European canal cities were built, canals were the best option. By the time the USA was rapidly expanding west, railroads made more sense. If New Orleans had been settled in 500 AD by European, it could easily have a city of Canals down there. In faction there are a lot of settle canals (bayou's) in Louisiana, they are just not urban areas.
 
Fogel's Railroads and American Economic Growth claims that canals could have been just about as efficient for long-run transport as railroads in the 19th century US. It sounds crazy, but having read about half of it, it makes a lot more sense than I would have expected.

Maybe a Midwestern city could end up with canals, as some sort of local boosterism/attempt to expand river warehousing capacity? Say, St. Louis or Kansas City?

I really have a hard time buying Fogel's reasoning, particularly concerning the settlement of the American west where rail networks are necessary to bring crops and minerals east. Not to mention how the construction of railroads helped to fuel the development of many of American's heavy industries.

That being said, a canal boom could probably be sustained along the great lakes and into the Ohio and Mississippi river basin's provided the development of rail is delayed by about 50 years.
 
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