Blitz Tour of Downtown Rochester

 

Coldayman suggested I visit, that I'd like it.  I did and did.  This was just a brief visit, though, for a quick walk through downtown Rochester.

 

First off, NY State countryside is different.  On the way to R only around Batavia did you start to see more "Ohio" scale wide fields and woodlots.  Otherwise there was farmland and woodland more mixed, with more fallow land, it seemed.  Didn't seem to be as intensively farmed.  But maybe an "old road" road trip betwen the two cities would be more revealing.

 

Coming into Rochester, noticed right away more new subdivisions off the freeway than I saw coming into Buffalo.  Also, when the skyline hove into view I thought..."uh-oh, another Dayton"...black glass box the tallest skyscraper.  Second tallest had vertical windows....

 

Turns out this was quite different.

 

On the map they had what looked like this deadly freeway maze encircling downtown.  The "Inner Loop".  Turns out this was easier to navigate than I thought due to excellent signage.  The highway actually is at grade in parts before either dropping or elevating.  It does form somewhat a barrier for the rest of the city, maybe...but I didnt really sense that in the part of town I was in.

 

Signage led me off the freeway to the "High Falls District"

 

I sort of knew this but didn't really realize the scale.  The downtown as a rapids running through it, nearly whitewater, and this big tall waterfall! where the Genessee River drops into a gorge on the way to Lake Ontario.  Wow...seriously this was jaw dropping.  And these old factory buildings growing out of cliffs surrounding the gorge an falls.

 

This area was an excellent mix of adaptive re-use, new construction, and industrial archeology (using factory ruins) interpreting their waterpower district.  Stuff like this usually just stays on paper, in never-executed plans and drawings.  In this case they actually built it!,  Including a converted bridge as walkway over the deep gorge.  Genesee Brewrey off on the far side cliffs.

 

This waterfront use continues through downtown, which is actually on both sides of the river.  There is some bizzarre modern architecture here, including a building with a flying saucer on the roof.  The downtown riverfront has walkways and seating and  modernist Y-bridge.  Pretty sucessfull except for one hotel that has a loading area along the river (yet you can still walk along it).

 

Bridges are impressive.  Stone, including a double stone one.  Along the river north and south there are older loft-style buidlings which are being re-used (and along the approach streets). 

 

Downtown seems pretty lively, considering I was there on Columbus Day.  Seems better than expected.  Interesting thing, too, are the streets, which come in on angles in some cases, giving the place a more defined feel (a bit like Charleston, WV). 

 

One of the streets leading from the heart of downtown to the High Falls area has a row of older storefront/commercial buildings that are being fixed up. 

 

The rest of the city?  Dont know,  On the way back I drove north, past the Kodak complex, reach the Bausch (or was in Lomb) bridge across the gorge.  As I was making the right turn I looked left and saw "the Flatiron Grille" or 'Flatiron Tavern", where the street splits, inviting one to explore the city.  Maybe next time.

 

Buffalo Planning Disasters & Reconstruction

 

Probably the big planning disaster was the ramming of a limited access highway through the parks and destroying Humboldt Boulevard in the processs.  Buffalo has wide Chicacago-style boulevards, with parkways seperating local acess from the main boulevard roads (also a bit like Southern Parkway in Louisville).  This inner city expressway destroyed one of these, tearing up all the trees and parkways and leaving the two local access streets as frontage roads.  Wow.  The freeway here is like a baby Dan Ryan, running in a cutting on its way to downtown, where it debouches into two wide one way streets, cutting downtown off from the rest of the East Site (sort of).

 

Planning Disaster #2 was maybe not really a disaster, but it detracts from the city.  This is the lakefront.  I did manage to find my way to the lakefront, which is hard to get to by car, too.  Turns out the area between the lakefront expressway and the lake itself is developed into suburban apt/condo developments.  Serioulsy, this looks like a high-end, more "designed"  version of a suburban planned unit development.  Nice landscaping, very pleasant, utterly unwalkable even though they have sidewalks. 

 

On the way to this is a collection of cruicform public housing towers,liked you see in NYC, except these apparently have been converted into market-rate housing? ,  Other than that, a maze of highway ramps and parking seperates this lakefront suburbia from downtown proper.  Urban design fail.

 

(I am beginning to think the only city that really did it right with a lakefront is Chicago....maybe Milwaukee).

 

Urban Planning Disaster # 3 (which is being corrected):  The Elicott  About half of the near east side of the city was removed for a bit public housing project. This was an old mixed Italian/black area.  This project is being replaced with nice suburban-style single famliy homes (and the high rises have been redone, too).  This turned out to be a good save. 

 

I should note that I explored a lot of the older parts of the east side, up to Jefferson Street (and beyond, too, the old Polonia).  It seems the Fruit Belt area has the mostly older things left, and the areas between Genessee and William is being mostly reconstructed as new suburban-style single family homes (with a few older houses mixed in).  So the Buffalo response to urban vacancy is appearst to be to reconstruct the city at a lower density, not turn it into open space or urban ag (more on urban ag later).

 

Michigan Street

 

This was interesting.  The area between downtown Buffalo and the East Side is sort of this wierd transitional zone, that actually has a scattering of older buildings of various types still standing.  Probably the most interesting was a small group on Michigan Street.  The oldest black church in the city (from before the Civil War) and the nearby ministers house have been preserved and turned into an open-air musuem (I think the church still operates as a church), and around the corner there is the Colored Muscians Club, which offers classes and music things, including a jazz jam session.  One can see a few other things being saved here, too, along Michigan and points east and west.  Michigan and Broadway was the historic core of the Buffalo black community (but also an eastern European Jewish "urban" shtetl" had developed here, too, east of Michigan),

 

Interesting to see them doing some urban history interpretation around black history and community formation, which is usually negelected in other places.

 

The wide streets here, shooting out of downtown (Genesee and Broadway) bring to mind Detroit, streets like Gratiot. Especially the big church buildings that sometimes front the streets, visible in the distance.  Closer into downtown the streets resemble the diagonals of Indianapolis, as there are still sets of older 19th century commrecial buildings on them (this is the Chippewa Market area off Broadway...said market is now a parking lot),

 

More notes on Buffalo (and a seperate thread on Cleveland) later...

 

 

Milwaukee has a better lakefront than Chicago, IMO.

 

Also residentially, Rochester and Dayton are damn near twins.  Both lack significant commercial districts outside of the core area and have similar topography (one with a giant lake just north, though).  Downtown Rochester is more "rough" than current downtown Dayton but in turn is more lively in the core itself.  Dayton has a better periphery overall (Oregon, St. Anne's) but Rochester has more natural look with the Falls.  They both have the same CSA as well.

 

Glad you went.

And thank you for that recommendation.  I certainly want to explore this area a bit more.

 

I've heard Syracuse is similar to the Dayton area in population.  Ill be there next month.

 

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More Buffalo notes:

 

Vernacular Architecture

 

There is a noticeable Buffalo housing style...somewhat wide front, tripartite facade division, door on the side on the first floor. There are two-story and cottage versions of this style.  In older examples the windows are arched, sometimes with elaborate trim around the windows (Italianate style).  I suspect that this is an urban variation on those upstate NY farmhouses, which you also see in the Western Reserve.  In the "newer" older areas you see sort of a "Hamtramck" style, with narrow front porches. 

 

Houses into Downtown

 

What's notable is how close the housing areas get into downtown.  Even Chippewa Street, which is pretty much a downtown street at Main and at Delaware, turns into a residential area just two blocks west (west of Elmwood, closer to the lake).  A mix of apartment houses and single family, but also a park dot this area (Johnson Park?), similar to those "parks" they have in Lexington (there are a few of these Lex-style parks in Buffalo).

 

In fact this set-up reminds me a lot of Lexington (with Gratz Park and Western Suburb) or Sacramento (with Alkali Flat),the way the residential area comes right up against downtown.

 

I think Delaware Street might have been akin to Woodward Avenue or Euclid before those streets were wiped out..the street of grand mansions and large churches, but closer in you even see fancy DC-style rowhouses (one block of them) and more commercial things mixing in with and replacing the mansions, more south of Allen Street.  Yet it's still very walkable right in to downtown.

 

Yt oddly Deleware becomes sort of blah in the heart of downtown, south of Chippewa, since the action is more on Main Street.  Vice versa Main Street north of the theatre area becomes more of an edge condition (between the residential areas along Deleware and parallel streets and a medical center) vs a central busy street.  North of, say, Deleware Park and Cansius College, Main street becomes more of an outer neighborhood busy street.