Gloomy like Charleston

 

 

 

Demolition of one of the first urban shopping malls

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Better than I had expected!

I really dig Rochester.

Rochester's High Falls are quite spectacular despite the muddiness of the water, and the pedestrian bridge provides outstanding views. Overall the city looks better than it did when I visited about 12 years ago, and it it looks as though they're continuing to enhance and promote the historic district. I was on a trip to New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts then, checking out historic sites and camping mostly in state parks, and was in urban-avoidance mode on much of the trip. Only later did I learn about the vast amount of interesting stuff in Rochester that would have merited more time. Thanks for providing the excellent tour.

Nice tour!  Is the abandoned subway still open?

Rochester is an interesting city. Its downtown, which is noosed off from the rest of the city by the Inner Loop expressway, really seems to have struggled in recent years, and I think the recent demolition of the Victor Gruen-designed Midtown Plaza was sad, though I am glad the Midtown Tower, shown in ink's photos in its current skeletal state, was spared. It's also possible that the rebuilt street network in the former Midtown footprint will be good for downtown in the long run.

 

Rochester has more than its share of great streets and phenomenal neighborhoods and is unique among the larger upstate cities in that you would never be likely to pass through it on an Interstate highway on the way to someplace else. You have to make a point of going there if you're driving by on I-90, which skirts Rochester's sprawling southern suburbs.

 

What I find most amazing about present-day metropolitan Rochester is that it is holding its own economically, despite the massive downsizing of Eastman Kodak over the past 30 years. I think that Kodak employed as many as 60,000 in Rochester around 1980 and heard recently that it is down to around 7,000.

Thank you, ink, for a real look at Rochester!  I don't know whether to laugh or cry--the city seems to share both good and bad in due measure.  Example: so many beautiful, unique buildings (the "Daily Record," for one) and a dramatic topography (the falls), yet the horrible downsizing of the once mighty Kodak.  Only time will tell what emerges next; I wish this city the best!

Wow, awesoome photos, ink. I had no idea Rochester had such a great natural setting and so many excellent buildings.  I also really dig the stone bridge and walls.  Hopefully the the very old stuff will survive and the very new stuff will continue displacing the awful junk in the middle.  That black glass tower with the round part on top is just brutal to look at.

One of my uncles lived there in the 80's, and we visited the Kodak plant and went on the tour.  They had robots rolling around following magnetic strips under the concrete floor of the plant and a few big robotic arms that stacked cases of 35mm film onto pallets. 

rochester!  :mrgreen:

 

 

nice thread of a great, scenic town.

 

how is kodak coping with the changing technology and downsizing? did it seem active around their offices? guess it would be hard to say outwardly.

 

 

how is kodak coping with the changing technology and downsizing? did it seem active around their offices? guess it would be hard to say outwardly.

 

I was there on a Saturday, so it would be expected that their offices would appear to be a ghostown. The overall condition/maintenance of the complex, however, signals that they are not doing well.

It's no secret that Kodak is struggling, and Rochester has taken the brunt of its decline, but it's important to note that Rochester is not solely dependent on Kodak. Metropolitan Rochester has adjusted to the loss of over 50,000 Kodak jobs since 1980 remarkably well. I am not an expert on its economy and haven't lived there since my college days at RIT, but I find its economic stability to be nothing short of amazing. I believe that many people are now working in smaller companies that have their roots in Kodak and other companies, such as Xerox, with large local presences. This article from the Rochester Business Journal is interesting: http://www.rbj.net/print_article.asp?aID=188999.

The Daily Record building is great.  Can anybody tell me what the blue gray cladding on the upper floors is made of?

As for Kodak, news is that they are considering bankruptcy.  I made a point of buying two digital cameras by them.  They were easy to use.

This tells a little about the Powers Building and its cladding: http://rocwiki.org/Powers_Building

Rochester gives off a Toledo vibe to me, and I don't mean that as a compliment. During my visit, downtown was mostly dead, and most nearby neighborhoods, while having areas of great historic architecture, also felt pretty dead (though less ghetto/thuggish than Toledo). It's not a vibrant place, and when I say "vibe," I mean it feels depressing much in the same way Toledo feels depressing (though I prefer downtown Toledo due to Huron Street and much better sports stadia). It's obviously well past its peak and never will recapture its former glory or population. It's not just Kodak. There were a slew of other industries that took big hits in Rochester. Keep in mind it has "transitioned" much in the same way Buffalo "transitioned" (permanent downsizing and increased reliance on public sector spending in healthcare and education). I love how the news media tries to paint sunshine and rainbows in the heart of the Rust Belt while overlooking 30 years of creative destruction and greatly reduced private sector opportunity. Once you study the labor force stats over the past couple of decades, those rainbows become clouds. Toledo still has ten years to go in its downsizing, and then everyone will probably say, "Look at Toledo! It's just like Buffalo and Rochester. They're no longer Rust Belt!" And tens of thousands of people will still be moving away....

 

It's obvious Rochester used to be a wonderful urban city filled with high culture and vibrancy, but the same can be said about Toledo and Buffalo (though Buffalo still is world class in Elmwood Village). Way too many people moved to suburbs or left the region entirely. That 300,000 mark in the core city seems like a line you don't want to fall under. Rochester also has to deal with what is arguably the worst weather on the Great Lakes (alright, the Lake Superior shore in the UP is worse, but hardly anyone lives there in the winter outside Marquette and Sault St. Marie). Rochester is gloomy and the snowstorms are actually worse than Cleveland and Buffalo (hard to believe, but the numbers don't lie). I'm actually amazed Rochester hasn't lost more people than it has, because the cloudiness and brutality of the weather just aren't what most Americans are looking for in a city. Couple this with the fact that it has become an almost entirely car-dependent city, and you've got a recipe for winter frustration and cabin fever. This is a place with 100 inches of snow a year, too many overcast days, ridiculously long winters (even by Great Lakes standards), and the constant feeling of lost potential. Rochester should be so much more than it is. Obviously it has dealt with a lot of the same issues other Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Erie have dealt with, but I think something may have gone beyond that. I don't know if it's due to the highway layout or urban renewal, but a dangerously high percentage of Rochester lacks cohesiveness and connections to other parts of the city. The inner highway ring is one of the worst I've seen. It snuffed the downtown similar to how 670 and 71 snuffed downtown Columbus.

 

Rochester is in a gorgeous part of the country with Chimney Bluffs and Letchworth Falls an easy drive away, but I think it would be tough to live there (and this is coming from a Toledoan!). It might be a nice place for a summer or fall vacation, but the other half of the year....at least spring lasts about a month or two in Toledo. I don't think they have much "spring" in Rochester. I like every city on the Great Lakes due to the water access and old industry, but Rochester doesn't rank as one of the more desirable ones to me.

Rochester reminds me a bit more of Dayton than Toledo - Toledo's long been an economic outpost of Detroit and the auto industry, while I see Rochester and Dayton as long-faded centers of innovation. The riverside setting the collections of old and new buildings are also comparable.

 

What is with the color scheme on the Hyatt (last picture)? Absolutely hideous. Outside of NYC and maybe Syracuse, urban skylines in NYState just seem random and Brutalist to me. Albany, Buffalo and Rochester each have incredible collections of historic towers, but the stuff built in those second-tier NYState cities the 60s and 70s has to be some of the worst urban architecture in the country, along with the likes of South Bend and Fort Wayne, Indiana.

 

Thanks for the tour, ink.

Rochester does not seem too bad to me. In my experience it has urban neighborhoods on its east side that are more vibrant than neighborhoods found in Ohio's second tier cities, as well as easy access to Lake Ontario and the Finger Lakes. The highway ring around the downtown does suck though.

 

It also produces Genesee beer, which helped keep me intoxicated during my broke college years.

I partly agree but mostly disagree with C-Dawg's assessment of Rochester. It doesn't remind me of Toledo much at all, though of course the two cities have experienced similar challenges over the last several decades, and both have become more dependent on their education and health-care industries. A difference is that Rochester's two universities and main hospital are all private institutions.

 

The city of Rochester itself is much smaller geographically than the city of Toledo--less than half the size--so it is hard to compare the two entities directly. At the metropolitan level, Rochester has not grown dramatically in recent decades but it has also not lost population, and Monroe County (NY), the core of the metropolitan area, recorded its highest population ever in census 2010. I don't know how Toledo compares in this regard, though I know that Lucas County has lost population over the past few decades. It is hard to measure Toledo as a metropolitan community, I think, because its official MSA does not include Monroe County (MI), as arguably it should.

 

The weather in Rochester is not that much different from the cities along Lake Erie in Ohio. It gets more snow, true, but, if you love winter, as many people do, that is not a drawback. It is also certainly true that the countryside around Rochester is beautiful, and this is no less true in winter than in summer. The drumlin field between Rochester and Syracuse, of which Chimney Bluffs (mentioned by C-Dawg) is one small part, is among the largest in the world.

 

I also don't think that Rochester itself is any more car dependent than most other places. True, it has areas of vast suburban sprawl, as do all of Ohio's cities, but, notably, Rochester's transit system carries as many passengers in a given year as much-larger Columbus's and several times as many as Toledo's.

 

Whether the city of Rochester's decline is permanent is hard to know.

 

 

 

 

Rochester reminds me a bit more of Dayton than Toledo - Toledo's long been an economic outpost of Detroit and the auto industry, while I see Rochester and Dayton as long-faded centers of innovation. The riverside setting the collections of old and new buildings are also comparable.

 

What is with the color scheme on the Hyatt (last picture)? Absolutely hideous. Outside of NYC and maybe Syracuse, urban skylines in NYState just seem random and Brutalist to me. Albany, Buffalo and Rochester each have incredible collections of historic towers, but the stuff built in those second-tier NYState cities the 60s and 70s has to be some of the worst urban architecture in the country, along with the likes of South Bend and Fort Wayne, Indiana.

 

 

good observation. i never thought of it like that because i'm impressed by the old structures, but you are right on the money. so much crapitecture from that era.

One of the things that makes Rochester different from the other Great Lakes cities is that it doesn't have the huge Eastern European population. It's not heavily Polish like Toledo. Rochester also never developed a shipping port on the level of Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, or Buffalo. As a result, it feels quite a bit less maritime. There just isn't that shared history with the other Great Lakes cities. I think the port is substantially smaller than Sandusky!

 

The depressing vibe and old, empty, haunting feeling is what reminds me of Toledo. Rochester feels like pure Rust Belt (even if news magazines think it's sunshine and rainbows without ever visiting the place). Of course you can say the same about Dayton, or the handful of other Rust Belt cities that have fallen this hard economically. It's really a small club. I'd only put Detroit, Toledo, Buffalo, Rochester, Dayton, and perhaps one or two other big cities in it (Cleveland). Pittsburgh was in it in the 80's, but it just doesn't feel depressing at all today. Cincinnati probably spent a decade or two in the Rust Belt Club, but it's just too damn wealthy now (but with Rust Belt rents, which really makes it a value). The Rust Belt Club is shrinking, and I think Rochester, Detroit, Toledo, and Dayton will be the only remaining big cities in the club ten years from now. They are among the poorest and cheapest cities in the country (most worthless real estate), and it just doesn't seem like the fundamentals of median income and median home price are changing for the better anytime soon...

 

The one major selling point Rochester has over everybody else in the Rust Belt is the proximity to such great outdoor recreation. There is just a ton to do around Rochester (hence why I see it as a potential tourist town). Geographically speaking, this is not Ohio. I'm not joking when saying some of the best parks in the country are near Rochester. Letchworth has no equal. The upper Genesee River ranks as one of North America's most dramatic rivers.

 

Rochester could be a serious tourism town in a way the other Rust Belt cities will have a tougher time pulling off. And I guess those long, brutal winters could be a selling point for skiers.

C-Dawg, you are so right in that Rochester is not a lake town in the traditional sense of the concept. Even though its city limits touch Lake Ontario, it is really more of a river town than a lake town! It is not a rectangular city hugging the shore like so many of the Great Lakes cities are, and you are right that its port is incidental. Like its sister city Syracuse (which is 40 miles off Lake Ontario), though, it is a lake town in that it was swept up by the economic power unleashed by the Erie Canal, which transferred much economic momentum from the river cities to the lake cities. Toledo is also an outlier among the Great Lakes cities--wouldn't you agree?--in that its grand waterfront is along the Maumee and not Lake Erie.

 

I continue to disagree with you, however, about Rochester's economy. I think it is astonishingly robust considering the fall of Kodak, and, despite the loss of more than 50,000 jobs at that one company, Rochester is simply not in a position where it has to look to nontraditional industries, such as tourism, to survive economically.

Incidentally, I believe that the Rochester subway was at least partially filled in with stimulus money either in 2010 or 2011.  That subway system had some similarities to Cincinnati's but overall the system was much smaller. 

Here is an interesting NYT article about Rochester: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/nyregion/despite-long-slide-by-kodak-rochester-avoids-decay.html?_r=2&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

 

Interesting that New York State cities like Buffalo and Rochester were able to build subways (Cincinati too!) but Cleveland, which struggled mightily to do so, could not.

 

I know each city's situation was unique, but are there any comonalities with the N.Y. cities that made them sucessful in this endeavour?

 

Tedolph

C-Dawg...I continue to disagree with you, however, about Rochester's economy. I think it is astonishingly robust considering the fall of Kodak, and, despite the loss of more than 50,000 jobs at that one company, Rochester is simply not in a position where it has to look to nontraditional industries, such as tourism, to survive economically.

your analysis was on target. did you write the New York Times article? :wink:

>Interesting that New York State cities like Buffalo and Rochester were able to build subways (Cincinati too!) but Cleveland, which struggled mightily to do so, could not.

 

The Rochester subway was not a rapid transit subway, but rather an interurban and streetcar entrance to downtown Rochester.  It also created a cross-town route for freight trains, although it functioned more like a spur, with the local newspaper's delivery of newsprint being its primary customer until as late as 1996 or so.  It was built during the era of public/private partnerships and was expected to be profitable.  No apparatus was in place to subsidize its operation when ridership fell in the 1950s, so it became easy prey for the interstate highway system.  The same thing happened to Cincinnati's subway -- 7 or 8 miles of surface right-of-way became an expressway, marooning the downtown tunnel. 

 

The Buffalo subway is totally and completely different.  It was built with UMTA 1970 funds and functions exactly like a modern rapid transit subway, with the exception of the downtown surface transit mall.  It was built with and is operated completely with public funds.   

 

 

 

The depressing vibe and old, empty, haunting feeling is what reminds me of Toledo.

 

Those are precisely the qualities I find most captivating and interesting about Rochester, Toledo, and similar cities -- how they exist in the haunted shadows of greatness. These are my favorite types of places. Even as Pittsburgh enters its fashionable phase, I find what I like best about it are the corners of the city that still possess a sadness about them.

Ive been to Rochester twice now (& a big "thank you" to ColDayMan who told me to "go!" when I posted that query about a road trip to R from Buffalo two years ago).  I do not catch the Dayton vibe, tho I was expecting it.  Dayton seems deader and more decimated by urban renewal and more fragmented...& doesnt have something like a whitewater river and waterfall in the heart of town...R seems to engage the river more.   

 

Rochester did an outstanding job with that High Falls district.  Good to see that.  Only regret during my two visits is that I did not see any of the older neighborhoods, the way I did of Syracuse and Buffalo.

 

Of the upstate citys the one that seems more Dayton-scale is maybe Syracuse, though they have a more intact downtown.  A substantial part was demolishied but what survived is fairly of-a-piece.

 

I think Rochester did get the eastern/southern European influx, as did Syracuse and Buffalo...I recall finding something out about this online.  Syracuse certainly did...Italians and Poles and also an Irish community and neigborhood.

 

@@@@

 

I was suprised to find out about the Rochester subway (found out about it online), which was, as Jmeck notes, more of a terminal railroad for outlying transit lines, bringing them into downtown.  But I think that was the original purpose for the Cincy subway, too. 

 

I wonder if that big high rise with the flying saucer on top was designed by Paul Rudolph or his firm, as it looks like his style a bit.

 

 

I think the closest Great Lakes city to Rocheser might be...a big might...Milwaulkee...the way the downtown is oriented around a river and that the river splits the downtown into two parts...

I got the "Dayton-vibe" (if there is one) in the neighborhoods of Rochester; the downtowns are quite different, agreed.  I can totally see the downtown Milwaukee comparison.

Rochester's looking good! That Powers Building is incredible and I like the High Falls district!