The canal that built N.Y.

Exactly 200 years, July 4, 1817, an empire was begun in Rome. No, our dates are not off and we don’t mean Italy. We speak of the city of Rome in Central New York and the start of construction of the Erie Canal, which let New York grow to be Empire State. No single public work of its time was as important as the Erie Canal, which opened a continent to trade, allowing ease of movement of goods and people and giving rise to Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Schenectady and Albany as the 363-mile watery highway linked them to each other and to the Midwest and to the mighty Hudson and New York Harbor, one of the planet’s finest natural anchorages.

Thus the man-made Erie Canal, coupled with nature’s blessing of the Hudson and the harbor, made New York the leading city of the world, the global colossus. Pretty good for a project Gov. DeWitt Clinton’s critics derided as “Clinton’s folly” and “DeWitt’s ditch.”

It was Clinton, who was also mayor and U.S. senator and almost beat James Madison for the presidency, who was the prime mover, championing the idea as member of very first canal commission in 1810. He was governor when the digging started and, after time out of office, he came back and was governor again when it was completed in 1825, riding the first boat and personally pouring water from Lake Erie into New York Harbor.

Two other New Yorkers, both from Queens, Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo, have cited Clinton and his canal as the type of smart government infrastructure investment that returns vastly more than the original public outlay.

As Trump said last month, “We will construct incredible new monuments to American grit that inspire wonder for generations and generations to come. We will build because our people want to build and because we need them to build. We will build because our prosperity demands it.”

Cuomo is right that once, our “transportation infrastructure spurred development. Our transportation infrastructure today retards development.” He is ending that and looking forward.

Today’s leaders need to follow Clinton’s example and find projects that can change the world like the Erie Canal.