Ho Ho Ho!

It’s 1914. The Red Cross here raised funds that year by selling stamps. Here a team of people at the Rochester Public Health Association opens mail. Judging by the pile of bills on the table, they weren’t doing too bad.

The fellow at the far right in this image is Dr. E. G. Whipple. He built our house.

Christmas is coming – you can tell by what’s going on downtown. It’s 1919.

What a city – what a world – that must have been. It’s worth reflecting on how little separates us from that other city, that other time.

Item #1 is the proposed Rochester Intermodal Transit Facility. It will house a new station for Amtrak, inter-city buses in Phase 2, and eventually high-speed rail. This project was recently funded by a $15,000,000 grant from the federal government. Total budget is in the range of $24,000,000.

Item #2 is our regional transit authority’s (Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority, RGRTA) new Mortimer Street Bus Barn. Construction is slated to begin this year. Budget is $52,000,000.

This is the measure of our far thinking leaders, as they plan for a sustainable and useable future for our city. Great work, team.

Rochester, Baseball Park, 1910.

We’ve been moved by automobiles here in Rochester for a very long time. But wait! Now we Rochesterians have a great chance to try something both old, and new again.

And so the battle to save the Cataracts is over. In a nearly unprecedented joint meeting of Rochester’s Preservation Board and Plan Commission on April 4th, the Preservation Board unanimously voted to designate Cataract 13 as a Rochester landmark. And then the Plan Commission voted unanimously to overturn their designation. Demolition may now proceed.

This has been an ugly process, filled with an almost endless supply of shortsightedness, untruths, name calling, and disingenuous behavior. But for those of us who have and will continue to advocate in favor of conserving value and assets in our cities, and opposed to demolition for parking lots in particular and for most reasons in general, now is the time to try to make sure that 13 Cataract will not be lost in vain.

Our city’s laws, which allow the Zoning Board of Appeals to grant permission for demolition without reference to our other preservation laws or our Preservation Board, are upside down, and must be rethought, and recast. Good examples of preservation statutes can be found in many American cities. Not ours.

And attitudes must be changed. City leaders need to rethink their response to a now oft-repeated pattern of threats from property owners. The brewers told us all that if they didn’t get exactly what they wanted, they would punish us all by doing nothing, taking their promised jobs (8 or 10) and investment (less than $3 million), and going home. Somehow the brewer’s meager project, unwillingness to honor local history, and stiff-necked pursuit of demolition for parking became, in the course of public discussion, a morsel of manna from heaven. Really?

Think about this: in order to help the brewers avoid bankruptcy a few years ago, the city gave them $9 million in concessions. In return, we get a parking lot, 8 or 10 jobs, and a new investment of less than a third of the amount they city has already forked over on their behalf. Good deal, right?

So now we must watch as these buildings bite the dust, and we must try to figure out how to move the conversation about historic preservation and city making to a better, more useful place.

Aside from those who were happy to tell us that this project would be central to the renewal of an entire quadrant of our city, about which any city observer is right to be skeptical, we heard two other themes repeated over and over during the proceedings.

The first went something like this: “It’s their property – let them do whatever they want.”

As if we advocates weren’t already acutely aware of the paucity of legal tools available to limit any citizen from doing something witless and wasteful with and on their property. We need to encourage a broad and constructive conversation here about the limits of property rights, the extent to which landmark buildings are so designated in order to acknowledge their value to the larger community, and about the real economic and cultural worth of historic properties as this accrues to the larger community. We all can and do benefit, in real dollars and otherwise, from the presence of historic properties. As long as we don’t tear them down….

The second theme was this: “Where were the nay-sayers 5 or 10 years ago? Why weren’t the preservation advocates shouting about 13 Cataract Street then?”

This is a ridiculous question, but many of you who engage in the advocacy of historic properties hear this often, regardless of where you may be.

For me, I think of a recent event here as a kind of metaphoric response to the second theme. A week or so ago someone tried to break into our house. They failed, thankfully, but damage was done nonetheless. We summoned the police, explained what had happened, and filed a report in the hope that they might find the offender. We did not, however, ask the police officer why he hadn’t been sitting out in front of our house for the last month.

Preservationists  and urbanists made no prior outcry about 13 Cataract Street because before November of last year, we all believed in some terrific and years old plans to save and adaptively reuse the Cataracts, and were hopeful they would be implemented. It wasn’t until November that the brewers indicated their plan to demolish instead of reuse, and it was then that those of us opposed to demolition swung into action.

In the end, it won’t be easy to change the attitudes that we have confronted in the last several months. But we will try. Perhaps one of the most hopeful outcomes in all this dismal mess has been the coalescing of a group of thoughtful and energetic individuals and organizations regularly getting together to try to make sense out of the planned demolition. Maybe the loss of 13 Cataract Street will become a turning point. We will see.

Onward we go.

“Goodnight, sweet prince/and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” W.S.

The matter went before the Rochester Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) on January 19th. After almost three hours of testimony, the Board retired to consider and vote. At dinner time, we learned that the vote was 5 – 1 in favor of the proposed variance, thus allowing demolition. But read on.

The barrels roll out?

Here’s how the struggle unfolded. Preceding the ZBA deliberations came a report, required by New York state law, from the city’s Director of Zoning. The Director was required to examine the environmental impact of the proposed demolition. Astonishingly, amazingly, pathetically, unbelievably, the Director decided that there would be no impact. Let ‘er rip….

This in spite of the fact that the city’s Environmental Commission, in a non-binding finding, ruled exactly the other way, saying that the impact was not sufficiently mitigated by the applicant.

Of course the testimony and the deliberations on the 19th had almost nothing to do with the zoning ordinance governing the application. One ZBA member did note that she thought the brewers were looking for relief from a self-created hardship (neglect of the poor old buildings, and then a claim that they were “abandoned” and too far gone to save). But otherwise, their vote was remarkably free of meeting the letter(s) of the law.

Just so that you have a sense of how ridiculous these proceedings have become, the beer guys got a bunch of neighbors (legitimately concerned about the neighborhood) and a couple of brewery employees to testify that crime, drugs, lurking, and illicit sex takes place near these buildings. Of course, as we all know, buildings do cause all sorts of misbehavior, so tear them down and poof! No more crime. Right?

The ZBA did rule that the demolition must be postponed for 30 days, in the hope that some kind of deal to sell and save the buildings could yet be arranged. At the 11th hour, before the hearing, we were close to having something put together that could work. But by the time of the hearing, the dollar gap between a local developer and the brewery could not be closed. As I write, the work of trying to secure a willing partner in the preservation and reuse of these buildings goes on.

But here’s the mystery: the fact that a deal here is so difficult is because the beer guys would rather pay nearly a million dollars to demolish the historic landmarks than sell them at a lesser cost and get out from under the liability they seem to represent. Now this really seems like self-created hardship. Can they do math?

Anyway, a bunch of folks are still toiling away trying to forge some kind of alliance that can salvage this mess. The clock ticks – the work goes on.

But let’s back up a minute. Nobody is opposed to having the beer guys create an Ale House and Visitor’s Center in the one landmark building they propose to reuse. Great idea – full speed ahead.

BUT THIS IS A CITY WITH A BEAUTIFUL WATERFALL AND CANYON IN ITS MIDST!

The Cataract Street buildings should join all of the other works near the gorge – the preservation of what’s left of the Gorsline Building adjacent to the Falls, the redeveloped High Falls Neighborhood on the river’s western banks (near where our city began), the soon to be reused Beebee power plant, and GardenAerial’s redesign of the old Platt Street Bridge (now called the Pont de Rennes), slated to become a local version of Chelsea’s High Line, as pieces of a redeveloping and reviving central city.

A simple rule in city life: build on value, capitalize value, capture value. Do not demolish value.

The High Line in Chelsea, which we visited last weekend, has created a tidal wave of economic development in that west side Manhattan neighborhood, and recaptured miles of public realm in the process. And it all started with a simple idea – reuse a 20 block long segment of elevated tracks as a public promenade. The Saturday morning we visited, the place was packed and the views were astonishing. Equally astonishing were all the new galleries, businesses, and residential buildings popping up all over the place, and the restorations of slews of wonderful old adjacent landmarks. The High Line has become an armature of economic development generating hundreds of millions of dollars in value (the NY Times says $2 billion in economic impact, 8,000 construction jobs, and 12,000 permanent jobs – not bad). Look and learn.

The High Line, Chelsea.

Rochester has a couple of real legacy mistakes in the works at the moment (such as a $50m bus barn that will allow us to avoid fixing our transit system, and a $100m expressway interchange that is at best a sad band-aid). But we may be awakening from a long and dangerous era of plundering our city for all sorts of regrettable and indefensible reasons.

Neighbors and friends: support the beer guys and their plans, but do not destroy the value that sits right in front of us. We will instantly regret missing this opportunity.

Save the Cataracts!

Postscript: Perhaps the most pathetic of all in the ZBA determination was a negotiated deal with the beer guys requiring them, as “mitigation,” to save part of the bottom 5 feet of one of the building’s stone base, and then adorn it with steel outlines of a portion of the building’s windows. Like this:

Better nothing, we think. This does not mitigate a thing. Even though the beer guys have promised us they will build a model of the landmark buildings for their new Ale House (isn’t that just terrific?), and take lots of pictures before wrecking the place, we think the leftovers are cynical and rude. Basta. 

Onward, ever onward.

Yup – a cool billion.

As you can imagine, the howls of disbelief and anger in Rochester and Syracuse are deafening. These three cities, the Moe, Larry and Curly of upstate New York urbanism, are nearly identical in rates of poverty, crime, joblessness, screwed up downtowns, massive sprawl, infrastructure no one can pay for, municipal budget deficits, crummy schools, and any other metric you might imagine to measure cities in crisis.

All three cities are a mess, with huge challenges ahead. All three cities have a rich and deep store of narratives, and all three were once gorgeous, vital, robust, bustling, and unique. All three cities have systematically choked themselves with inner loops and outer loops and loop-de-loops, sending  jobs and institutions and families out of town, and fast. All of which got me to thinking.

Maybe the fact that our city didn’t get the dough is actually a blessing. Maybe we can put our heads together and figure out just exactly what we would do with that kind of money, so next year, or the year after, when we here might win the Governor’s massive lotto game, we can get started right away. Let’s think about this for a minute.

(Of course it could take years to get an agreement in any of the Stooge Cities as to how to spend a $1 million windfall, much less $1 billion – but onward).

Here’s what we should do (with thanks to Edward Glaeser and his wonderful, problematic book, “Triumph of the City”): City, County, and area leaders and institutions should come together to harness the extraordinary energy and innovative talents of our region – our people – and especially our young people. Doing all that they can to foster a spirit of invention and entrepreneurship, our leaders should commit to a central locale for a potent, new, and powerful economic engine: our central city. By bringing the energy of our most gifted citizens together in a dense urban setting, collaboration and the free sharing and transfer of ideas and invention will yield new jobs, real growth, and a new vitality for Rochester and its surrounds. History teaches us that innovation and invention benefit most from close quarters – cities.

Where should we create this new regional economic engine room? Well, there are a bunch of recently cleared blocks in downtown Rochester where an old enclosed shopping mall used to be. It was called Midtown Plaza, and it was at Main and Clinton – our city’s historic crossroad intersection. Now it’s big and empty, and will be for the most part for the foreseeable future. A great spot for our power center.

From the Democrat & Chronicle.

At the moment, RIT is building the Golisano Institute of Sustainability out in the suburbs on their windblown campus. Of course this kind of Center should be downtown, since no human settlement is more sustainable than a dense, walkable city. Maybe we could allocate a few dollars to move the building to Main and Clinton.

Our local Community College, Monroe Community College, is about to enlarge their downtown presence substantially – probably in former Kodak buildings over by our ball yard. So they will be downtown.

University of Rochester is spread out all over the place here. They began downtown – maybe we could lure them back with a portion of their facilities.

So we gather the best and the brightest – well at least some of them – and we get them to go to work inventing a useable future for our region. Meanwhile, we take whatever is left over in the $1b grand prize and we give it all to our urban infrastructure, social and physical. Many of my fellow Rochesterians may not agree with me, but it seems clear that the health and viability of our region is inextricably tied to the health and viability of our city.

And in late-breaking news, we learned Friday that Rochester has won a kind of booby prize in the state’s urban lotto. The Governor has awarded us $100 million so that we can improve an interchange on one of our loop-de-loop expressways. Everyone here seems to think this is a fabulous development. At the risk of being lynched, I say: NUTS!

The intersection in question, I 390 at Kendrick Road, is a southern point of access to U of R and their medical campus. Sandy Parker, of the Rochester Business Alliance says: “All of that area is extremely congested, so without this project coming into being, it would restrict further expansion of the U of R and RIT.” Take a look at this extreme congestion.

Joel Seligman, President of the U of R, declares that the project will be “transformational to the region’s economic future….” State Assemblyman  Joe Morelle says that this project will “help take us to the next level.” All of them should be ashamed. This project is a massive make-work that is a total and absolute dead end. Basta.

As it happens, I know this intersection very well. In the spring, summer, and fall, I am here multiple times a week, at many different hours of the day. This place is many things, but “extremely congested” is certainly not one of those things. This is just the kind of defective thinking that is leading us further and further from a useful urban future.

A truly ridiculous project, whose time has come and long gone, and yet cheered on by our regional and institutional leaders. Do we really still believe that road building is what we should do to preserve and protect our community? I wish I could laugh – it is laughable – but I can’t. There are 100 million better things we need to be doing here. Expressway interchanges are nowhere on that list.

Sigh.

In this aerial photo, the building they will be reusing for their tasting room and visitors center, 25 Cataract Street, is to the left of the footbridge (once the Platt Street Bridge, now called the Pont de Rennes, in honor of a Rochester Sister City) on the eastern banks of the Genesee River. The landmark buildings they propose to demolish are to the right of the bridge, in that triangle of land against St. Paul Street that is part building and part parking lot.

The best of the landmarks is 13 Cataract Street – that’s the one casting the longer shadow in this image. (Scroll down to see our earlier blog entries showing all these buildings, if you’d like). It dates from the late 1880s, and was designed by the noted brewery architect A. C. Wagner (also the architect for the Stegmaier Brewery in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, thankfully preserved and reused, and now on the National Register of Historic Places).

The other building, 7 Cataract Street, is a two-story masonry construction built in the early 20th century. It was the bottling house.

Okay. Now since the Genesee proposal went public, there has been an outcry from some local residents here that goes like this:

“It’s their property. They can do what they want – let them tear it down. If you historical fanatics want to save these buildings, then why don’t you buy them?”

Two important facts refute this kind of rubbish.

First, we did buy them, in a way. All of us citizens.

When the NYC equity firm called KPS purchased Genesee Brewing in 2009, the City of Rochester gave them over $9 million in forgiven loans, water bills and taxes. Around Genesee Brewing, KPS created the North American Brewing Company, now the 8th largest brewery in the country. We’re glad for all their success, and all the jobs saved and created, but we do have more than a bit of skin in their game.

And second, there is a little thing called the law. In Rochester, in order to destroy buildings designated of historic value, an applicant must meet certain standards. This applicant fails to meet these standards. Here’s why.

Section 120-195B(4)(b)of the Rochester Zoning Ordinance says:

(b) An area variance shall be granted only if the applicant establishes the existence of each of the following conditions:

[1] Benefits. The benefit to the applicant if the variance is granted outweighs the detriment to the health, safety and welfare of the neighborhood or community by such grant.

No problem here, since the applicant gets the benefits and we get, well, nothing. There will be no neighborhood left when they are done. Fail.

[2] Essential character of the area. No undesirable change will be produced in the character of the neighborhood or a detriment to nearby properties will be created by the granting of the area variance.

You decide this one. Would you call removing the neighborhood undesirable? Would you call a giant empty parking lot a detriment? Would you call losing two landmark buildings in favor of – nothing – an undesirable change? Fail.

[3] No other remedy. The benefit sought by the applicant cannot be achieved by some method feasible for the applicant to pursue, other than the area variance.

As we heard during the ZBA hearing on this matter, there are many other remedies still available. Some of them are being pursued even now. The applicant could yet: work out some kind of  a deal for the buildings; stabilize the buildings for reuse as their success continues to brew; donate the buildings to a variety of interested groups. Too soon to tell about possible remedies. Fail.

[4] Significance. The requested area variance is not substantial.

Seems pretty substantial. Fail.

[5] Physical and environmental conditions. The proposed variance will not have an adverse effect or impact on the physical or environmental conditions in the neighborhood or district.

Look at the aerial image of the neighborhood or district. Imagine the physical environment without the landmarks, and with more parking spaces. We hold certain truths as self-evident. Fail.

[6] Not self-created. The alleged difficulty was not self-created, the consideration of which shall be relevant to the decision of the Board of Appeals but shall not necessarily preclude the granting of the area variance.

When KPS bought Genesee Brewing, they knew that the buildings were designated as of historic value. They had been left uncared for, and after their purchase they continued to be uncared for. Now we hear that they are in such a deteriorated condition that they must be destroyed (this is patently untrue, by the way). Can’t have it both ways, brewery guys. Either you could have solved this “difficulty” by caring for the buildings, or you can solve this difficulty now by caring for these buildings. But if they are too deteriorated to save, exactly who else could have created that problem? Fail.

So there are six standards under our law by which to test any desire to demolish the Cataract Street neighborhood. The applicant fails to meet all six standards.

Next case.

And so, herewith, an invitation to the incantations.

What: Zoning Board of Appeals, Thursday, December 15, 2011.

Where:  City Hall, Rochester, NY (a wonderful landmark structure). Council Chambers, 3rd floor.

When: Their meeting begins at 9:00am. We are told that there are 5 items on the agenda, and 13 Cataract Street is 5th. So if you’re there by 10:00 or 10:30 a.m., there should be plenty of time for you to see and hear the action.

It would be great to have the room full of those of us in opposition to this flawed and sad proposal. Come prepared to speak out if you’d like – 3 minutes maximum – or just come to offer moral support to the cause.

It would be wonderful to see a crowd of neighbors. Join us.

As we continue in our efforts here to save 13 Cataract Street, things are really brewing. First, an article written by Rochester activist and urban advocate Joel Helfrich, which you can find at the always extraordinary Rochester Subway site, produced by my intrepid and tireless colleague Mike Governale. Here’s a link:

http://www.rochestersubway.com/topics/2011/12/genesee-brewery-they-paved-history-and-put-up-a-parking-lot/

If you haven’t already, you might want to take a closer look at Mike’s site to see his Photoshop magic, as he gives us a few glimpses of what’s possible at this essential location at High Falls.

And then today, in our local paper, the Democrat and Chronicle, came this piece, by Rochester historian John DeVolder:

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20111210/OPINION02/112100302/Don-t-destroy-another-treasure?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|Home|s

Now we know who designed 13 Cataract, Philly brewery architect A. C. Wagner, and we hear again why we must save this building. Thanks, Mr. DeVolder.

And in very late breaking news (late this afternoon), our local community college, Monroe Community College (MCC), voted this afternoon to move the long considered expansion of their downtown campus (they moved to the suburbs decades ago) to vacant space at Kodak HQ. This is bad because they are now housed in the historic Sibley’s department store downtown, and their large presence there, near the Eastman School, would have really given a boost to that part of downtown. I pray we don’t end up having to rally to save this artifact of our downtown’s past. Our mayor wisely urged them to stay at Sibley’s, but they chose otherwise.

Sibley, Lindsay & Curr, on the left in 1948.

But the good news is that their decision will now put thousands of (beer drinking?) MCC students two blocks from the High Falls, and three blocks from 13 Cataract Street. Genesee Brewing – opportunity knocks even more loudly.

More as news develops. Onward.