title: Erie Canal

text: The construction of the Erie Canal was a landmark civil engineering achievement in the early history of the United States. When built, the canal was the second-longest in the world (after the Grand Canal in China). Initially wide and deep, the canal was expanded several times, most notably from 1905 to 1918 when the "Barge Canal" was built and over half the original route was abandoned. The modern Barge Canal measures long, wide, and deep. It has 34 locks, including the Waterford Flight, the steepest locks in the United States. When leaving the canal, boats must also traverse the Black Rock Lock to reach Lake Erie or the Troy Federal Lock to reach the tidal Hudson. The overall elevation difference is about .


title: Erie Canal

text: The Erie's peak year was 1855, when 33,000 commercial shipments took place. It continued to be competitive with railroads until about 1902, when tolls were abolished. Commercial traffic declined heavily in the latter half of the 20th century due to competition from trucking and the 1959 opening of the larger St. Lawrence Seaway. The canal's last regularly-scheduled hauler, the "Day Peckinpaugh", ended service in 1994.


title: Erie Canal

text: Today, the Erie Canal is mainly used by recreational watercraft. It connects the three other canals in the New York State Canal System: the Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga–Seneca. Some long-distance boaters take the Erie as part of the Great Loop. The canal has also become a tourist attraction in its own right—a number of parks and museums are dedicated to its history. The Erie Canalway Trail is a popular cycling path that follows the canal across the state. In 2000, Congress designated the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor to protect and promote the system.


title: Erie Canal

text: The waterway today referred to as the Erie Canal is quite different from the nineteenth-century Erie Canal. More than half of the original Erie Canal was destroyed or abandoned during construction of the New York State Barge Canal in the early 20th century. The sections of the original route remaining in use were widened significantly, mostly west of Syracuse, with bridges rebuilt and locks replaced. It was called the Barge Canal at the time, but that name fell into disuse with the disappearance of commercial traffic and the increase of recreational travel in the later 20th century.


title: Erie Canal

text: Prior to the advent of railroads, water transport was the most cost-effective way to ship bulk goods. A mule can only carry about , but can draw a barge weighing as much as along a towpath.In total, a canal could cut transport costs by about 95 percent.


title: Erie Canal

text: In the early years of the United States, transportation of goods between the coastal ports and the interior was slow and difficult. Close to the seacoast, rivers provided easy inland transport up to the fall line, since floating vessels encounter much less friction than land vehicles. However, the Appalachian Mountains were a great obstacle to further transportation or settlement, stretching from Maine to Mississippi, with just five places where mule trains or wagon roads could be routed. Passengers and freight bound for the western parts of the country had to travel overland, a journey made more difficult by the rough condition of the roads. In 1800, it typically took 2½ weeks to travel overland from New York to Cleveland, Ohio, () and 4 weeks to Detroit ().


title: Erie Canal

text: The principal exportable product of the Ohio Valley was grain, which was a high-volume, low-priced commodity, bolstered by supplies from the coast. Frequently it was not worth the cost of transporting it to far-away population centers. This was a factor leading to farmers in the west turning their grains into whiskey for easier transport and higher sales, and later the Whiskey Rebellion. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, it became clear to coastal residents that the city or state that succeeded in developing a cheap, reliable route to the West would enjoy economic success, and the port at the seaward end of such a route would see business increase greatly. In time, projects were devised in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and relatively deep into the coastal states.


title: Erie Canal

text: The Mohawk River (a tributary of the Hudson) rises near Lake Ontario and runs in a glacial meltwater channel just north of the Catskill range of the Appalachian Mountains, separating them from the geologically distinct Adirondacks to the north. The Mohawk and Hudson valleys form the only cut across the Appalachians north of Alabama. A navigable canal through the Mohawk Valley would allow an almost complete water route from New York City in the south to Lake Ontario and Lake Erie in the west. Via the canal and these lakes, other Great Lakes, and to a lesser degree, related rivers, a large part of the continent's interior (and many settlements) would be made well connected to the Eastern seaboard.


title: Erie Canal

text: The idea of a canal to tie the East Coast to the new western settlements was discussed as early as 1724: New York provincial official Cadwallader Colden made a passing reference (in a report on fur trading) to improving the natural waterways of western New York.


title: Erie Canal

text: Gouverneur Morris and Elkanah Watson were early proponents of a canal along the Mohawk River. Their efforts led to the creation of the "Western and Northern Inland Lock Navigation Companies" in 1792, which took the first steps to improve navigation on the Mohawk and construct a canal between the Mohawk and Lake Ontario, but it was soon discovered that private financing was insufficient.


title: Erie Canal

text: Christopher Colles (who was familiar with the Bridgewater Canal) surveyed the Mohawk Valley, and made a presentation to the New York state legislature in 1784, proposing a shorter canal from Lake Ontario. The proposal drew attention and some action but was never implemented.


title: Erie Canal

text: Jesse Hawley had envisioned encouraging the growing of large quantities of grain on the western New York plains (then largely unsettled) for sale on the Eastern seaboard. However, he went bankrupt trying to ship grain to the coast. While in Canandaigua debtors' prison, Hawley began pressing for the construction of a canal along the -long Mohawk River valley with support from Joseph Ellicott (agent for the Holland Land Company in Batavia). Ellicott realized that a canal would add value to the land he was selling in the western part of the state. He later became the first canal commissioner.


title: Erie Canal

text: New York legislators became interested in the possibility of building a canal across New York in the first decade of the 19th century. Shipping goods west from Albany was a costly and tedious affair; there was no railroad yet, and to cover the distance from Buffalo to New York City by stagecoach took two weeks. The problem was that the land rises about from the Hudson to Lake Erie. Locks at the time could handle up to of lift, so even with the heftiest cuttings and viaducts, fifty locks would be required along the canal. Such a canal would be expensive to build even with modern technology; in 1800, the expense was barely imaginable. President Thomas Jefferson called it "little short of madness" and rejected it.


title: Erie Canal

text: Eventually, Hawley interested New York Governor DeWitt Clinton in the project. There was much opposition, and the project was ridiculed as "Clinton's folly" and "Clinton's ditch". In 1817, though, Clinton received approval from the legislature for $7 million for construction.


title: Erie Canal

text: The original canal was long, from Albany on the Hudson to Buffalo on Lake Erie. The channel was cut wide and deep, with removed soil piled on the downhill side to form a walkway known as a towpath. Its construction, through limestone and mountains, proved a daunting task. To move earth, animals pulled a "slip scraper" (similar to a bulldozer). The sides of the canal were lined with stone set in clay, and the bottom was also lined with clay. The Canal was built by Irish laborers and German stonemasons. All labor on the canal depended upon human and animal power or the force of water. Engineering techniques developed during its construction included the building of aqueducts to redirect water; one aqueduct was long to span of river. As the canal progressed, the crews and engineers working on the project developed expertise and became a skilled labor force.


title: Erie Canal

text: The men who planned and oversaw construction were novices as surveyors and as engineers. There were no civil engineers in the United States. James Geddes and Benjamin Wright, who laid out the route, were judges whose experience in surveying was in settling boundary disputes. Geddes had only used a surveying instrument for a few hours before his work on the Canal. Canvass White was a 27-year-old amateur engineer who persuaded Clinton to let him go to Britain at his own expense to study the canal system there. Nathan Roberts was a mathematics teacher and land speculator. Yet these men "carried the Erie Canal up the Niagara escarpment at Lockport, maneuvered it onto a towering embankment to cross over Irondequoit Creek, spanned the Genesee River on an awesome aqueduct, and carved a route for it out of the solid rock between Little Falls and Schenectady—and all of those venturesome designs worked precisely as planned".


title: Erie Canal

text: Construction began on July 4, 1817, at Rome, New York. The first , from Rome to Utica, opened in 1819. At that rate, the canal would not be finished for 30 years. The main delays were caused by felling trees to clear a path through virgin forest and moving excavated soil, which took longer than expected, but the builders devised ways to solve these problems. To fell a tree, they threw rope over the top branches and winched it down. They pulled out the stumps with an innovative stump puller. Two huge wheels were mounted loose on the ends of an axle. A third wheel, slightly smaller than the others, was fixed to the center of the axle. A chain was wrapped around the axle and hooked to the stump. A rope was wrapped around the center wheel and hooked to a team of oxen. The mechanical advantage (torque) obtained ripped the stumps out of the soil. Soil to be moved was shoveled into large wheelbarrows that were dumped into mule-pulled carts. Using a scraper and a plow, a three-man team with oxen, horses and mules could build a mile in a year.


title: Erie Canal

text: The remaining problem was finding labor; increased immigration helped fill the need. Many of the laborers working on the canal were Irish, who had recently come to the United States as a group of about 5,000. Most of them were Roman Catholic, a religion that raised much suspicion in early America because of its hierarchic structure, and many laborers on the canal suffered violent assault as the result of misjudgment and xenophobia.


title: Erie Canal

text: Construction continued at an increased rate as new workers arrived. When the canal reached Montezuma Marsh (at the outlet of Cayuga Lake west of Syracuse), it was rumored that over 1,000 workers died of "swamp fever" (malaria), and construction was temporarily stopped. However, recent research has revealed that the death toll was likely much lower, as no contemporary reports mention significant worker mortality, and mass graves from the period have never been found in the area. Work continued on the downhill side towards the Hudson, and the crews worked on the section across the swampland when it froze in winter.


title: Erie Canal

text: The middle section from Utica to Salina (Syracuse) was completed in 1820, and traffic on that section started up immediately. Expansion to the east and west proceeded simultaneously, and the whole eastern section, from Brockport to Albany, opened on September 10, 1823, to great fanfare. The Champlain Canal, a separate but connected north-south route from Watervliet on the Hudson to Lake Champlain, opened on the same date.


title: Erie Canal

text: After Montezuma Marsh, the next difficulties were crossing Irondequoit Creek and the Genesee River near Rochester. The former ultimately required building the long "Great Embankment," to carry the canal at a height of above the level of the creek, which ran through a culvert underneath. The canal crossed the river on a stone aqueduct, long and wide, supported by 11 arches.


title: Erie Canal

text: In 1823 construction reached the Niagara Escarpment, an -high wall of hard dolomitic limestone. The route followed the channel of a creek that had cut a ravine steeply down the escarpment. The construction and operation of two sets of five locks along a corridor soon gave rise to the community of Lockport. The lift-locks had a total lift of , exiting into a deeply cut channel. The final leg had to be cut deep through another limestone mass, the Onondaga ridge. Much of that section was blasted with black powder, and the inexperience of the crews often led to accidents, and sometimes to rocks falling on nearby homes.


title: Erie Canal

text: Two villages competed to be the terminus: Black Rock, on the Niagara River, and Buffalo, at the eastern tip of Lake Erie. Buffalo expended great energy to widen and deepen Buffalo Creek to make it navigable and to create a harbor at its mouth. Buffalo won over Black Rock, and grew into a large city, eventually encompassing its former rival.


title: Erie Canal

text: In 1824, before the canal was completed, a detailed "Pocket Guide for the Tourist and Traveler, Along the Line of the Canals, and the Interior Commerce of the State of New York", was published for the benefit of travelers and land speculators.


title: Erie Canal

text: The entire canal was officially completed on October 26, 1825. The event was marked by a statewide "Grand Celebration," culminating in a series of cannon shots along the length of the canal and the Hudson, a 90-minute cannonade from Buffalo to New York City. A flotilla of boats, led by Governor Dewitt Clinton aboard "Seneca Chief", sailed from Buffalo to New York City over ten days. Clinton then ceremonially poured Lake Erie water into New York Harbor to mark the "Wedding of the Waters". On its return trip, "Seneca Chief" brought back a keg of Atlantic Ocean water, which was poured into Lake Erie by Buffalo's Judge Samuel Wilkeson, who would later become mayor.


title: Erie Canal

text: The Erie Canal was thus completed in eight years at a cost of $7.143 million (equivalent to $ million in ). It was acclaimed as an engineering marvel that united the country and helped New York City develop as an international trade center.


title: Erie Canal

text: Problems developed but were quickly solved. Leaks developed along the entire length of the canal, but these were sealed using cement that hardened underwater (hydraulic cement). Erosion on the clay bottom proved to be a problem and the speed was limited to .


title: Erie Canal

text: <mapframe width=400 height=200 zoom=6 latitude=42.977 longitude=-76.506 align=right text="The original path of the Erie Canal">


title: Erie Canal

text: The Erie made use of the favorable conditions of New York's unique topography, which provided that area with the only break in the Appalachians south of the St. Lawrence River. The Hudson is tidal to Troy, and Albany is west of the Appalachians. It allowed for east–west navigation from the coast to the Great Lakes within US territory.


title: Erie Canal

text: The canal began on the west side of the Hudson River at Albany, and ran north to Watervliet, where the Champlain Canal branched off. At Cohoes, it climbed the escarpment on the west side of the Hudson River—16 locks rising —and then turned west along the south shore of the Mohawk River, crossing to the north side at Crescent and again to the south at Rexford. The canal continued west near the south shore of the Mohawk River all the way to Rome, where the Mohawk turns north.


title: Erie Canal

text: At Rome, the canal continued west parallel to Wood Creek, which flows westward into Oneida Lake, and turned southwest and west cross-country to avoid the lake. From Canastota west, it ran roughly along the north (lower) edge of the Onondaga Escarpment, passing through Syracuse, Onondaga Lake, and Rochester. Before reaching Rochester, the canal uses a series of natural ridges to cross the deep valley of Irondequoit Creek. At Lockport the canal turned southwest to rise to the top of the Niagara Escarpment, using the ravine of Eighteen Mile Creek.


title: Erie Canal

text: The canal continued south-southwest to Pendleton, where it turned west and southwest, mainly using the channel of Tonawanda Creek. From the Tonawanda south toward Buffalo, it ran just east of the Niagara River, where it reached its "Western Terminus" at Little Buffalo Creek (later it became the Commercial Slip), which discharged into the Buffalo River just above its confluence with Lake Erie. With Buffalo's re-excavation of the Commercial Slip, completed in 2008, the Canal's original terminus is now re-watered and again accessible by boats. With several miles of the Canal inland of this location still lying under 20th-century fill and urban construction, the effective western navigable terminus of the Erie Canal is found at Tonawanda.


title: Erie Canal

text: Pulled by teams of horses, canal boats moved slowly, but methodically, shrinking time and distance. Efficiently, the smooth, nonstop method of transportation cut the travel time between Albany and Buffalo nearly in half, moving by day and by night. Migrants took passage on freight boats, camping on deck or on top of crates.


title: Erie Canal

text: Packet boats, serving passengers exclusively, reached speeds of up to and ran at much more frequent intervals than the cramped, bumpy stagecoach wagons. These boats, measuring up to long and wide, made ingenious use of space, accommodating up to 40 passengers at night and up to three times as many in the daytime. The best examples, furnished with carpeted floors, stuffed chairs, and mahogany tables stocked with books and current newspapers, served as sitting rooms during the days. At mealtimes, crews transformed the cabin into a dining room. Drawing a curtain across the width of the room divided the cabin into ladies' and gentlemen's sleeping quarters at night. Pull-down tiered beds folded from the walls, and additional cots could be hung from hooks in the ceiling. Some captains hired musicians and held dances.


title: Erie Canal

text: The New York State Legislature debated closing the locks of the Erie Canal on Sundays, when they convened in 1858. However, George Jeremiah and Dwight Bacheller, two of the bill's opponents, argued that the state had no right to stop canal traffic on the grounds that the Erie Canal and its tributaries had ceased to be wards of the state. The canal at its inception had been imagined as an extension of nature, an artificial river where there had been none. The canal succeeded by sharing more in common with lakes and seas than it had with public roads. Jeremiah and Bacheller argued, successfully, that just as it was unthinkable to halt oceangoing navigation on Sunday, so it was with the canal.


title: Erie Canal

text: The Erie Canal greatly lowered the cost of shipping between the Midwest and the Northeast, bringing much lower food costs to Eastern cities and allowing the East to economically ship machinery and manufactured goods to the Midwest. To give an example, the cost to transport barrel of flour from Rochester to Albany dropped from $3 (before the canal) to 75¢ on the canal. The canal also made an immense contribution to the wealth and importance of New York City, Buffalo and New York State. Its impact went much further, increasing trade throughout the nation by opening eastern and overseas markets to Midwestern farm products and by enabling migration to the West. The port of New York became essentially the Atlantic home port for all of the Midwest. Because of this vital connection and others to follow, such as the railroads, New York would become known as the "Empire State" or "the great Empire State".


title: Erie Canal

text: The Erie Canal was an immediate success. Tolls collected on freight had already exceeded the state's construction debt in its first year of official operation. By 1828, import duties collected at the New York Customs House supported federal government operations and provided funds for all the expenses in Washington except the interest on the national debt. Additionally, New York State's initial loan for the original canal had been paid by 1837. Although it had been envisioned as primarily a commercial channel for freight boats, passengers also traveled on the canal's packet boats. In 1825 more than 40,000 passengers took advantage of the convenience and beauty of canal travel. The canal's steady flow of tourists, businessmen and settlers lent it to uses never imagined by its initial sponsors. Evangelical preachers made their circuits of the upstate region, and the canal served as the last leg of the Underground Railroad ferrying runaway slaves to Buffalo near the Canada–US border. Aspiring merchants found that tourists were reliable customers. Vendors moved from boat to boat peddling items such as books, watches and fruit, while less scrupulous "confidence men" sold remedies for foot corns or passed off counterfeit bills. Tourists were carried along the "northern tour," which ultimately led to the popular honeymoon destination Niagara Falls, just north of Buffalo.


title: Erie Canal

text: As the canal brought travelers to New York City, it took business away from other ports such as Philadelphia and Baltimore. Those cities and their states started projects to compete with the Erie Canal. In Pennsylvania, the Main Line of Public Works was a combined canal and railroad running west from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh on the Ohio River, opened in 1834. In Maryland, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran west to Wheeling, West Virginia, then a part of Virginia, also on the Ohio River, and was completed in 1853.


title: Erie Canal

text: The canal played a major role in the growth of Standard Oil, as founder John D. Rockefeller used the canal as a cheaper form of transportation – in the summer months when it was not frozen – to get his refined oil from Cleveland to New York City. In the winter months his only options were the three trunk lines: the Erie Railroad, the New York Central Railroad, or the Pennsylvania Railroad.


title: Erie Canal

text: New ethnic Irish communities formed in some towns along its route after completion, as Irish immigrants were a large portion of the construction labor force. A plaque honoring the canal's construction is located in Battery Park in southern Manhattan.


title: Erie Canal

text: Because so many immigrants traveled on the canal, many genealogists have sought copies of canal passenger lists. Apart from the years 1827–1829, canal boat operators were not required to record passenger names or report them to the New York government. Some passenger lists survive today in the New York State Archives, and other sources of traveler information are sometimes available.


title: Erie Canal

text: The Canal also helped bind the still-new nation closer to Britain and Europe. Repeal of Britain's Corn Law resulted in a huge increase in exports of Midwestern wheat to Britain. Trade between the United States and Canada also increased as a result of the repeal and a reciprocity (free-trade) agreement signed in 1854. Much of this trade flowed along the Erie.


title: Erie Canal

text: Its success also prompted imitation: a rash of canal-building followed. Also, the many technical hurdles that had to be overcome made heroes of those whose innovations made the canal possible. This led to an increased public esteem for practical education. Chicago, among other Great Lakes cities, recognized the importance of the canal to its economy, and two West Loop streets are named "Canal" and "Clinton" (for canal proponent DeWitt Clinton).


title: Erie Canal

text: Concern that erosion caused by logging in the Adirondacks could silt up the canal contributed to the creation in 1885 of another New York National Historic Landmark, the Adirondack Park.


title: Erie Canal

text: Many notable authors wrote about the canal, including Herman Melville, Frances Trollope, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Samuel Hopkins Adams and the Marquis de Lafayette, and many tales and songs were written about life on the canal. The popular song "Low Bridge, Everybody Down" by Thomas S. Allen was written in 1905 to memorialize the canal's early heyday, when barges were pulled by mules rather than engines.


title: Erie Canal

text: Consisting of a massive stone aqueduct that carried boats over incredible cascades, Little Falls was one of the most popular stops for American and foreign tourists. This is shown in Scene 4 of William Dunlap's play "A Trip to Niagara", where he depicts the general preference of tourists to travel by canal so that they could experience a combination of artificial and natural sights. Canal travel was, for many, an opportunity to take in the sublime and commune with nature. The play also reflects the less enthusiastic view of some who saw movement on the canal as tedious.


title: Erie Canal

text: The Erie Canal changed property law in New York. Most importantly, it expanded the government's right to take private property. Cases surrounding the newly-built Erie Canal expanded condemnation theory to permit canal builders to appropriate private land and broadened the meaning of "public use" in the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The canal also had an impact on water access jurisprudence as well as nuisance law.


title: Erie Canal

text: Additional feeder canals soon extended the Erie Canal into a system. These included the Cayuga-Seneca Canal south to the Finger Lakes, the Oswego Canal from Three Rivers north to Lake Ontario at Oswego, and the Champlain Canal from Troy north to Lake Champlain. From 1833 to 1877, the short Crooked Lake Canal connected Keuka Lake and Seneca Lake. The Chemung Canal connected the south end of Seneca Lake to Elmira in 1833, and was an important route for Pennsylvania coal and timber into the canal system. The Chenango Canal in 1836 connected the Erie Canal at Utica to Binghamton and caused a business boom in the Chenango River valley. The Chenango and Chemung canals linked the Erie with the Susquehanna River system. The Black River Canal connected the Black River to the Erie Canal at Rome and remained in operation until the 1920s. The Genesee Valley Canal was run along the Genesee River to connect with the Allegheny River at Olean, but the Allegheny section, which would have connected to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, was never built. The Genesee Valley Canal was later abandoned and became the route of the Genesee Valley Canal Railroad.


title: Erie Canal

text: The original design planned for an annual tonnage of 1.5 million tons (1.36 million metric tons), but this was exceeded immediately. An ambitious program to improve the canal began in 1834. During this massive series of construction projects, known as the First Enlargement, the canal was widened from and deepened from . Locks were widened and/or rebuilt in new locations, and many new navigable aqueducts were constructed. The canal was straightened and slightly re-routed in some stretches, resulting in the abandonment of short segments of the original 1825 canal. The First Enlargement was completed in 1862, with further minor enlargements in later decades.


title: Erie Canal

text: The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad opened in 1837, providing a bypass to the slowest part of the canal between Albany and Schenectady. Other railroads were soon chartered and built to continue the line west to Buffalo, and in 1842 a continuous line (which later became the New York Central Railroad and its Auburn Road in 1853) was open the whole way to Buffalo. As the railroad served the same general route as the canal, but provided for faster travel, passengers soon switched to it. However, as late as 1852, the canal carried thirteen times more freight tonnage than all the railroads in New York State combined. The New York, West Shore and Buffalo Railway was completed in 1884, as a route running closely parallel to both the canal and the New York Central Railroad. However, it went bankrupt and was acquired the next year by the New York Central. The canal continued to compete well with the railroads through 1902, when tolls were abolished.


title: Erie Canal

text: In 1903 the New York State legislature authorized construction of the New York State Barge Canal as the "Improvement of the Erie, the Oswego, the Champlain, and the Cayuga and Seneca Canals".


title: Erie Canal

text: In 1905, construction of the Barge Canal began, which was completed in 1918, at a cost of $96.7 million.


title: Erie Canal

text: This new canal replaced much of the original route, leaving many abandoned sections (most notably between Syracuse and Rome). New digging and flood control technologies allowed engineers to canalize rivers that the original canal had sought to avoid, such as the Mohawk, Seneca, and Clyde rivers, and Oneida Lake. In sections that did not consist of canalized rivers (particularly between Rochester and Buffalo), the original Erie Canal channel was enlarged to wide and deep. The expansion allowed barges up to to use the Canal. This expensive project was politically unpopular in parts of the state not served by the canal, and failed to save it from becoming obsolete for commercial shipping.


title: Erie Canal

text: The new alignment began on the Hudson River at the border between Cohoes and Waterford, where it ran northwest with five locks (the so-called "Waterford Flight"), running into the Mohawk River east of Crescent. The Waterford Flight is claimed to be one of the steepest series of locks in the world.


title: Erie Canal

text: While the old Canal ran next to the Mohawk all the way to Rome, the new canal ran through the river, which was straightened or widened where necessary. At Ilion, the new canal left the river for good, but continued to run on a new alignment parallel to both the river and the old canal to Rome. From Rome, the new route continued almost due west, merging with Fish Creek just east of its entry into Oneida Lake.


title: Erie Canal

text: From Oneida Lake, the new canal ran west along the Oneida River, with cutoffs to shorten the route. At Three Rivers, the Oneida River turns northwest, and was deepened for the Oswego Canal to Lake Ontario. The new Erie Canal turned south there along the Seneca River, which turns west near Syracuse and continues west to a point in the Montezuma Marsh. There the Cayuga and Seneca Canal continued south with the Seneca River, and the new Erie Canal again ran parallel to the old canal along the bottom of the Niagara Escarpment, in some places running along the Clyde River, and in some places replacing the old canal. At Pittsford, southeast of Rochester, the canal turned west to run around the south side of Rochester, rather than through downtown. The canal crosses the Genesee River at the Genesee Valley Park, then rejoins the old path near North Gates.


title: Erie Canal

text: From there it was again roughly an upgrade to the original canal, running west to Lockport. This reach of from Henrietta to Lockport is called "the 60‑mile level" since there are no locks and the water level rises only over the entire segment. Diversions from and to adjacent natural streams along the way are used to maintain the canal's level. It runs southwest to Tonawanda, where the new alignment discharges into the Niagara River, which is navigable upstream to the New York Barge Canal's Black Rock Lock and thence to the Canal's original "Western Terminus" at Buffalo's Inner Harbor.


title: Erie Canal

text: Freight traffic reached a total of 5.2 million short tons (4.7 million metric tons) by 1951. The growth of railroads and highways across the state, and the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, caused commercial traffic on the canal to decline dramatically during the second half of the 20th century.


title: Erie Canal

text: Since the 1990s, the canal system has been used primarily by recreational traffic, although a small but growing amount of cargo traffic still uses it.


title: Erie Canal

text: In 1992, the New York State Barge Canal was renamed the New York State Canal System (including the Erie, Cayuga-Seneca, Oswego, and Champlain canals) and placed under the newly created New York State Canal Corporation, a subsidiary of the New York State Thruway Authority. While part of the Thruway, the canal system was operated using money generated by Thruway tolls. In 2017, the New York State Canal Corporation was transferred from the New York State Thruway to the New York Power Authority.


title: Erie Canal

text: In 2000, Congress designated the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, covering of navigable water from Lake Champlain to the Capital Region and west to Buffalo. The area has a population of 2.7 million; about 75% of Central and Western New York's population lives within of the Erie Canal.


title: Erie Canal

text: There were some 42 commercial shipments on the canal in 2008, compared to 15 such shipments in 2007 and more than 33,000 shipments in 1855, the canal's peak year. The new growth in commercial traffic is due to the rising cost of diesel fuel. Canal barges can carry a short ton of cargo on one gallon of diesel fuel, while a gallon allows a train to haul the same amount of cargo and a truck . Canal barges can carry loads up to , and are used to transport objects that would be too large for road or rail shipment. Today, the system is served by several commercial towing companies. In 2012, the New York State Canal System (which consists of the Erie Canal and a few smaller canals) was used to ship 42,000 tons of cargo.


title: Erie Canal

text: Travel on the canal's middle section (particularly in the Mohawk Valley) was severely hampered by flooding in late June and early July 2006. Flood damage to the canal and its facilities was estimated as at least $15 million.


title: Erie Canal

text: Aside from transportation, numerous businesses, farms, factories and communities alongside its banks still utilize the canal's waters for other purposes such as irrigation for farmland, hydroelectricity, research, industry, and even drinking. Use of the canal system has an estimated total economic impact of $6.2 billion annually.


title: Erie Canal

text: The Erie Canal is open to small craft and some larger vessels from May through November each year. During winter, water is drained from parts of the canal for maintenance. The Champlain Canal, Lake Champlain, and the Chambly Canal, and Richelieu River in Canada form the Lakes to Locks Passage, making a tourist attraction of the former waterway linking eastern Canada to the Erie Canal. In 2006 recreational boating fees were eliminated to attract more visitors.


title: Erie Canal

text: The Erie Canal is a destination for tourists from all over the world, and has inspired guidebooks dedicated to exploration of the waterway. An Erie Canal Cruise company, based in Herkimer, operates from mid-May until mid-October with daily cruises. The cruise goes through the history of the canal and also takes passengers through Lock 18.


title: Erie Canal

text: Today, the reconfiguration of the canal created during the First Enlargement is commonly referred to as the "Improved Erie Canal" or the "Old Erie Canal", to distinguish it from the canal's modern-day course. Existing remains of the 1825 canal abandoned during the Enlargement are officially referred to today as "Clinton's Ditch" (which was also the popular nickname for the entire Erie Canal project during its original 1817–1825 construction).


title: Erie Canal

text: Sections of the Old Erie Canal not used after 1918 are owned by New York State, or have been ceded to or purchased by counties or municipalities. Many stretches of the old canal have been filled in to create roads such as Erie Boulevard in Syracuse and Schenectady, and Broad Street and the Rochester Subway in Rochester. A 36‑mile (58 km) stretch of the old canal from the town of DeWitt, New York, east of Syracuse, to just outside Rome, New York, is preserved as the Old Erie Canal State Historic Park. In 1960 the Schoharie Crossing State Historic Site, a section of the canal in Montgomery County, was one of the first sites recognized as a National Historic Landmark.


title: Erie Canal

text: Some municipalities have preserved sections as town or county canal parks, or have plans to do so. Camillus Erie Canal Park preserves a stretch and has restored Nine Mile Creek Aqueduct, built in 1841 as part of the First Enlargement of the canal. In some communities, the old canal has refilled with overgrowth and debris. Proposals have been made to rehydrate the old canal through downtown Rochester or Syracuse as a tourist attraction. In Syracuse, the location of the old canal is represented by a reflecting pool in downtown's Clinton Square and the downtown hosts a canal barge and weigh lock structure, now dry. Buffalo's Commercial Slip is the restored and re-watered segment of the canal which formed its "Western Terminus".


title: Erie Canal

text: In 2004, the administration of New York Governor George Pataki was criticized when officials of New York State Canal Corporation attempted to sell private development rights to large stretches of the Old Erie Canal to a single developer for $30,000, far less than the land was worth on the open market. After an investigation by the "Syracuse Post-Standard" newspaper, the Pataki administration nullified the deal.


title: Erie Canal

text: Records of the planning, design, construction, and administration of the Erie Canal are vast and can be found in the New York State Archives. Except for two years (1827–1829), the State of New York did not require canal boat operators to maintain or submit passenger lists.


title: Erie Canal

text: The following list of locks is provided for the current canal, from east to west. There are a total of 36 (35 numbered) locks on the Erie Canal.


title: Erie Canal

text: All locks on the New York State Canal System are single-chamber; the dimensions are long and wide with a minimum depth of water over the miter sills at the upstream gates upon lift. They can accommodate a vessel up to long and wide. Overall sidewall height will vary by lock, ranging between depending on the lift and navigable stages. Lock E17 at Little Falls has the tallest sidewall height at .


title: Erie Canal

text: Distance is based on position markers from an interactive canal map provided online by the New York State Canal Corporation and may not exactly match specifications on signs posted along the canal. Mean surface elevations are comprised from a combination of older canal profiles and history books as well as specifications on signs posted along the canal. The margin of error should normally be within .


title: Erie Canal

text: The Waterford Flight series of locks (comprising Locks E2 through E6) is one of the steepest in the world, lifting boats in less than .


title: Erie Canal

text: There is a natural rise between locks E33 and E34 as well as a natural rise between Lock E35 and the Niagara River.


title: Erie Canal

text: There is no Lock E1 or Lock E31 on the Erie Canal. The place of "Lock E1" on the passage from the lower Hudson River to Lake Erie is taken by the Troy Federal Lock, located just north of Troy, New York, and is not part of the Erie Canal System proper. It is operated by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The Erie Canal officially begins at the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers at Waterford, New York.


title: Erie Canal

text: Although the original alignment of the Erie Canal through Buffalo has been filled in, travel by water is still possible from Buffalo via the Black Rock Lock in the Niagara River to the canal's modern western terminus in Tonawanda, and eastward to Albany. The Black Rock Lock is operated by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.


title: Erie Canal

text: Oneida Lake lies between locks E22 and E23, and has a mean surface elevation of . Lake Erie has a mean surface elevation of .


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul (abbreviated St. Paul) is the capital of the U.S. state of Minnesota and the county seat of Ramsey County. Situated on high bluffs overlooking a bend in the Mississippi River, Saint Paul is a regional business hub and the center of Minnesota's government. The Minnesota State Capitol and the state government offices all sit on a hill close to the city's downtown district. One of the oldest cities in Minnesota, Saint Paul has several historic neighborhoods and landmarks, such as the Summit Avenue Neighborhood, the James J. Hill House, and the Cathedral of Saint Paul. Like the adjacent and larger city of Minneapolis, Saint Paul is known for its cold, snowy winters and humid summers.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: As of the 2021 census estimates, the city's population was 307,193, making it the 67th-largest city in the United States, the 12th-most populous in the Midwest, and the second-most populous in Minnesota. Most of the city lies east of the Mississippi River near its confluence with the Minnesota River. Minneapolis is mostly across the Mississippi River to the west. Together, they are known as the "Twin Cities" and make up the core of Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area, the third most populous metro in the Midwest.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The Legislative Assembly of the Minnesota Territory established the Town of St. Paul as its capital near existing Dakota Sioux settlements in November 1849. It remained a town until 1854. The Dakota name for where Saint Paul is situated is "Imnizaska" for the "white rock" bluffs along the river. The city has two sports venues: Xcel Energy Center, home to the Minnesota Wild, and Allianz Field, home to Minnesota United.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul has a mayor–council government. The current mayor is Melvin Carter III, who was first elected in 2018.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Burial mounds in present-day Indian Mounds Park suggest the area was inhabited by the Hopewell Native Americans about 2,000 years ago. From the early 17th century to 1837, the Mdewakanton Dakota, a tribe of the Sioux, lived near the mounds after being displaced from their ancestral grounds by Mille Lacs Lake from advancing Ojibwe. The Dakota called the area "Imniza-Ska" ("white cliffs") for its exposed white sandstone cliffs on the river's eastern side. The Imniza-Ska were full of caves that were useful to the Dakota. The explorer Jonathan Carver documented the historic Wakan tipi in the bluff below the burial mounds in 1767. In the Menominee language St. Paul was called "Sāēnepān-Menīkān", which means "ribbon, silk or satin village", suggesting its role in trade throughout the region after the introduction of European goods.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, U.S Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike negotiated approximately of land from the indigenous Dakota in 1805 to establish a fort. A military reservation was intended for the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers on both sides of the Mississippi up to Saint Anthony Falls. All of what is now the Highland park neighborhood was included in this. Pike planned a second military reservation at the confluence of the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers. In 1819, Fort Snelling was built at the Minnesota and Mississippi confluence. The 1837 Treaty with the Sioux ceded all tribal lands east of the Mississippi to the U.S. government. Chief Little Crow V moved his village, Kaposia, from south of Mounds Park across the river a few miles onto Dakota land. Fur traders, explorers, and settlers came to the area for the fort's security. Many were French-Canadians who predated American pioneers by some time. A whiskey trade flourished among the squatters and the fort's commander evicted them all from the fort's reservation. Fur trader turned bootlegger "Pig's Eye" Parrant, who set up business just outside the reservation, particularly irritated the commander. By the early 1840s, a community had developed nearby that locals called "Pig's Eye" (French: "L'Œil du Cochon") or "Pig's Eye Landing" after Parrant's popular tavern. In 1842, a raiding party of Ojibwe attacked the Kaposia encampment south of St. Paul. A battle ensued where a creek drained into wetlands two miles south of Wakan Tipi. The creek was thereafter called Battle Creek and is today parkland. In the 1840s-70s the Métis brought their oxen and Red River Carts down Kellogg Street to Lambert's landing to send buffalo hides to market from the Red River of the North. St. Paul was the southern terminus of the Red River Trails. In 1840, Pierre Bottineau became a prominent resident with a claim near the settlement's center.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: In 1841, Catholic missionary Lucien Galtier was sent to minister to the French Canadians at Mendota. He had a chapel he named for St. Paul built on the bluff above the riverboat landing downriver from Fort Snelling. Galtier informed the settlers that they were to adopt the chapel's name for the settlement and cease the use of "Pigs Eye". In 1847, New York educator Harriet Bishop moved to the settlement and opened the city's first school. The Minnesota Territory was created in 1849 with Saint Paul as the capital. The U.S. Army made the territory's first improved road, Point Douglas Fort Ripley Military Road, in 1850. It passed through what became St. Paul neighborhoods. In 1857, the territorial legislature voted to move the capital to Saint Peter, but Joe Rolette, a territorial legislator, stole the text of the bill and went into hiding, preventing the move.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The year 1858 saw more than 1,000 steamboats service Saint Paul, making it a gateway for settlers to the Minnesota frontier or Dakota Territory. Geography was a primary reason the city became a transportation hub. The location was the last good point to land riverboats coming upriver due to the river valley's topography. For a time, Saint Paul was called "The Last City of the East." Fort Snelling was important to St. Paul from the start. Direct access from St. Paul did not happen until the 7th bridge was built in 1880. Before that, there was a cable ferry crossing dating to at latest the 1840s. Once streetcars appeared, a new bridge to St. Paul was built in 1904. Until the town built its first jail the fort's brig served St. Paul. Industrialist James J. Hill founded his railroad empire in St. Paul. The Great Northern Railway and the Northern Pacific Railway were both headquartered in St. Paul until they merged with the Burlington Northern. Today they are part of the BNSF Railway.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: On August 20, 1904, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes damaged hundreds of downtown buildings, causing $1.78 million ($ million today) in damages and ripping spans from the High Bridge. During the 1960s, in conjunction with urban renewal, Saint Paul razed neighborhoods west of downtown for the creation of the interstate freeway system. From 1959 to 1961, the Rondo Neighborhood was demolished for the construction of Interstate 94. The loss of that African American enclave brought attention to racial segregation and unequal housing in northern cities. The annual Rondo Days celebration commemorates the African American community.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Downtown St. Paul had skyscraper-building booms beginning in the 1970s. Because the city center is directly beneath the flight path into the airport across the river there is a height restriction for all construction. The tallest buildings, such as Galtier Plaza (Jackson and Sibley Towers), The Pointe of Saint Paul condominiums, and the city's tallest building, Wells Fargo Place (formerly Minnesota World Trade Center), were constructed in the late 1980s. In the 1990s and 2000s, the tradition of bringing new immigrant groups to the city continued. As of 2004, nearly 10% of the city's population were recent Hmong immigrants from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar. Saint Paul is the location of the Hmong Archives.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul's history and growth as a landing port are tied to water. The city's defining physical characteristic, the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, was carved into the region during the last ice age, as were the steep river bluffs and dramatic palisades on which the city is built. Receding glaciers and Lake Agassiz forced torrents of water from a glacial river that served the river valleys. The city is situated in east-central Minnesota.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The Mississippi River forms a municipal boundary on part of the city's west, southwest, and southeast sides. Minneapolis, the state's largest city, lies to the west. Falcon Heights, Lauderdale, Roseville, and Maplewood are north, with Maplewood lying to the east. The cities of West Saint Paul and South Saint Paul are to the south, as are Lilydale, Mendota, and Mendota Heights, across the river from the city. The city's largest lakes are Pig's Eye Lake, which is part of the Mississippi, Lake Phalen, and Lake Como. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and is water.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The Parks and Recreation department is responsible for 160 parks and 41 recreation centers. The city ranked #2 in park access and quality, after only Minneapolis, in the 2018 ParkScore ranking of the top 100 park systems across the United States according to the nonprofit Trust for Public Land.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul's Department of Planning and Economic Development divides Saint Paul into seventeen Planning Districts, created in 1979 to allow neighborhoods to participate in governance and use Community Development Block Grants. With a funding agreement directly from the city, the councils share a pool of funds. The councils have significant land-use control, a voice in guiding development, and they organize residents. The boundaries are adjusted depending on population changes; as such, they sometimes overlap established neighborhoods. Though these neighborhoods changed over time, preservationists have saved many of their historically significant structures.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul has a humid continental climate typical of the Upper Midwestern United States. Winters are frigid and snowy, while summers are warm to hot and humid. On the Köppen climate classification, Saint Paul falls in the hot summer humid continental climate zone ("Dfa"). The city experiences a full range of precipitation and related weather events, including snow, sleet, ice, rain, thunderstorms, tornadoes, and fog.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Due to its northerly location and lack of large bodies of water to moderate the air, Saint Paul is sometimes subjected to cold Arctic air masses, especially during late December, January, and February. The average annual temperature of gives the Minneapolis−Saint Paul metropolitan area the coldest annual mean temperature of any major metropolitan area in the continental U.S.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The earliest known inhabitants from about 400 A.D. were members of the Hopewell tradition who buried their dead in mounds (now Indian Mounds Park) on the river bluffs. The next known inhabitants were the Mdewakanton Dakota in the 17th century who fled their ancestral home of Mille Lacs Lake in central Minnesota in response to westward expansion of the Ojibwe nation. The Ojibwe later occupied the north (east) bank of the Mississippi River.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: By 1800, French-Canadian explorers came through the region and attracted fur traders to the area. Fort Snelling and Pig's Eye Tavern also brought the first Yankees from New England and English, Irish, and Scottish immigrants who had enlisted in the army and settled nearby after discharge. These early settlers and entrepreneurs built houses on the heights north of the river. The first wave of immigration came with the Irish, who settled at Connemara Patch along the Mississippi, named for their home, Connemara, Ireland. The Irish became prolific in politics, city governance, and public safety, much to the chagrin of the Germans and French who had grown into the majority. In 1850, the first of many groups of Swedish immigrants passed through Saint Paul on their way to farming communities in northern and western regions of the territory. A large group settled in Swede Hollow, which later became home to Poles, Italians, and Mexicans. The last Swedish presence moved up Saint Paul's East Side along Payne Avenue in the 1950s.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Of people who specified European ancestry in the 2005–07 American Community Survey of St. Paul, 26.4% were German, 13.8% Irish, 8.4% Norwegian, 7.0% Swedish, and 6.2% English. There is also a visible community of people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, representing 4.2% of the population. By the 1980s, the Thomas-Dale area, once an Austro-Hungarian enclave known as Frogtown (German: "Froschburg"), became home to Vietnamese people who had left their war-torn country. A settlement program for the Hmong diaspora came soon after, and by 2000, the Saint Paul Hmong were the largest urban contingent in the United States. Mexican immigrants have settled in Saint Paul's West Side since the 1930s, and have grown enough that Mexico opened a foreign consulate in 2005.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The majority of residents claiming religious affiliation are Christian, split between the Roman Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations. The Roman Catholic presence comes from Irish, German, Scottish, and French Canadian settlers, who in time were bolstered by Hispanic immigrants. There are Jewish synagogues such as Mount Zion Temple and relatively small populations of Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. The city has been dubbed "paganistan" due to its large Wiccan population.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: As of the 2005–07 American Community Survey, White Americans made up 66.5% of Saint Paul's population, of whom 62.1% were non-Hispanic whites, down from 93.6% in 1970. Blacks or African Americans made up 13.9% of the population, of whom 13.5% were non-Hispanic Blacks. American Indians made up 0.8%, of whom 0.6% were non-Hispanic. Asian Americans made up 12.3%, of whom 12.2% were non-Hispanic. Pacific Islander Americans made up less than 0.1%. People of other races made up 3.4%, of whom 0.2% were non-Hispanic. Individuals from two or more races made up 3.1%, of whom 2.6% were non-Hispanic. In addition, Hispanics and Latinos made up 8.7%.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: As of the 2000 census, there were 287,151 people, 112,109 households, and 60,999 families residing in the city. The racial makeup of the city was 67.0% White, 11.7% African American, 1.1% Native American, 12.4% Asian (mostly Hmong), 0.1% Pacific Islander, 3.8% from other races, and 3.9% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino people of any race were 7.9% of the population.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: As of the 2010 census, there were 285,068 people, 111,001 households, and 59,689 families residing in the city. The population density was . There were 120,795 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the city was 60.1% white, 15.7% African American, 1.1% Native American, 15.0% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 3.9% from other races, and 4.2% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino people of any race were 9.6% of the population.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: There were 111,001 households, of which 30.4% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 34.1% were married couples living together, 14.8% had a female householder with no husband present, 4.9% had a male householder with no wife present, and 46.2% were non-families. 35.8% of all households were made up of individuals, and 8.5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.47 and the average family size was 3.33.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The median age in the city was 30.9 years. 25.1% of residents were under the age of 18; 13.9% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 29.6% were from 25 to 44; 22.6% were from 45 to 64; and 9% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the city was 48.9% male and 51.1% female.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The Minneapolis–Saint Paul–Bloomington area employs 1,570,700 people in the private sector as of July 2008, 82.43% of whom work in private service providing-related jobs.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Major corporations headquartered in Saint Paul include Ecolab, a chemical and cleaning product company that the "Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal" named in 2008 as the eighth-best place to work in the Twin Cites for companies with 1,000 full-time Minnesota employees, and Securian Financial Group Inc.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The 3M Company moved to St. Paul in 1910. It built a art deco headquarters at 900 Bush that still stands. Headquarters operations moved to the Maplewood campus in 1964. 3M manufacturing continued for a couple more decades until all St. Paul operations ceased.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The city was home to the Ford Motor Company's Twin Cities Assembly Plant, which opened in 1924 and closed at the end of 2011. The plant was in Highland Park on the Mississippi River, adjacent to Lock and Dam No. 1, Mississippi River, which generates hydroelectric power. The site is now being cleared of buildings and tested for contamination to prepare for redevelopment. The lead developer, the Ryan Company, has released a proposed set of zoning changes that will shape how the land will be used.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul has financed city development with tax increment financing (TIF). In 2018, it had 55 TIF districts. Projects that have benefited from TIF funding include the St. Paul Saints stadium, and the affordable housing along the Twin Cities Metro Green Line.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul passed what critics have called "the nation's worst rent control law" by voter referendum in November 2021, as part of a larger effort to curb rising housing costs. Some claim the law has had the opposite effect by raising housing costs as "new building permit applications plunge[d] and developers [froze] in-progress housing projects, totaling thousands of units, as their financing partners skipped town". In September 2022, the St. Paul city council voted to amend and "water down" the law.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Every January, Saint Paul hosts the Saint Paul Winter Carnival, a tradition that began in 1886 when a New York reporter called Saint Paul "another Siberia". The organizers had a model in the Montreal Winter Carnival the year before. Architect A. C. Hutchinson designed the Montreal ice castle and was hired to design St. Paul's first. The event has now been held 135 times with an attendance of 350,000. It includes an ice sculpting competition, a snow sculpting competition, a medallion treasure hunt, food, activities, and an ice palace when it can be arranged. The Como Zoo and Conservatory and adjoining Japanese Garden are popular year-round. The historic Landmark Center in downtown Saint Paul hosts cultural and arts organizations. The city's recreation sites include Indian Mounds Park, Battle Creek Regional Park, Harriet Island Regional Park, Highland Park, the Wabasha Street Caves, Lake Como, Lake Phalen, and Rice Park, as well as several areas abutting the Mississippi River. The Irish Fair of Minnesota is held annually at the Harriet Island Pavilion area. The country's largest Hmong American sports festival, the Freedom Festival, is held the first weekend of July at McMurray Field near Como Park.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The city is associated with the Minnesota State Fair in neighboring Falcon Heights just west of Como Park. The fair dates to before statehood. With the competing interests of Minneapolis and St. Paul, it was held on "neutral ground" between both. That area refused to become part of St. Paul or Roseville and became Falcon Heights in the 1950s. The University of Minnesota Saint Paul Campus is actually in Falcon Heights.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Fort Snelling is often identified as being in St. Paul but is actually its own unorganized territory. The eastern part of Fort Snelling Unorganized Territory (MSP included) has a St. Paul mailing address. The western side has a Minneapolis ZIP code.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul is the birthplace of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, who lived in Merriam Park from infancy until 1960. Schulz's "Peanuts" inspired giant, decorated sculptures around the city, a Chamber of Commerce promotion in the late 1990s. Other notable residents include writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and playwright August Wilson, who premiered many of the ten plays in his Pittsburgh Cycle at the local Penumbra Theater.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The Ordway Center for the Performing Arts hosts theater productions and the Minnesota Opera is a founding tenant. RiverCentre, attached to Xcel Energy Center, serves as the city's convention center. The city has contributed to the music of Minnesota and the Twin Cities music scene through various venues. Great jazz musicians have passed through the influential Artists' Quarter, first established in the 1970s in Whittier, Minneapolis, and moved to downtown Saint Paul in 1994. Artists' Quarter also hosts the Soapboxing Poetry Slam, home of the 2009 National Poetry Slam Champions. At The Black Dog, in Lowertown, many French or European jazz musicians (Evan Parker, Tony Hymas, Benoît Delbecq, François Corneloup) have met Twin Cities musicians and started new groups touring in Europe. Groups and performers such as Fantastic Merlins, Dean Magraw/Davu Seru, Merciless Ghosts, and Willie Murphy are regulars. The Turf Club in Midway has been a music scene landmark since the 1940s. Saint Paul is also the home base of the internationally acclaimed Rose Ensemble. As an Irish stronghold, the city boasts popular Irish pubs with live music, such as Shamrocks, The Dubliner, and until its closure in 2019, O'Gara's. The internationally acclaimed Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is the nation's only full-time professional chamber orchestra. The Minnesota Centennial Showboat on the Mississippi River began in 1958 with Minnesota's first centennial celebration.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul hosts a number of museums, including the University of Minnesota's Goldstein Museum of Design, the Minnesota Children's Museum, the Schubert Club Museum of Musical Instruments, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Traces Center for History and Culture, the Minnesota History Center, the Alexander Ramsey House, the James J. Hill House, the Minnesota Transportation Museum, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Twin City Model Railroad Museum.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul hosts a number of professional, semi-professional, and amateur sports teams. The Minnesota Wild play their home games in downtown Saint Paul's Xcel Energy Center, which opened in 2000. The Wild brought the NHL back to Minnesota for the first time since 1993, when the Minnesota North Stars left the state for Dallas, Texas. (The World Hockey Association's Minnesota Fighting Saints played in Saint Paul from 1972 to 1977.) Citing the history of hockey in the Twin Cities and teams at all levels, "Sports Illustrated" called Saint Paul the new Hockeytown U.S.A. in 2007.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The Xcel Energy Center, a multipurpose entertainment and sports venue, can host concerts and accommodate nearly all sporting events. It occupies the site of the demolished Saint Paul Civic Center. The Xcel Energy Center hosts the Minnesota high school boys hockey tournament, the Minnesota high school girls' volleyball tournament, and concerts throughout the year. In 2004, it was named the best overall sports venue in the US by ESPN.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The St. Paul Saints are the city's Minor League Baseball team, which plays in the International League as an affiliate of the Minnesota Twins. There have been several different teams called the Saints over the years. Founded in 1884, they were shut down in 1961 after the Minnesota Twins moved to Bloomington. The Saints were brought back in 1993 as an independent baseball team in the Northern League, moving to the American Association in 2006. They joined affiliated baseball in 2021. Their home games are played at the open-air CHS Field in downtown's Lowertown Historic District. Four noted Major League All-Star baseball players are natives of Saint Paul: Hall of Fame outfielder Dave Winfield, Hall of Fame infielder Paul Molitor, Hall of Fame pitcher Jack Morris, and first baseman Joe Mauer. The all-black St. Paul Colored Gophers played four seasons in Saint Paul from 1907 to 1911.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The St. Paul Twin Stars of the National Premier Soccer League play their home games at Macalester Stadium. St. Paul's first curling club was founded in 1888. The current club, the St. Paul Curling Club, was founded in 1912 and is the largest curling club in the United States. Minnesota Roller Derby is a flat-track roller derby league based in the Roy Wilkins Auditorium, made up of women and gender expansive athletes. Minnesota's oldest athletic organization, the Minnesota Boat Club, resides in the Mississippi River on Raspberry Island. Saint Paul is also home to Circus Juventas, the largest circus arts school in North America.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: On March 25, 2015, Major League Soccer announced that it had awarded its 23rd MLS franchise to Minnesota United FC, a team from the lower-level North American Soccer League. Bill McGuire and his ownership group, which includes Jim Pohlad of the Minnesota Twins, Glen Taylor of the Minnesota Timberwolves, former Minnesota Wild investor Glen Nelson, and his daughter Wendy Carlson Nelson of the Carlson hospitality company, had intended to build a privately financed soccer-specific stadium in Downtown Minneapolis near the Minneapolis Farmer's Market. But their plan was met with heavy opposition from former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, who said her city was suffering from "stadium fatigue" after building three stadiums for the Minnesota Twins, Minnesota Vikings and the Minnesota Golden Gophers, within a six-year span. On July 1, 2015, after failing to reach an agreement with the city of Minneapolis, McGuire and his partners turned their focus to Saint Paul.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: On October 23, 2015, Bill McGuire of Minnesota United FC and former Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman announced that a privately financed soccer-specific stadium would be built on the vacant Metro Transit bus barn site in Saint Paul's Midway neighborhood near the intersection of Snelling Avenue and University Avenue. It is midway between downtown Saint Paul and downtown Minneapolis. The stadium, Allianz Field, opened in April 2019 and seats 19,400. The team began playing in the MLS in 2017.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: On May 15, 2018, the Minnesota Whitecaps joined the Premier Hockey Federation (the former National Women's Hockey League) as its fifth franchise. Founded in 2004, the team originally played in the Western Women's Hockey League before going independent in 2010 when that league folded. The Whitecaps play their home games at TRIA Rink, a 1,200-seat arena and practice facility in downtown Saint Paul. The team began playing in the PHF in 2018.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul has a variant of the strong mayor–council form of government. The mayor is the chief executive and chief administrative officer of the city and the seven-member city council is its legislative body. The mayor is elected by the entire city, while members of the city council are elected from seven different geographic wards of approximately equal population. Both the mayor and council members serve four-year terms. The current mayor is Melvin Carter (DFL), Saint Paul's first African-American mayor. Aside from Norm Coleman, who became a Republican during his second term, Saint Paul has not elected a Republican mayor since 1952.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The city is also the county seat of Ramsey County, named for Alexander Ramsey, the state's first governor. The county once spanned much of the present-day metropolitan area and was originally to be named Saint Paul County after the city. Today it is geographically the smallest county and the most densely populated. Ramsey is the only home rule county in Minnesota; the seven-member Board of Commissioners appoints a county manager whose office is in the combination city hall/county courthouse along with the Minnesota Second Judicial Courts. The nearby Law Enforcement Center houses the Ramsey County Sheriff's office.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul is the capital of Minnesota. The city hosts the capitol building, designed by Saint Paul resident Cass Gilbert, and the House and Senate office buildings. The Minnesota Governor's Residence, which is used for some state functions, is on Summit Avenue. The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (affiliated with the Democratic Party) is headquartered in Saint Paul. Numerous state departments and services are also headquartered in Saint Paul, such as the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The city is split into four Minnesota Senate districts (64, 65, 66 and 67) and eight Minnesota House of Representatives districts (64A, 64B, 65A, 65B, 66A, 66B, 67A and 67B), all of which are held by Democrats.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul is the heart of Minnesota's 4th congressional district, represented by Democrat Betty McCollum. The district has been in DFL hands without interruption since 1949. Minnesota is represented in the US Senate by Democrat Amy Klobuchar, a former Hennepin County Attorney, and Democrat Tina Smith, former Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Saint Paul is second in the United States in the number of higher education institutions per capita, behind Boston. Higher education institutions that call Saint Paul home include three public and eight private colleges and universities and five post-secondary institutions. Well-known colleges and universities include the Saint Catherine University, Concordia University, Hamline University, Macalester College, and the University of St. Thomas. Metropolitan State University and Saint Paul College, which focus on non-traditional students, are based in Saint Paul, as well as a law school, Mitchell Hamline School of Law.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The Saint Paul Public Schools district is the state's largest school district and serves approximately 39,000 students. The district is extremely diverse with students from families speaking 90 different languages, although only five languages are used for most school communication: English, Spanish, Hmong, Karen, and Somali. The district runs 82 different schools, including 52 elementary schools, 12 middle schools, seven high schools, ten alternative schools, and one special education school, employing over 6,500 teachers and staff. The school district also oversees community education programs for pre-K and adult learners, including Early Childhood Family Education, GED Diploma, language programs, and various learning opportunities for community members of all ages. In 2006, Saint Paul Public Schools celebrated its 150th anniversary. Some students attend public schools in other school districts chosen by their families under Minnesota's open enrollment statute.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: A variety of K-12 private, parochial, and public charter schools are also represented in the city. In 1992, Saint Paul became the first city in the US to sponsor and open a charter school, now found in most states across the nation. Saint Paul is currently home to 21 charter schools as well as 38 private schools. The Saint Paul Public Library system includes a central library, twelve branch locations, and a bookmobile.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Residents of Saint Paul can receive 10 broadcast television stations, five of which broadcast from within Saint Paul. One daily newspaper, the "St. Paul Pioneer Press", two weekly neighborhood newspapers, the "East Side Review" and "City Pages" (owned by The Star Tribune Company), and several monthly or semimonthly neighborhood papers serve the city. It was the only city in the United States with a population of 250,000 or more to see an increase in circulation of Sunday newspapers in 2007. Several media outlets based in neighboring Minneapolis also serve the Saint Paul community, including the "Star Tribune". Saint Paul is home to Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), a three-format system that broadcasts on nearly 40 stations around the Midwest. MPR locally delivers news and information, classical, and The Current (which plays a wide variety of music). The station has 110,000 regional members and more than 800,000 listeners each week throughout the Upper Midwest, the largest audience of any regional public radio network. Also operating as part of American Public Media, MPR's programming reaches five million listeners, most notably through "Live from Here", hosted by Chris Thile (previously known as "A Prairie Home Companion", hosted by Garrison Keillor, who also lives in the city). The Fitzgerald Theater, renamed in 1994 for Saint Paul native and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, is home to the show.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Residents use Interstate 35E running north–south and Interstate 94 running east–west. Trunk highways include U.S. Highway 52, Minnesota State Highway 280, and Minnesota State Highway 5. St. Paul has several unique roads such as Ayd Mill Road, Phalen Boulevard and Shepard Road/Warner Road, which diagonally follow particular geographic features in the city. Biking is also gaining popularity, due to the creation of more paved bike lanes that connect to other bike routes throughout the metropolitan area and the creation of Nice Ride Minnesota, a seasonally operated nonprofit bicycle sharing and rental system that has over 1,550 bicycles and 170 stations in both Minneapolis and St. Paul. Downtown St. Paul has a five-mile (8 km) enclosed skyway system over 25 city blocks. The Avenue of the Saints connects St. Paul with St. Louis, Missouri.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The layout of city streets and roads has often drawn complaints. While he was Governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura appeared on the "Late Show with David Letterman", and remarked that the streets were designed by "drunken Irishmen". He later apologized, though people had been complaining about the fractured grid system for more than a century by that point. Some of the city's road design is the result of the curve of the Mississippi River, hilly topography, conflicts between developers of different neighborhoods in the early city, and grand plans only half-realized. Outside of downtown, the roads are less confusing, but most roads are named, rather than numbered, increasing the difficulty for non-natives to navigate.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Metro Transit provides bus service and light rail in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. The METRO Green Line is an light rail line that connects downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis with 14 stations in St. Paul. The Green Line runs west along University Avenue, through the University of Minnesota campus, until it links up and then shares stations with the METRO Blue Line in downtown Minneapolis. Construction began in November 2010 and the line began service on June 14, 2014. The Green Line averaged 42,500 rides per weekday in 2018. Planning is underway for the Riverview Corridor, a rail line that will connect downtown Saint Paul to the airport and Mall of America.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: The METRO A Line opened in 2016 as Minneapolis–Saint Paul's first arterial bus rapid transit line. The A Line connects the Blue Line at 46th Street station to Rosedale Center with a connection at the Green Line Snelling Avenue station. Future METRO lines are planned that will serve Saint Paul with the B Line and E Line Line running primarily on arterial streets, and the Gold Line and Purple Line running primarily in their own right of way.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Amtrak's "Empire Builder" between Chicago and Seattle stops twice daily in each direction at the newly renovated Saint Paul Union Depot. Ridership on the train increased about 6% from 2005 to over 505,000 in fiscal year 2007. A Minnesota Department of Transportation study found that increased daily service to Chicago should be economically viable, especially if it originates in St. Paul and does not experience delays from the rest of the western route of the Empire Builder. Saint Paul is the site of the Pig's Eye Yard, a major freight classification yard for Canadian Pacific Railway. As of 2003, the yard handled over 1,000 freight cars per day. Both Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe run trains through the yard, though they are not classified at Pig's Eye. Burlington Northern Santa Fe operates the large Northtown Yard in Minneapolis, which handles about 600 cars per day. There are several other small yards located around the city.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: Holman Airfield is across the river from downtown St. Paul. Lamprey Lake was there until the Army Corps of Engineers filled it with dredgings starting in the early 1920s. Northwest Airlines began initial operations from Holman in 1926. During WWII Northwest had a contract to install upgraded radar systems in B-24s, employing 5,000 at the airfield. After WWII, Holman Airfield competed with the Speedway Field for the Twin Cities' growing aviation industry and lost out in the end. Today Holman is a reliever airport run by the Metropolitan Airports Commission. It is home to Minnesota's Air National Guard and a flight training school and is tailored to local corporate aviation. There are three runways, with the Holman Field Administration Building and Riverside Hangar on the National Register of Historic Places. The historical importance of the original Northwest Airlines building was realized only after demolition commenced.


title: Saint Paul, Minnesota

text: For the most part St. Paul's aviation needs are served by the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport (MSP), which sits on in the Fort Snelling Unorganized Territory bordering the city to the southwest. MSP serves 17 commercial passenger airlines and is the hub of Delta Air Lines, Mesaba Airlines and Sun Country Airlines.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The all-time medal table for all Olympic Games from 1896 to 2022, including Summer Olympic Games, Winter Olympic Games, and a combined total of both, is tabulated below. These Olympic medal counts do not include the 1906 Intercalated Games which are no longer recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as official Games.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The IOC itself does not publish all-time tables, and publishes unofficial tables only per single Games. This table was thus compiled by adding up single entries from the IOC database.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The results are attributed to the IOC country code as currently displayed by the IOC database. Usually, a single code corresponds to a single National Olympic Committee (NOC). When different codes are displayed for different years, medal counts are combined in the case of a simple change of IOC code (such as from HOL to NED for the Netherlands) or simple change of country name (such as from Ceylon to Sri Lanka). As the medals are attributed to each NOC, not all totals include medals won by athletes from that country for another NOC, such as before independence of that country. Names in italic are national entities that no longer exist. The totals of NOCs are not combined with those of their predecessors and successors.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The table is pre-sorted by the name of each Olympic Committee, but can be displayed as sorted by any other column, such as the total number of gold medals or total number of overall medals. To sort by gold, silver, and then bronze, sort first by the bronze column, then the silver, and then the gold. The table does not count revoked medals (e.g., due to doping).


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: A total of 156 current and historical NOCs have earned at least one medal. Medal totals in this table are current through the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, People's Republic of China, and all changes in medal standings due to doping cases and medal redistributions up to 20 February 2022 are taken into account.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: After the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, 68 of the current 206 National Olympic Committees have yet to win an Olympic medal. Seven historic National Olympic Committees and the Refugee Olympic Team are also included in this list.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: A total of 8 special delegations have earned at least one medal. Medal totals in this table are current through the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, People's Republic of China, and all changes in medal standings due to doping cases and medal redistributions up to 20 February are taken into account.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The following is the overall medal tally (top ten nations) with the records of current NOCs combined with those of their precursors (sorted by gold, then silver, then bronze), through 2022.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: If results for East and West Germany are combined, Germans athletes won the most gold medals also in the 1976 Summer Olympics and the 1988 Winter Olympics.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: For the 1900 Summer Olympics several countries are credited with appearances that are not considered official by the IOC. Only one of these cases concerns a medal. A gold medal that is officially added to France's total is given to Luxembourg.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: Other differences from the official table are based on disagreements about which events were Olympic. This affects several of the events in the 1900 and 1904 Olympics. In addition, some sources include the 1906 Intercalated Games when compiling their medal tables.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: From 1924 through 1936, the IOC on several occasions awarded gold medals for feats of alpinism and aeronautics that occurred in the preceding four-year Olympiad. In 1924, 1932 and 1936, gold medals were awarded to 25 mountaineers from six nations for expeditions in the Himalayas and the Matterhorn. In 1936, a gold medal was awarded to Hermann Schreiber of Switzerland for crossing the Alps in a glider in 1935, the first time that had been done. Some sources include these IOC awards of gold medals in the overall count.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: Australasia was a combined team of athletes from Australia and the Dominion of New Zealand that competed together at the 1908 and 1912 Summer Olympics. When the Olympic Games resumed in 1920 after World War I, the two nations sent separate teams to the Games, and have done so ever since.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The West Indies Federation, also known as the West Indies, the Federation of the West Indies or the West Indian Federation, was a short-lived political union that existed from 3 January 1958 to 31 May 1962. Various islands in the Caribbean that were part of the British Empire, including Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, and those on the Leeward and Windward Islands, came together to form the Federation.The expressed intention of the Federation was to create a political unit that would become independent from Britain as a single state


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: Before that could happen, the Federation collapsed due to internal political conflicts over how it would be governed or function viably.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: renamed to British West Indies (BWI) by the IOC, at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Italy. Thirteen competitors, all men, took part in thirteen events in five sports. The short-lived nation only participated at these single Games, as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago competed independently again in 1964, and Barbados started competing at the 1968 Games.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: Czechoslovakia first participated at the Olympic Games in 1920, after having competed as Bohemia from 1900 to 1912. The nation sent athletes to compete in every Summer Olympic Games since then, except for the 1984 Games when they were part of the Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympics.Czechoslovakia has participated in every Winter Olympic Games since the inaugural Games of 1924.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, the Czech Republic and Slovakia sent independent teams to the Olympics starting in 1994.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: Germany has competed under five different designations, including as two separate teams at several Games. Sources vary in how they present the medals won by these teams. The table below shows sourced combinations of these teams, when applied to the updated medal totals from the main table. A part of Germany, Saar, competed independently in the Summer Olympic games in 1952, but failed to win any medals. Due to most lists only listing medal counts, it's possible but not certain Saar was included as part of Germany in their calculations. Germany was denied participation on three occasions (1920, 1924, and 1948).


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: At the 2016 Summer Olympics nine athletes from Kuwait competed as "Independent Olympic Athletes" (IOA), as the Kuwait Olympic Committee had been suspended by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the second time in five years due to governmental interference.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: Although not allowed to compete as a sovereign state at the 2016 Summer Olympics, the nation's participants were able to compete as Independent Olympic Athletes under the Olympic flag. At those games, Kuwaiti shooters Fehaid Al-Deehani and Abdullah Al-Rashidi


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The Netherlands Antilles participated at the Olympic Games from 1952 until 2008 as a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The National Olympic Committee for the Netherlands Antilles was created in 1931 and recognized by the International Olympic Committee from 1950 until 2011 upon the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: Aruba left the Netherlands Antilles in 1986 to become a constituent country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Between 1952 until 1984, Aruban athletes competed as part of the Netherlands Antilles. Since the Olympic Games in 1988, athletes from Aruba have competed separately under their own Olympic banner and has participated in each Summer Olympic Games since then.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: After the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in 2010, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba became part of the Netherlands as special municipalities of the Netherlands. Curaçao and Sint Maarten became separate constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: At the 2012 Olympics, participants from the five islands competed as independent athletes under the Olympic flag.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: However, athletes from the former Netherlands Antilles who qualified for the 2012 Olympics were allowed to participate independently under the Olympic flag, in addition to the possibility of competing for the Netherlands (as for example Churandy Martina did) or Aruba (because they have Dutch nationality). Ultimately, three athletes from the Netherlands Antilles participated as Independent Olympic Athletes.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The Republic of China (ROC) participated in its first Summer Olympics in 1932 under the name of "China". After the Chinese Civil War, the ROC retreated to the island of Taiwan in 1949, and only Taiwan-based athletes have competed on its behalf since then. In 1971, the ROC was expelled from the United Nations, but was permitted to compete under its official name, flag, and anthem in the 1972 Winter, 1972 Summer, and 1976 Winter Olympics. It was denied official representation in the 1976 Summer Olympics and boycotted it as a result. The 1979 Nagoya Resolution allowed the ROC to compete under the deliberately-ambiguous name "Chinese Taipei"; it protested against this decision and boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics as well, but has competed under this name since the 1984 Winter Olympics.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The Republic of China took part in the Opening Ceremony of the 1924 Summer Olympics, but its four athletes, all of whom were tennis players, withdrew from competition.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The Russian Federation, the Russian Empire, the Olympic Athletes from Russia and the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) are sometimes combined outside of IOC sources. The Soviet Union is often combined with the post-union team that competed in 1992. Some sources combine the Soviet Union and Russia, despite the fact that many republics which subsequently gained or re-gained independence (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan) contributed to the medal tally of the USSR, and there are occasional sources that combine all medals of RU1, URS, EUN, OAR, ROC and RUS. On 31 January 1992, the United Nations recognized, without objection, Russia as legal successor of the rights and obligations of the former Soviet Union, but this has no significance in medal tallies.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: The nationalities of many medalists at the 1904 Olympics are disputed as many competitors were recent immigrants to the United States who had not yet been granted US citizenship.


title: All-time Olympic Games medal table

text: All-time medal counts are compiled by various sources, often adding up related results for Russia, Germany, Serbia, Czech Republic, etc.


title: 1996 Summer Olympics

text: The 1996 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the XXVI Olympiad, also known as Atlanta 1996 and commonly referred to as the Centennial Olympic Games) were an international multi-sport event held from July 19 to August 4, 1996, in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. These were the fourth Summer Olympics to be hosted by the United States, and marked the centennial of the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, the inaugural edition of the modern Olympic Games. These were also the first Summer Olympics since 1924 to be held in a different year than the Winter Olympics, as part of a new IOC practice implemented in 1994 to hold the Summer and Winter Games in alternating, even-numbered years. The 1996 Games were the first of the two consecutive Summer Olympics to be held in a predominantly English-speaking country preceding the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. These were also the last Summer Olympics to be held in North America until 2028, when Los Angeles will host the games for the third time.


title: 1996 Summer Olympics

text: 10,320 athletes from 197 National Olympic Committees competed in 26 sports, including the Olympic debuts of beach volleyball, mountain biking and softball, as well as the new disciplines of lightweight rowing, women's fencing, team rhythmic gymnastics, and women's association football. A total of 24 countries made their Summer Olympic debuts in Atlanta, including 11 former Soviet republics participating for the first time as independent nations. With a total of 101 medals, the United States topped the medal table for the first time since 1984 (and for the first time since 1968 in a non-boycotted Summer Olympics), also winning the most gold (44) and silver (32) medals out of all the participating nations. Notable performances during the competition included those of Andre Agassi, whose gold medal in these Games would be followed up with the French Open title in 1999, making him the first men's singles tennis player to complete the Golden Slam; Donovan Bailey, who set a new world record of 9.84 for the men's 100 metres; Lilia Podkopayeva, who became the second gymnast to win an individual event gold medal after winning the all-around title in the same Olympics; and the Magnificent Seven, who dramatically won the first ever U.S. gold medal in the Women's artistic gymnastics team all-around.


title: 1996 Summer Olympics

text: The Games were marred by violence on July 27, 1996, when a pipe bomb was detonated at Centennial Olympic Park (which had been built to serve as a public focal point for the festivities), killing two and injuring 111. Years later, Eric Rudolph confessed to the bombing and a series of related terrorist attacks, and was sentenced to life in prison. Nonetheless, the 1996 Olympics turned a profit, helped by record revenue from sponsorship deals and broadcast rights, and a reliance on private funding, among other factors. There was some criticism of the apparent over-commercialization of the Games, with other issues raised by European officials, such as the availability of food and transport. The event had a lasting impact on the city; Centennial Olympic Park led a revitalization of Atlanta's downtown area, and has served as a symbol of the legacy of the 1996 Games; the Olympic Village buildings have since been used as residential housing for area universities; and the Centennial Olympic Stadium has since been redeveloped twice, first as the Turner Field baseball stadium, then as the Center Parc college football stadium.


title: 1996 Summer Olympics

text: Atlanta was selected on September 18, 1990, in Tokyo, Japan, over Athens, Belgrade, Manchester, Melbourne, and Toronto at the 96th IOC Session. The city entered the competition as a dark horse, being up against stiff competition. The US media also criticized it as a second-tier city and complained of Georgia's Confederate history. However, the IOC Evaluation Commission ranked Atlanta's infrastructure and facilities the highest, while IOC members said that it could guarantee large television revenues similar to the success of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the most recent Olympics in the United States. Additionally, former US ambassador to the UN and Atlanta mayor Andrew Jackson Young touted Atlanta's civil rights history and reputation for racial harmony. Young also wanted to showcase a reformed American South. The strong economy of Atlanta and improved race relations in the South helped to impress the IOC officials. The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) also proposed a substantial revenue-sharing with the IOC, USOC, and other NOCs. Atlanta's main rivals were Toronto, whose front-running bid that began in 1986 had chances to succeed after Canada had held a successful 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, and Melbourne, Australia, who hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics and after Brisbane, Australia's failed bid for the 1992 games (which were awarded to Barcelona) and prior to Sydney, Australia's successful 2000 Summer Olympics bid. This would be Toronto's fourth failed attempt since 1960 (tried in 1960, 1964, and 1976, but defeated by Rome, Tokyo and Montreal).


title: 1996 Summer Olympics

text: Greece, the home of the ancient and first modern Olympics, was considered by many observers the "natural choice" for the Centennial Games. However, Athens bid chairman Spyros Metaxa demanded that it be named as the site of the Olympics because of its "historical right due to its history", which may have caused resentment among delegates. Furthermore, the Athens bid was described as "arrogant and poorly prepared", being regarded as "not being up to the task of coping with the modern and risk-prone extravaganza" of the current Games. Athens faced numerous obstacles, including "political instability, potential security problems, air pollution, traffic congestion and the fact that it would have to spend about US$3 billion to improve its infrastructure of airports, roads, rail lines and other amenities". Athens would later be selected to host the 2004 Summer Olympics seven years later on September 5, 1997.


title: 1996 Summer Olympics

text: The total cost of the 1996 Summer Olympics was estimated to be around US$1.7 billion. The venues and the Games themselves were funded entirely via private investment, and the only public funding came from the U.S. government for security, and around $500 million of public money used on physical public infrastructure including streetscaping, road improvements, Centennial Olympic Park (alongside $75 million in private funding), expansion of the airport, improvements in public transportation, and redevelopment of public housing projects. $420 million worth of tickets were sold, sale of sponsorship rights accounted for $540 million, and sale of the domestic broadcast rights to NBC accounted for $456 million. In total, the Games turned a profit of $19 million.


title: 1996 Summer Olympics

text: The cost for Atlanta 1996 compares with costs of $4.6 billion for Rio 2016, $40–44 billion for Beijing 2008, and $51 billion for Sochi 2014 (the most expensive Olympics in history). The average cost for the Summer Games since 1960 is $5.2 billion. Unlike Atlanta 1996, Beijing and Sochi were primarily funded by their respective governments.


title: 1996 Summer Olympics

text: Events of the 1996 Games were held in a variety of areas. A number were held within the Olympic Ring, a circle from the center of Atlanta. Others were held at Stone Mountain, about outside of the city. To broaden ticket sales, other events, such as Association football (soccer), were staged in various cities in the Southeast.