I didn't hurry to get to my walk today, as it was going to be cool and (knock wood) not wet in about the same proportions for a couple of hours. When I did walk, it was a lovely day, and I made good time. GREAT time if you believed my walking odometer, which reset its time after twenty minutes... while keeping my mileage! So I showed a superb average speed today, you betcha.
On the canal, I spotted a disused dock, just about the only one with no trespassing signs on it. It was a little overgrown with weeds, and has creeper on the bench. I photographed it for future reference. There's a Little Free Library not far from State Street, on the canal, and I poked through it and straightened the books and CDs out. I even tightened the latch, having a Phillips Head on my knife.
In the area back of the Del Monte motel (where we all stayed our first night in town, as our other accomodations wouldn't be ready for another day, twelve years ago), I went to the portion of the Auburn Trail that Sarah and I had walked once, from the apartment we were in for three weeks or so as we waited for this house to be ready for us. At the time, I'd seen signs that something was odd about one part, near the end. I looked down and saw some concrete. Later, I decided that was a spot where another line (I recently learned that it's the old electric car line from Rochester to Victor or Bloomfield or one of those places) crossed below, which I'd seen in a photo. This photo:
I'd almost started to think that I had imagined it, having spent some of my walks bumming around that stretch of the railroad trail, looking in the dense growth below for signs of that underpass. I'd spent time looking at what I could find online--like this photo!
I thought I had it in a book, but couldn't find it, so I found it at a site set up by Mr. David Gardner, who had some early photos, and a map showing the path of the streetcar, which brought me to within a few paces of the spot earlier this week. Just above is a view of the elevated part of the Auburn, taken from a spot on or near the tracks in the old shot. When you're on the trail up there, nothing really tells you you're on a cement structure. It just looks like a raised right of way, except when you notice how far down the trees on either side go.
Today I walked to the spot, about to look for the thing for a couple of minutes at the apex of my walk (from home back to home was about six miles today), and there it was, plain as anything--because some men with tractors and other equipment were removing the vegetation that covered it and clearing off the front of the old underpass (which is now undoubtedly bricked or cemented in) so it can be seen from the trail. And they're putting in a bench, and for all I know a historical info sign. I thought this was great, and thanked them. The above view is looking own from the upper track bed at part of an exposed side of the underpass--it would be on your right in the old pic.
The above map shows where this took place. The arrow by "Abutments" points to where my abutment has been several times in the past couple of weeks. I used that map and a screen snap of the satellite view from Google and worked out where that spot should be, and checked the scale and estimated about a hundred paces. I wasn't far off. I also went and looked at Jojo's, which occupies the old streetcar depot (handily across Main Street from the Auburn's depot). I also located the old German Howitzer that used to sit in a park just above that arrow indicating the station. There's no sign of its base in the park now, but the Pioneer Burying Ground a mile from my house has three cement pads that used to hold the captured armament until 1936 when the other park was created. By about 1980, they decided to landscape it out of existence, and they loaned the piece to East Rochester. By a coincidence, the day after I had been reading about it, I walked around a corner of one of the paths between the Auburn Line and the canal and there was the howitzer.
A guy there told me they were looking to put the thing in the park they're creating back there, but it needs some work. He said some Mennonites were maybe going to fix the wheels and tires, but it still needed sandblasting. To add another layer of unlikely coincidence, I was telling my next-door neighbor about the howitzer, and he said that his Legion post (or was it his VFW chapter? Never mind!) had refurbished the thing in 1980. A sign on it says it was done again in another year, too. I'm deciding against buying a howitzer for my yard. Too much maintenance.
In other railroad trail news, I saw some 'new-to-me' miles yesterday when I drove (first time I drove somewhere to walk by myself) down to Railroad Mills, the street that marks the farthest south I'd gone before, and parked by Powder Mill Park, and walked to the trail and went two and a half miles (not an ambitious day, distance-wise) and saw some nice glens and woods, on a very well manicured trail with stone mile markers and reasonable signage. I reached Fishers, NY, which has a two-story blocky, knobby stone pump house that is the second oldest railroad building in the US. Though it's a very small town, they did have a Little Free Library there, and I traded the book in my pack for one they had.
Between Railroad Mills and Fishers, however, was another little mystery.
Why, what a nice tunnel under I-90 (Dewey Thruway)! You fellows surely didn't build that there because the old railroad trail ran that way. How recently did the trains run this way? And how long ago did they build the Thruway? (On different days, I found the answers: This part of the Auburn Road was abandoned in 1960. The Thruway was built in 1954. It was just that close.)
My research this week also shows that the Trails group that was starting up in the late 1990s had considered connecting the Auburn as it crossed the Erie Canal (presently a dead end on each side) by putting a new footbridge where the railroad bridge used to be, something I'd often wished someone would do. In 2002, the job was estimated to cost $1.4M to do. No idea how much it would cost now, but that big concrete piece still stands ready in the middle of the canal. (I also learned that some abutments I'd seen when crossing the canal at Marsh Road were not from an old Marsh Road bridge, but were there for the street car line.)
Anyway, on the way back, I sat on a bench and played with my tiny keyboard for a quarter of an hour, getting back my version of Fats Wallers's "Viper's Drag" that I can play on a 31-key instrument with just two notes of polyphony.
Getting back to today, I found the Harladay Hots stand in operation in a vacant-lot park on Main Street, and had an Andouille Sausage for lunch. Then I went home and played the piano. Life was full of fun today, and I relished it, haw haw.
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