A Canal Conversation

A Canal Conversation brought together an array of experts to talk about the Commercial Slip, the Erie Canal, and the prospects for “heritage development” in Buffalo. They outlined the potential for heritage tourism and development, identified key issues to be resolved, and raised some flags over problems and pitfalls.

This report contains a transcript of the proceedings of the conference as full as was possible to reconstruct. The elements of these proceedings were assembled from tape recordings and the texts of speakers. In one case, a text was reconstructed after the fact with the assistance of the speaker and in another, a previously published article was substituted for missing text. Nevertheless, the end result is generally faithful to the intentions of the speakers who appeared at the conference. This summary was derived from a careful, line-by-line analysis of the content of these texts and transcripts. We tried to identify key ideas expressed by the speakers and to show when speakers used ideas in common with their colleagues. The table in the final section of this report shows that analysis in greater detail. The result, however, is a powerful distillation of the collected messages from the conference.