Local news

Holyoke opens the second stretch of the canal walk

The new half mile runs from Appleton Street to the old mill gate, eleven years after the first section.

By Tomas Oyelaran · August 9, 2026

Holyoke opened the second stretch of the canal walk on Saturday morning, a half mile of paved path along the second-level canal running from Appleton Street north to the old mill gate at Cabot. The first stretch opened in 2015. The city had told people at the time that the rest would follow in about three years.

Roughly 200 people showed up for the ribbon cutting at 10 a.m. Mayor Delia Santos-Reyer cut the ribbon with a pair of hedge shears borrowed from the parks department because nobody could find the ceremonial scissors.

The new section cost $4.8 million. About $3.1 million came from a state recreational trails grant the city won in 2022 and nearly lost in 2023 when the first contractor walked off the job. The rest came out of a bond the City Council approved in November 2021.

"Eleven years is too long and I am not going to stand here and pretend it isn't," Santos-Reyer said. "But it's built now, it's twelve feet wide, and it's going to be here after everybody at this ribbon is gone."

What took eleven years

Three things, mostly, and the city has been fairly straight about all of them.

The first was the wall. Engineers hired in 2017 found that about 340 feet of the canal's east retaining wall, behind the Chapin Street buildings, had lost enough of its mortar that it could not carry a path and a railing on top of it. Rebuilding that stretch took two seasons and $1.9 million nobody had planned for.

The second was ownership. Four parcels along the route belonged to a Connecticut holding company that had stopped answering mail in 2014. The city took them by eminent domain in 2020 and settled for $215,000 in 2021.

The third was the contractor. Delahanty Brothers of Chicopee stopped work in March 2023 with the subgrade in and almost nothing else, and the city went through its surety to finish the job. Cordova Construction picked it up in the fall of 2024.

Planning director Ansel Wojcik, who has been on this project since 2016, said he stopped giving people completion dates in 2019.

"Every time I said a year out loud, somebody wrote it down and read it back to me two years later," Wojcik said. "So I quit saying years."

What is actually there

The path is asphalt, twelve feet wide, with a crushed-stone shoulder on the canal side. There are 26 light poles, about 90 feet apart, on the same fixtures as the first section. Six benches. Two bike racks, and a water fountain near the Appleton Street entrance with a dog bowl at the bottom.

Six interpretive signs run the length of it, in English and Spanish, covering the canal system, the Lyman Mills and the paper trade. The city paid $34,000 for them, which drew a complaint or two at the council meeting where it was approved, and they are the best thing on the path.

Where the new section meets the old at Appleton, the grade changes about four inches over ten feet. It is not a trip hazard but you can feel it on a bike.

The railing is powder-coated steel, black, 42 inches. At the mill gate end you can see down into the canal about eighteen feet to the water.

The people who live on it

Reaction on Chapin and Cabot streets has been mixed in the way these things usually are.

Marisol Otero, who has lived on Cabot Street for 31 years and whose back windows look out on the new path, said the construction noise was worse than anyone warned her about.

"Two summers of a saw cutting stone at seven in the morning," Otero said. "But I walked it Sunday at six with my sister and there were maybe fifteen people out there. I have not seen fifteen people walking on this block in years. So, fine. It was worth it. Do not do it again."

Ray Kulikowski, who owns a machine shop on Appleton, is less pleased. Two of his eleven parking spots went to the path easement, and the loading area behind the shop now has a bench in front of it.

"They asked me about it in 2019 and I said no, and then they built it," Kulikowski said. "That was the whole conversation."

Wojcik said the city paid Kulikowski $18,000 for the easement and that the bench can be moved if the shop asks in writing.

The third stretch

The plan on paper runs the canal walk another 0.8 miles from the mill gate to Berkshire Street, within a block of the train platform. That section is in design and unfunded. Wojcik put the estimate at $7 million to $9 million and said the wall condition along that run is unknown, which is what he also said about the section that turned out to need $1.9 million of masonry.

He would not give a year.

The path is open dawn to 10 p.m. Parks and recreation will plow the new section on the same schedule as the first, meaning after the streets and the school lots, usually a day or two behind a storm. Comments on the Berkshire Street design go to the Planning Board meeting on Tuesday, September 8, at 6:30 p.m. at City Hall, or by email to the planning office, which posts the drawings on the city website under capital projects.