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The fire still crackles intensely in the hearts of some who live in and around my beloved hometown of Rochester. Rochester’s blood runs through me. It is the city in which I was born and the city to which I returned after a hitch in the Marines. This once rollicking Erie Canal port holds the distinction of being the northern terminus of now fractured U.S. Route 15. Before interstate superhighways crisscrossed America, the northern run of the road took strangers to this “big city” and dumped them off in a bustling downtown. It still performs that function but does so now as a less urbane, uninviting gateway.
Picking up city street names as it crosses the southern metropolitan boundary, Route 15 transitions to West Henrietta Road. Slicing straight through an insipid southern Rochester suburb of the same name, it doffs its rural mantle and displays a congested strip of car dealerships, restaurants, plazas and box retailers. Welcome to Gemerica. That predictable, generic four lane eyesore is indistinguishable from countless others found in any city in the United States. Usually near a university, an airport or a business park, the Gemerican thoroughfare is tailored for rapid movement of cars and trucks and treats people as the body’s immune system treats viruses. Pedestrians are unwelcome here.
A few miles north, West Henrietta Road’s ugliness mutates to Mount Hope Avenue. For a while, that street too remains devoid of character as it slips past more commercial nothingness and the industrial park complex of the University of Rochester’s Medical Center. All is not lost, though. For a brief stretch anyway, Route 15, still carrying the sobriquet of Mount Hope, having left the boxy pile and towers of the medical center campus behind, begins to parallel the hilly and leafy setting of a large and quite beautiful cemetery. In and around the graveyard, sidewalks, trees and attractive residences line both sides of the road and provide the traveler with something other than mini-marts, parking lots and fast food restaurants on which to gaze.
Over 350,000 dead are interred in Mount Hope Cemetery’s rolling grounds. It is a telling statistic that the dead inhabiting this necropolis greatly outnumber the living and breathing people residing in the city. Within Mount Hope’s spiky wrought iron fences; the gothic crematoria, worn and mossy stone monuments and garage sized crypts draw the neighborhood curious. Joggers, bikers and strollers frequent the paved roads and trails and take advantage of its park-like solitude. Under the stately oaks and pines of Mount Hope’s canopy, historians, school kids as well as the thoughtful anonymous place small stones and decorative remembrances on or next to the markers set over the remains of Rochester’s renowned freedom fighters; Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony.
This pastoral slice of Route 15 is bluntly cut short as the road descends into the center city of Rochester itself. Planed flat now as it nears the high cement flood control walls holding back the Genesee River, the road passes a new multi-dwelling public housing project, a gaudily painted public housing tower, abandoned and crumbling commercial fronts and weedy open lots sitting on the river’s banks.
Just at the fringe of the city’s small, compact core, Route 15 meets and joins an unattractive bundle of unsightly overpasses rising from a paved, lightly traveled moonscape. Enmeshed in that loathsome urban can of worms, it works its way out, crossing over I-490 and an ill conceived concrete moat known as the Inner Loop built to move traffic at a time when the city was more heavily populated and bustling. It now lies mostly unused. In its last few hundred yards, posing as South Clinton Avenue, Route 15 cruises underneath a misleadingly artistic welcoming sign and into a once vibrant but now sparsely visited downtown. There it dies at Washington Square Park. This small grassy and shady rectangle has as its centerpiece the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. The statue is an interesting, dramatic slab of rock and metal sporting a cylindrical pedestal on top of which stands, oddly, not our first president but a pensive Abraham Lincoln.
Futile have been the many attempts at rejuvenation of a city one can literally hold in the palm of one’s hand. It once boasted street cars, packed sidewalks, shopping, restaurants, nightlife and a lively business and residential mix. Theater marquees lit the night and a taxi could be hailed at the curb.
The white flight of the 1960s and 1970s to Rochester’s suburbs along with the inexorable migration of mobile, weather weary northeasterners to the Sunbelt ate away at Rochester’s once lofty population of 350,000. Those leaving the city but staying in the area preferred free parking at suburban malls, better schools and the tranquility of new neighborhoods with houses spaced apart. Like Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, Rochester bled population and now barely contains 200,000 souls living within city limits. Those that remain are predominantly black and poor. Immigration and births in Rochester couldn’t then, and can’t now, keep pace with the diaspora.
At the terminus of Route 15, where South Clinton Avenue cuts into Woodbury Boulevard, the urban landscape is devoid of the round-the-clock hum of life and commerce. The tick of the clock to closing time sees the city’s office towers empty and cars flooding out of ramp garages and parking slots with the sidewalks rolling up conveniently behind them.
One of America’s first boomtowns, Rochester is a shadow of a nineteenth century hub of limitless energy and ideas. It baffles visitors when they are told that this place was once so cutting edge it dared call itself the “Young Lion of the West.” Here the very word entrepreneur could have been coined as freewheelers, inventors and risk takers milled about Rochester’s streets. The westward migrating population of America stopped and settled here on the frontier to take advantage of the river’s power, access to the canal and cheap, plentiful farmland which, unlike New England, was free of plow denting rocks. In fact, early Rochester once lorded over a tiny and insignificant midwestern backwater known as Chicago.
Early in the nineteenth century, millers capitalized on the fast moving Genesee River, channeling it over enormous water wheels which transferred river energy to gristmills. Those enterprises lining busy millraces ground wheat into high quality flour providing Rochester with another fitting nickname: the Flour City. Teamsters, stevedores and money men loaded the product on canal boats teeming on the nearby Erie Canal and barely kept up with the demand of millions of eager purchasers waiting on the Atlantic seaboard and beyond.
THE Library of Congress holds in its collection a remarkable panoramic view of the once fair city. It was taken in late spring or early summer of 1906. Then, Rochester was on an upward trajectory. The connected photos are taken later in the morning with the shadows cast westward. Trees are fully leaved and green. The camera looks south down the length of busy South Avenue and to the upriver course of the muddy Genesee. The scene pans northward, looking west down the length of Court Street and, finally, northwest to the heart of the city to the packed and smoky Four Corners. Rows of tenements and businesses hang precariously from the bridge carrying Main Street over the river.
Transportation is highlighted in this rare view of early twentieth century life in Rochester. The Erie and Lehigh Valley railroad stations hum on opposite sides of the river. At the time, they and three other rail lines served the city, whisking passengers and freight to all destinations. Both terminals are bustling with customers waiting to board the trains idly puffing at the stations' platforms.
The Erie Canal passing by the storefronts on South Avenue leaves the photo in the foreground and then reappears bending languidly around to the west and passing over the river within the walls of its amazing aqueduct. No boats are on it the day the photo was taken. That makes sense. Competing rail transport had already stuck a stake in the economic heart of the American canal.
The engineering marvel of its day, the Erie Canal aqueduct today no longer holds canal water as it crosses over the Genesee River. Currently, it supports only the arches and concrete road deck of Broad Street. In the years after this photo was taken, the Erie Canal was rerouted to travel well south of the city. The empty aqueduct and canal bed presented a challenge for a growing city’s planners. Thinking Rochester would keep its position as one of America’s most populous cities; the old canal route was engineered to carry the single line track of Rochester’s short-lived subway.
Parallel to the Erie Canal aqueduct and pointing like an arrow outward in the center of the photo is Court Street carried by its bridge across the flood of the Genesee. Shiny twin street car rails line its surface. The Kimball Tobacco Factory's brick bulk takes up the space just to the right on the opposite bank. On top of its ornamental spire sits a riveted bronze statue of winged Mercury, symbolizing commerce and the prosperity of the city far below. After Kimball’s products fell out of favor, Cluett Peabody took over the space and set up manufacture of collars and shirts. When that enterprise faltered, the empty hulk was torn down and became the current site of the civic arena.
The Rochester Community War Memorial, until its expansion and renovation in the 1990s, was a diminutive horseshoe shaped structure barely squeezing in 7,000 seats for indoor sports and only a few more folding chairs for concerts. For a brief time, it was the home of the Rochester Royals, Rochester’s only major professional sports team. The Royals won the NBA title in 1951 beating the New York Knickerbockers and moved into the War Memorial in 1955. But glancing into the crystal ball and gazing at Rochester a few years down the road, the moneymen behind the venture saw little future. After giving the city its sole first-tier, major league sports title the Royals packed their bags and moved to Cincinnati, then Kansas City and finally ended up in California as the Sacramento Kings. Rochester was now permanently minor league.
Across from the thick walled and steel framed arena, which also served as a civil defense shelter during the age when Soviet atomic bombs and missiles were a threat, sits Rochester’s gulag-like Civic Center. Utilitarian, square and architecturally bland, the Civic Center houses the county jail, the court system and several public service agencies. It is a glaring example of what planners should avoid when renewing urban centers. Its drab and uninspired style would fit just as well in 1960s East Berlin as in downtown Rochester. Soviet style apartment blocks have equal allure. Rows of quiet streets and pretty houses were torn down and carted to the dump in order to erect this monstrosity.
Demolition also cleared lots of quirky and seedy stores and apartments on Front Street and the admittedly shabby tenements hanging precariously over the sides of the Main Street Bridge. Such destruction in the name of progress chipped away at the brick architectural originality that gave Rochester its very own unique municipal shape. The panoramic photo captures that fast disappearing, gritty industrial and energetic character sandwiched between the cascading falls at Court Street and the higher, more dramatic ninety foot High Falls just out of sight to the north. The center city of one of America’s early twentieth century metropolises pulses. Church steeples and smokestacks jut up here and there. The twelve story Powers Building, topped with an oversized and barely ruffling American flag, towers above the rest. It is the most imposing structure in the growing city.
That growth continued even when the Erie Canal became a stagnant ditch, antiquated by the railroads and slowly filling with the detritus of a people too busy to care. And busy they were. Industry was Rochester’s new course; its reason to live. At the tail end of the nineteenth century, George Eastman’s Dry Plate Company had whitewashed the name Kodak in bold letters across the frontages of its factories and office buildings and was churning out cameras and film, delivering one-click photography to the average citizen who could simply press a button while Kodak did the rest. Eastman’s deep pockets provided Rochester’s early philanthropic jolt as he handed out millions to local charities, social programs, cultural institutions and colleges and universities. The aged and infirm Eastman, the man who had revolutionized photography in his adopted city, cloistered in his East Avenue mansion. One day in 1932 he triggered a single gunshot into his own heart. Perhaps haunted with a vision of what his city was to become, Eastman’s suicide note resignedly told all who cared to listen “[m]y work is done. Why wait?”
In the wake of Eastman’s blazed photographic trail, Joe Wilson’s Xerox came along and brought to market Chester Carlson’s electric photography process. Mass produced and simplified, the new office management technology refashioned the way the world did business. While Kodak and Xerox were building empires, Bausch and Lomb introduced cutting edge optical products for the world. The “Big Three” in Rochester created an environment that bred innovation and growth, similar to the impact high tech companies have today on Silicon Valley or the Carolina Triangle. Rochester’s industry was world renowned. Its reputation even leaked into fiction as Sam Wainwright, by telephone, almost convinces Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey to move to Rochester to take a job in his plastics factory there in the 1946 movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life. “Rochester? Why Rochester?” asks Bailey. Wainwright responds, “Why not?”
But, in a story told in other manufacturing based cities in America, Rochester was victimized by newer technologies and the shift of labor to cheaper, less regulated nations worldwide. Xerox, although still a sizeable employer in town, moved its headquarters to Connecticut in the 1970s. Kodak, which at its peak employed 65,000 people in Rochester, failed to exploit its self-invented digital camera technology. It milked its dwindling prospects from film dry. At last count, Kodak employs fewer than 8,000 in the area and is weighing draconian financial options in light of severely degraded revenue stream and poor cash flow. The value of the company to shareholders now comes primarily from the patents Kodak holds and not the company’s potential for growth. Kodak Park, once one of the largest manufacturing facilities in the world, has dramatically shrunk in size as Kodak bean counters order buildings imploded or otherwise demolished to take the unused and unnecessary capacity off the tax rolls.
Despite the transition, loyalists with strong family roots stick here. Rochester remains a sizeable metropolitan statistical area with over one million people in the city and surrounding counties. But because that population is static, the Flower City slowly declines in relative influence to other more dynamic areas that steal the spotlight and the political clout. Gutted and bleeding from the trauma of fading industry, depressed by the gloom of endlessly gray winters and kept down by its inability to break the hold of a downward pulling vortex, Rochester barely plods along.
Just north of Route 15’s urban end, past the ebony and featureless rectangular mass of Rochester’s 440 foot Xerox Tower, the tallest in the city, a pile of debris and bare iron skeletons are all that remains of a once innovative indoor mall, a first in America. Known as Midtown Plaza its demolition at the time of this writing is underway. City blocks of a once grand and glorious place are being torn down to make way for redevelopment. Egged on by the grandiose dreams of a businessman and a handshake promise to construct his company’s world headquarters on a shovel-ready site, the plans vanished in a flash when he sold his company to a bargain bidder. Midtown is presently nothing more than cleared land, piles of rubble and the skeletal frames of buildings that could, if the spirit and the money will it, be something again someday. But like the other New York and Pennsylvania cities that have seen better days, there is more hope in Rochester than anything else.
On a summer evening, one can wander the streets with friends at one’s side, enjoying one of the many festivals whose food and entertainment tents spring up overnight with the advent of pleasant weather. Then it is much easier to bask in the sense that the community is one big project away from restoration to greatness. But summer in these northern climes is short and soon departs in a hurry giving way to the blustery, chill wind and perpetually battleship gray skies of winter.
Reuters, in an October 2011 article on the social impact of Kodak’s demise on Rochester, called the residents who have watched the giant tumble “weary and resilient.” That characterization seems overly optimistic. Those that depended on Kodak’s salaries and its post-retirement largesse are unlikely to strike out in other American cities also suffering from the decline of American industry. They remain anchored to the land of their birth and wait for the next shoe to fall. Some, who have already gotten the employment axe, are forced into a lower paying job most likely in a service to others. They watch helplessly as their prospects sag and stare out the window as wave after wave of frigid frontal Canadian air sweeps over Lake Ontario and dumps loads of lake effect snow on dimming hopes. By March, the drifts are waist deep, piled mountain high on empty lots and decrepit real estate once occupied by a thrifty and industrious class. This enterprising and trailblazing city, lovingly succoring an inventive and diligent population, has fallen into malaise and disrepair. It was victimized, almost brutalized, by social and economic change that even the blindest observer could see coming a mile down the road.
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