SCHENECTADY — On the side of the Broadway exit of Interstate 890 lurks a mysterious concrete structure obscured by trees and vines.

Drivers might stop every day in traffic at the exit's light and look at it, never knowing that it was once a key part of Schenectady's past.

What city workers now call the "stairway to heaven" was once part of the Klondike Ramp, an eight-story circular walkway that carried General Electric workers to and from Hamilton Hill from the 1930s to 1958.

Artifacts from the heyday of GE — 40,000 people worked there during World War II — are still sprinkled throughout Schenectady, crumbling relics now silent at a time when it would be hard to find many employees who still walk to the plant off Erie Boulevard.

"There are always little clues of the past here and there if you look for them," said Chris Hunter, curator of collections and exhibitions at the Museum of Innovation and Science, formerly the Schenectady Museum and Suits-Bueche Planetarium, about the these relics, which also include a pedestrian subway entrance and bathhouse.

For a good part of the 20th century, thousands of GE workers did walk to work from their hilly city neighborhoods that were working class hubs — Bellevue, Mont Pleasant and Hamilton Hill. To support such foot traffic, pathways were needed — like the Klondike Ramp, which replaced a long concrete staircase. In 1905, the Schenectady City Council approved $137 to buy land for the stairs at the urging of 2,000 people who signed a petition to build a stairway from what was then called Pleasant Valley to near the GE Plant, Despite complaints about icy conditions, trash and poor lighting, the stairs remained until a 1930 rainstorm washed them out. The octagonal ramp was built in the early 1930s with $55,000 worth of federal Works Progress Administration money.

"There was some question as to whether the new Klondike Ramp was worth the cost," according to "Tales of Old Schenectady, Volume Two" by Larry Hart, a former time city historian and Daily Gazette writer. "For one thing, walking either down or up (but especially up) the ramp was a rather tiring experience. Even the gradual slope did not make it easy on the legs since it seemed almost an eternity to reach the lower or upper level once the trip started."

Hart wrote that no one knows where the term "Klondike" came from. Perhaps it was from the cold wind that would whistle through the neighborhoods in the city's valley or because the path the employees cut on their way to work was symbolic of them mining for gold.

Times Union columnist Marv Cermak, who was born in 1932, remembers riding his bike up and down the ramp, which was near his grandmother's house on Strong Street. He watched other kids take a treacherous ride on roller skates or push their friends down in wagons.

As bus service improved and more workers drove cars to the new GE-paved parking lots, fewer people used the ramp. It was removed in 1958 after more hillside erosion. City Commissioner of General Services Carl Olsen said he doesn't know why the concrete ramp leading to the circular walkway was not demolished, too. Now it merely juts into the sky and ends in midair. Olsen said he's not even sure who owns it, the city or the state now that I-890 runs alongside it.

Bellevue resident Dolores Hutton said she and her husband, a GE retired foreman, were driving on Broadway years ago when she spotted the entrance to the old ramp through the trees.

"I said, 'What was that?'" Hutton said. "I thought, 'Why didn't they preserve that? Why did they allow it to fall apart and all those trees to grow through it?'"

Hutton was integral in saving an old bathhouse in Bellevue's Fairview Park that was believed to be where GE workers washed up while on their walk home from work. In the early 1990s, the park was overgrown and the bathhouse was barely visible among the tall weeds.

"I found a man, he was 92 then. He said he would walk up a cinder path and wash up there," Hutton said. "I didn't even know it was a park until I asked."

Hutton got $5,000 in grants and had the bathhouse refurbished, albeit without its sinks or troughs still in place.

On lower Broadway, the entrance to a pedestrian subway — which allowed GE employees to walk underneath train tracks that bordered the plant — is also still there. A picture, circa 1960, that Hunter found in the museum's archives shows security at the plant was tight, as a posted sign said cameras were not allowed to be carried through the subway.

The entrance is falling apart now, its steel doors dented and colored with graffiti. By peeking into a small broken window, one can see how the subway tunnel was eventually filled sometime in the 1990s — the stairs to the entrance now disappearing into the ground. General Electric still owns the padlocked entrance, Olsen said.

These days, only a few businesses remain on lower Broadway, among them a Moose lodge, two bars and Another World adult bookstore. But when the subway was in use, the street was called Krusei Avenue and was chock-full of restaurants and taverns that served GE employees. Every day, bartenders would pour beers and line them up on the bar in anticipation of workers stopping by on break.

"They would guzzle a whole quart and go back to work," Cermak said.

lstanforth@timesunion.com • 518-454-5697