Laser Scanning Clinton's Ditch: High Tech HAER Documentation along the Erie Canal

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Katherine Clarke
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1 Historic American Engineering Record NPS Heritage Documentation Programs Laser Scanning Clinton's Ditch: High Tech HAER Documentation along the Erie Canal World Canals Conference Rochester 23 September 2010 Christopher H. Marston, HAER Project Leader Jeremy Mauro, HAER Architect

along the Erie Canal World Canals Conference Rochester 23 September

2 HAER Mohawk-Hudson Survey Vogel book, Smithsonian

3 Cohoes Harmony Mills, HAER Survey 1970 Harmony Mill No. 3, Cohoes

4 Harmony Mills & Cohoes Power Canal HAER Survey 1970 Cohoes Power Canal

5 Erie Canal Converted to Power Canal

6 Library of Congress: Prints & Photographs Division Vogel book, Smithsonian

7 Lockport Flight of Five 2005 Laser Scanning Area

8 Lockport Flight of Five 2005 Laser Scanning in the Snow

9 Lockport Flight of Five 2005

10 HAER/CRGIS Erie Canal Survey 2009

11 1879 Cohoes Harmony Mill

12 Locks Holmes Hutchison Map

13 Clinton s Ditch Canal Locks 37&38 (1825) Cohoes Company Map, 1835

14 Enlarged Erie Canal Locks, Constructed

15 Pump House & Picker House ca. 1880

16 Cohoes Lockwalls Site-Waterworks Bldg

17 Cohoes Lockwalls Lock 38 stones

18 Leica Scan Station 2: Fieldwork

19 Leica Scan Station 2: Fieldwork

20 Leica Scan Station 2: Fieldwork

21 Aerial View of Site

22 Leica Scan Station 2: Fieldwork

23 Cohoes Pumphouse Overgrown Site-Waterworks Bldg

24 Leica Scan Station 2: Fieldwork

25 Leica Scan Station 2: Fieldwork

26 Leica Scan Station 2: Fieldwork

27 Leica Scan Station 2: Fieldwork

28 Leica Scan Station 2: Fieldwork

29 AutoCAD 2011: Registering Scan Stations

30 AutoCAD 2011: Scan World 100

31 AutoCAD 2011: 3-D Point Cloud

32 AutoCAD 2011: 3-D Point Cloud

33 AutoCAD 2011: Point Cloud Top

34 AutoCAD 2011: Point Cloud Front

35 AutoCAD 2011: 15% Point Cloud Section

36 AutoCAD 2011: 56% Density Point Cloud

37 AutoCAD 2011: 100% Density Point Cloud

38 AutoCAD 2011: Cropping Point Cloud

39 AutoCAD 2011: Cropped Point Cloud

40 AutoCAD 2011: Cropped Point Cloud - Long Section

41 AutoCAD 2011: Drawing over Point Cloud

42 AutoCAD 2011: Drawing over Point Cloud

43 AutoCAD 2011: Drawing over Point Cloud - Plan

44 AutoCAD 2011: Plan

45 AutoCAD 2011: 3-D Model

46 AutoCAD 2011: 3-D Model

47 AutoCAD 2011: 3-D Model

48 AutoCAD 2011: Final Drawings

49 AutoCAD 2011: Final Drawings

50 Laser Scanning Clinton's Ditch: High Tech HAER Documentation along the Erie Canal Christopher Marston, Architect & Project Leader, National Park Service-Historic American Engineering Record, Washington, DC, USA Since 2005, the National Park Service's Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) has been employing some state-of-the-art technology to digitally document a wide variety of historic resources along the Erie Canal system. This work has been done in partnership with the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, and will be used to help restore and protect many of these historic resources. Beginning in 2005, HAER signed an agreement with the City of Lockport and started documentation of the Enlarged Erie Flight of Five locks, as well as still active Barge Canal locks 34 & 35. In partnership with Texas Tech University, HAER recorded this large scale site using the HDS Leica Geosystems high definition laser scanner. Although their brief window of site accessibility was during a snow storm, the team was nonetheless able to collect point cloud data used to complete detailed plans, sections, and elevations of the site, completed in 2-D AutoCAD. These drawings, along with large format photographs and a contextual history, were consulted by a team led by Bergmann Associates to stabilize and rehabilitate the site. In 2009, HAER and its sister agency Cultural Resources Geographic Information Systems (CRGIS) embarked on a large scale project to survey a variety of historic canal structures along the entire route. The New York State Barge Canal HAER Recording Project surveyed all four historic canal routes in the system: the Enlarged Erie/Erie Barge Canal, Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga-Seneca canals. The field team documented nearly 200 sites and produced HAER short form histories with digital photographs. The structures identified included lock sites (lock, lockhouse, powerhouse, auxiliary buildings, and associated dams), lift bridges, lighthouses, and guard gates. (Due to the limited scope, the team decided to not record any overpass bridges, culverts, or waste weirs). In addition, CRGIS surveyed each site with GPS, creating a geodatabase and mapping of all the structures. The data collected will be used by Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor for a future National Register district nomination. Finally, in 2010, HAER completed an agreement with the City of Cohoes and NYSDOT, using a Save America's Treasures Grant to record the remains of lock walls from the Clinton's Ditch era. Located beneath a City of Cohoes pumphouse along the Cohoes Company Power Canal in the Harmony Mills complex, the lock walls are the last known structural survivor from the original Erie Canal from HAER documented this significant resource using the Leica II laser scanner, three generations advanced from the tool used at Lockport. The 3-D AutoCAD drawings produced will be used by the City of Cohoes in interpretive panels as part of a planned visitor's display. In addition to a HAER contextual history report and large format photographs, CRGIS is producing digital maps showing the evolution of four eras of canal building in the Albany-Troy-Cohoes-Waterford region. The documentation will put the canal resources in the Cohoes area into the larger context of the evolution of the Erie Canal and Champlain Canal systems.

51 In addition to being a valuable tool for property owners, engineers, and planners, the documentation will both be archived in the HABS/HAER/HALS Collection at the Library of Congress, be available to the general public on the Library of Congress' website. The involvement of HAER, a 40+ year old federal agency, in recording these historic Erie Canal resources is significant in that HAER had its first official survey in the Troy-Cohoes region, documenting significant canal, industrial, and engineering resources in The agency's methodology has evolved significantly over those forty years, while still achieving the same high standards of documentation required by the Secretary of the Interior and the Library of Congress. Christopher H Marston received his B.S. in architecture from the University of Virginia and his M.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University. He has been with the National Park Service s Historic American Engineering Record since 1989, where he has led teams documenting a variety of sites including steel mills, railroad, canals, water power resources, historic roads, and covered bridges. He has given several presentations on his work to professional groups at the Society for Industrial Archeology, American Society of Civil Engineers, Transportation Research Board, Preserving the Historic Road, American Precision Museum, Construction History Society, and New York State Canal conferences. He is co-editor of the award-winning book, America s National Park Roads and Parkways: Drawings from the Historic American Engineering Record, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Working in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, he served as associate curator for the traveling exhibition, Covered Bridges: Spanning the American Landscape ( ). The University of New Mexico s Southwest Summer Institute invited him to teach courses on documentation of historic resources along Route 66 in Recently, he served as chair for the just-concluded Preserving the Historic Road Conference in Washington, DC.

For Historically Designated Homes & Buildings

For Historically Designated Homes & Buildings Ninth Street Historic Park Acknowledgements This project was paid for in part by a State Historical Fund grant from the Colorado Historical Society. The contents contained herein do not necessarily reflect