The Main Street Bridge

Reader David Steele has asked what the street side of the Main Street bridge was like. Reader Jason Haremza told him: just like any other street, really. You’d never know the river was there. Herewith, proof.

Here’s the bridge from the south, looking downriver, in 1919, on a day when the river was very high. (This was after the city deepened the river under the bridge in 1916, because of a flood in 1915).

Here’s a similar view, a bit closer, from around 1920.

And here’s a similar view but closer still, from 1922.

Can you make out the name on the upper right of the right hand building? Ocumpaugh’s. Remember that – here’s the front on Main.

51 to 55 South Main, 1922. These shops and offices comprise the Ocumpaugh property. The pedestrians are all on the bridge.

Okay, so what did the street side of the bridge really look like? One more image tells the tale.

Main Street, looking east across the river, in about 1912. The streetcar in the middle of the image is almost exactly in the middle of the river.

In truth, it would have been a nicer bit of the city if there was a little porchlet or terrace out on each side of the river, providing passers-by with a little vista up and down the river. The Ponte Vecchio does have that lovely colonnade on each side.

But it was pretty nice, anyway.

Streetcar buffs – note the headways on the westbound side of the street. What do you figure? 20 seconds, maybe?

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Let’s Pretend

Hong Kong.

In the last few months, we have been wandering around, and wondering at, some memorable places in some amazing cities. Here are a few more highlights.

Nanjing Road, Shanghai.

Nha Trang, Vietnam.

Cochin, India.

Dubai, UAE.

Your author at lunch, in the Botanic Gardens, Wellington, NZ.

As I have been reflecting on all that we have seen, I have had an idea: I have invented a new game that should be played in our town, or perhaps in yours. It goes like this.

By decree of the Czar, our towns must now retool their economic engines. Whatever drives the economy of your city, of our city, must be changed. Here in Rochester, our economy is driven by health care, educational institutions, the optics industry, the grocery business, and innovation and skills in high-technology processes and manufacturing. But no longer.

The Czar requires that now our economy must be driven principally by tourism. Visitors – lots of them.

In my new game, your city will receive higher and higher points for generating more and more of your tax revenues from tourism. Your city will receive bonus points for each hour that a visitor stays with you.

Perhaps this game will invite us to see our cities differently. What will attract visitors? What will they come to see and do, where will they want to stroll, to linger, to shop for local authenticity, to experience unique Rochester delights? What architecture will they admire, photograph, upload to Flickr? How will they describe the rich urbanism of our place to their friends and family upon their return home? Will our history, and the quirky but extraordinary contributions to our city life by people such as the deservedly revered Albert Stone, be made vivid and accessible?

For us here to stay in this game, we have our work cut out for us. Much of what would easily attract visitors to our place is gone. And many of our best assets are under-utilized, or ignored. So we need a fix-this list, and a make-something-out-of-this list. Get rid of the huge parking lots downtown, and create great places instead. Grab onto the riverfront and make it fabulous. Make it easy for folks to get around. Finally blow up the Inner Loop and make great streets and streetscapes. The list goes on. 

Anyway, we have great stuff here, as you must in your city, and we have enormous challenges. Maybe if we put out-of-towner glasses on for a bit, we might see what we already have differently, and find it easier to fix what’s broken.

Our town – Rochester.

Want to buy a “Get-Out-of-Jail-Free” card?

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Rochester and Sustainability: A Report Card

Photo by David Mohney, City Hall Photo Lab, from the Monroe County Library Collection, c-0001910.

Rochester’s green grade: F. F for Fail. Failing. Failed.

I went looking around this morning at what cities are doing to become more sustainable. I went to a bunch of .gov web sites from a selection of municipalities to see how they talked about sustainability, and what they were doing about the subject.

On Rochester’s website, the city says that our recycling program, our graffiti removal program, and a clean up program called Rochester Clean Sweep are helping us to have a better environment. That’s it. Thus the grade.

Cleveland’s Mayor, Frank Jackson, has announced his intention to make that city a model of sustainability, through a city-wide program called Sustainable Cleveland 2019. There is broad support for the initiative, and they are using the catch phrase “Green City Blue Lake.” They see this initiative both as a way to construct a better city, and as a way to compete with other cities for jobs, young people, and economic development.

In Cincinnati, Mayor Mark Mallory has created the Green Cincinnati Plan, for similar purposes, and the City is planning for a new streetcar system to enhance transit options there.

In Washington, Mayor Fenty has a program called Green DC. The city has been very active in working with citizens to provide tax credits for updating residential water, heat and cooling systems. And DC is currently constructing a streetcar to enhance the Metro, bus, and circulator systems that make DC one of the most walkable cities in nation: 34% of residents do not own a car.

Monroe County, in which Rochester sits, has something they call Green Monroe. You can see what’s up in sustainable projects and initiatives - it’s pretty pathetic. But at least they talk about the issues a bit. Grade: D-. At least it’s not an F.

Here in municipal politics: silence. No word from leadership on green subjects.

End of story. Or worse.

Locals: tell me if I am missing something.

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Rearranging Deck Chairs

Downtown Rochester in 2005. Have a parking space.

Like most American cities, our city has been very badly damaged by the car. Not only do we have a wickedly unhelpful transit system, but we have the Inner Loop, half of downtown is used for parking lots, we have expressways all over the place throughout the region, we tore out our streetcars in the 1940s, we abandoned our subway system in the 50s, and the population of the city proper has dropped by one-third since its peak in 1950. As I have said here over and over, car mobility has come at an almost incalculable price.

Downtown in 1956. Have a parking space.

The car has proven to be Rochester’s iceberg, and we are taking on cold sea water at an alarming rate. Strike up the band.

So has this blatantly obvious circumstance led to progressive thinking about our urban future? Has city and county leadership decided to act quickly to construct a regional network of multiple modes of mobility to minimize car use? Are we facing huge increases in downtown parking rates (now averaging only $5.77 a day) to discourage cars?

Nope. This city doesn’t even have a bike plan, much less any sense about what we need to do to construct and inhabit a useable, durable urban future. In fact, the City has just embarked on a truly groundbreaking study aimed at answering a burning question in our region: how can we make it even easier to use our cars to get downtown.

Mayday, Mayday! We’re going down!

Here’s some facts. In 2008, the City of Rochester did a study of downtown parking capacity. The results: 26,306 parking spaces downtown (about 200 acres of parking). During the week, this massive amount of parking is 57% occupied. On the weekend, this parking is 43% occupied. But the fact that the city is undertaking a study aimed at improving downtown parking must mean there’s a problem.

There is. Not all of the 55,000 or so downtown workers can park within 50 yards of their places of employment. So this new study is aimed at creating a downtown circulator of some kind – bus, van, jitney – even the “S” word has been used (yes, streetcar), that will shuttle from parking lot to parking lot, passing by major employment spots on its path. So now you will be able to even more easily use your car – leave it in one corner of the giant sea of parking, catch the ferry to the office, and avoid walking more than 2 minutes to and from work. Just great.

Downtown is circumscribed by the Inner Loop. And downtown is roughly a mile wide and a mile long – a little less, but let’s not quibble. Walk about 15 minutes in any direction and you will have walked out of downtown. As it is today, you could park at the always-empty-except-game-days surface parking at Frontier Field, where our minor league baseball team holds court, and walk smack into the middle of downtown in about 10 minutes.

Parking, the stadium, and downtown. Have a parking space.

But the car has a strong grip on us here. Sadly, most Rochesterians seem content to continue to allow the automobile to define our urban life. So let’s do the study, let’s get the shuttle, let’s keep the price of parking as low as we can, let’s continue to see 86% of all downtown workers drive alone to the office, let’s continue to have 73% of all employers offer no incentives for using a car alternate. Just great.

I guess I’ll head to the pool – sounds like I better get in shape for a long, cold swim.

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The Price

Rochester from the air, 1930. Dense, textured, crackling with life.

Cities are living things, changing with each passing day. Each old city passes away, constantly replaced by the next city, in layer after layer. Each of these cities tells us who we were and what we cared about. Each layer foreshadows what will come next.

This is not idle rhetoric. This is fact. And all of us pay a price for changes in each erstwhile city. Sometimes that price is slight, and the city is better for its changing. If we are paying attention, we might call this progress.

And sometimes that price is nearly incalculably high, and neither is the next city better for its changing, nor does it induce other better next cities to follow. Let me explain.

Colleague, now Chicagoan, and reader David Steele has helped me by discovering a treasure. This morning he sent me 5 aerial photographs of downtown Rochester, taken, in turn, in 1930, 1951, 1961, 1970 and 2002. During this period, the city changed, and changed enormously. During this period the Inner Loop was constructed. During this period Rochesterians decided that nothing, and here I mean truly nothing, was more important than the car, and car convenience. And in these pictures we can begin to comprehend the urban price we have paid for that desire. You don’t have to take my word for it. You only need to see these pictures.

Downtown Rochester, 1930.

Downtown Rochester, 1951.

Downtown Rochester, 1961.

Downtown Rochester, 1970

Downtown Rochester, 2002.

I will refrain from saying anything else. I find these images shocking, and enormously sad. The price has been very, very high.

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The Arc of Urban Change: Rochester in the 20th Century

It’s impossible to begin to imagine a next Rochester, or any next city, without understanding its history. In particular, it is imperative to understand how this city got as screwed up as it is during the course of the 20th century. And I do mean screwed up.

Oh, Rochester wasn’t alone – the arc of change for this city has been much like the arc of change for most American cities. But the unique efflorescence of modern urbanism here has resulted from the particular identity and character of this place – climate, geography, history, culture, industry, attitudes, events, governance. Let me explain.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Rochester was home to 162,800 people, and was the 24th largest city in the U.S. By mid-century, the city had reached its peak population of 332,488. At the end of the century, the city population had receded to 219,773. By 2000, the region, which was entirely populated by city dwellers in 1900, had grown to a sprawl of city and suburbs totaling 1,034,090, the 51st largest in the nation.

Rochester, looking northwest. Wiki image.

Again, the features of Rochester’s shift from a centralized city to an auto-dominated, sprawling (and unsustainable) region are the same as most American cities born in the late 18th or early 19th century. The markers along this arc of change are well known to all of us.

Cars, suburbs, shifting places of employment, strip shopping and big malls,  more cars, waning transit, complaints about congestion, expressways, more cars, empty downtowns with literally half the land used as parking lots, increasing strains on city coffers as the wealth, and population, of the region motors into the countryside.

Sound familiar? Everycity, U.S.A.

Carol Stream, Illinois. Photo by Alex MacLean.

But now let’s take a peek at this particular city, and its particular circumstances.

During the 20th century, Rochester was a place of wealth far greater than its size would suggest. Kodak, Western Union, Bausch and Lomb, and in 1906, Xerox, were enormously successful in the early years of the century, and this wealth allowed for the construction of substantial social infrastructure.

Shopping downtown, Christmas, 1915.

Today, we Rochesterians enjoy culture well beyond our census data – a great orchestra, and the Eastman School of Music, (30 cultural institutions started by George Eastman largesse alone), great museums of a wide array, great universities, a great jazz festival, and a summer ‘art’ fair that draws more people than the city’s population. There is much to see and do, and experience, for a city this size.

Throngs at the Corn Hill Arts Festival.

And the city’s population, and now the region’s, is and has been characterized by a very high level of technical skill and scientific and technical education. Beginning in the 19th century, Rochester was home to companies and institutions that needed, and attracted,  a gifted workforce.  In fact, that’s one reason why we’re here.

Amy’s parents came here in the early 1930s, and her father joined Kodak. He was a physical chemist, worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII, and then returned to Kodak. When her parents moved to upstate New York from Pittsburgh, they lived at first in the city. But by the mid 1930s they had moved to the northern suburb of Irondequoit. So it goes.

Downtown Rochester, 1938.

This moment then, the mid 30s, was the top of Rochester’s arc of change – the city population took a dip in the 30s as folks spread out, presaging what was to come. Then, with WWII, the population stabilized and grew a bit due to the war effort, before the inevitable exodus began again, now in earnest, by the 1950s.

So in the late 30s, there was already a lot of hubbub about traffic and congestion. Even though Rochester had a subway beginning in the late 20s, and streetcars until 1941, (pretty early for a streetcar system collapse – they ran in my hometown near Chicago until the mid-1950s), automobiles were king at a pretty early moment.

The Sea Breeze Trolley – gone but not forgotten.

Thus comes the most single most destructive moment in the city’s 20th century urban history – one that set a precedent for all kinds of other really dreadful urban missteps. Not the only big mistake mind you, but the worst. The Inner Loop.

Conceived as a way to alleviate increasing downtown congestion as the city’s population neared its peak, the Inner Loop was born as an idea in the late 30s and early 40s. Engineering began in earnest in the late 40s, and the Loop was under construction by the early 50s. Huge swaths of urban clearing were undertaken to make way for the moatlike expressway – a kind of prelude to the massive urban renewal of the later 50s so common throughout the U.S.

The 1951 Inner Loop plan.

Hundreds of buildings were demolished, and a kind of Maginot Line was created between the fabric of the city and its downtown. And this was only the first of these efforts. Later expressways followed, making it easier and easier to avoid the central city. And of course as it got easier to live away, it got easier to shop away from downtown, and to live all of the rest of one’s life without ever seeing the city itself.

So where does all this leave us? Rochester is a shrinking city with a great history, great richness of culture and social infrastructure, great assets in its population and their impressive capabilities, a lovely city with wonderful tree-lined streets and historic architecture. The surrounding countryside is enormously attractive, the Lake is at hand, the universities are very strong (University of Rochester has now supplanted Kodak as the region’s largest employer). It’s a pretty terrific place. But it is not sustainable, in any sense.

Sprawl in Greece, NY,  a suburb of Rochester.

What do I mean? Well, perhaps the simplest way to understand the challenges ahead is by doing a little simple math.

The Rochester Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) comprises five counties: Livingston, Monroe (where the city resides), Ontario, Orleans and Wayne. The regional population in a 2007 estimate was set at 1,030,495. The land area of the MSA is 4,869 square miles, or 3,116,160 acres. All of which leaves us with a mess of sprawl – 1 person for every 3 acres.

Does the MSA include farmland and parks and other open space? Of course it does, like any other MSA in the nation. But spreading out like we have means many features of now 21st century life can’t continue much longer.

Spreading out on Ridge Road, Rochester.

Here’s just one reason, without resorting to any environmental mumbo-jumbo: money.

If the region has just over 1,000,000 souls, and has had to build all of the physical and social infrastructure necessary to allow this level of sprawl, there is a limit that we can reasonably expect in taxes extracted versus cash required to pay for the mess. And we are reaching that limit. Every day we read about the fact that there are not enough dollars to pay for schools, repair bridges, keep the libraries open, provide adequate fire service – it’s pretty much an endless list. (It doesn’t help that New York as a state is in major financial trouble as well, and for many of the same reasons). Property taxes here are some of the highest in the nation, while real estate values languish.

So without resorting to facts like global warming, or water scarcity, or an industrialized food system that is eating us alive, or a lack of sustainable energy, or any other of the problems that are closing in on all of us at a breakneck pace, we can talk about the sustainability and survivability of a city, and a region, from a strictly economic perspective. We can’t go on much longer as we have been – we simply cannot afford it.

Or we could talk about governance as another example of  why a region like ours will have to make some fairly radical changes in order to carry on. This part of the nation is a county-strong place – county governments have a lot of power here. The county and the city are wrangling all the time for control of all sorts of stuff – the big one at the moment is schools. But with five counties in the region, a major city, and hundreds of towns, villages, school districts, park districts – you name it – we are constantly tripping over boundaries, and local sets of interest. With all of these separate units of government, there is endless bickering over power, endless NIMBYism, endless attempts to protect one fiefdom or another.

So while our fates are inevitably lashed together, our system of governance is perfectly designed to prevent us from working together on our really big challenges.

I suppose I will have to take some consolation in all these reflections from a few favorite words from poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who said “of all the memberships we identify ourselves by, the one thing that is most forgotten…. is place…. people who can agree that they share a commitment to the landscape/cityscape – even if they are otherwise locked in struggle with each other – have at least one deep thing to share.”

Maybe this is the tiny patch of ground we need on which to start building the next city.

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Rochester in Motion

Cars are everywhere. Shopping is at one of the four major malls, out in the suburbs – there’s almost no retail left downtown. There’s an inner and an outer loop of expressways that act like walls to the now forbidden city. All that’s left of public transit is a bus system, and here in Rochester it is impossible, unbelievably, to get a single system-wide map. You know what this all feels like – everywhere U.S.A.

Not so oddly, it wasn’t always so. Rochester once had all of the buzz, and commerce and mobility, of the Erie Canal.

And a huge amount of rail service – freight, passenger, short haul and long, interurbans to Buffalo and Syracuse and beyond, and of course, the ubiquitous streetcar, complete with a line to the amuseument park in Charlotte, on the shore of Lake Ontario. A truly intermodal city. And a handsome one, at that.

Rochester even had a subway, shown below during construction.

The subway opened in 1927, and ran beneath the city until 1956. The alignment map shows a system oriented northwest to southeast. There were connections available to a number of surface rail systems – streetcar lines, interurbans, and longer range rail lines. It must have been pretty easy to move around the region in those days.

The line ran only about 2 miles in tunnels – the rest was grade-separated in a cut, most of which, before 1918, was the old Erie Canal. The Erie canal was relocated and became the Erie Barge Canal in about 1918, and the old canal bed was set for its next incarnation – rail transit.

Of course in its current incarnation, much of the canal has become home to the expressways of today - such is progress.

Rochester was reputed to be the smallest city in the world with a subway system. And interestingly, much of the old downtown subway tunnel remains mostly intact.

Image by Carol Fil/Flickr.

In fact, it has become the center of a protracted debate about the need for renewed public transit access, public safety (the tunnels are often used as shelter for the homeless), and public fiduciary responsiblity (the city pays something north of $1.2m annually to maintain the tunnel). The city has been trying for years to fill the tunnels in, and transit advocates have kept this from happening. It looks at this point as if the advocates are finally going to lose – the tunnels are slated to be filled in the spring of 2010. As a local urbanist said recently, unearthing them later is not an overwhelming task. We shall see.

And of course Rochester is blessed with more than its fair share of transit geeks (I count myself as one of these, by the way). One of the groups, the Rochester Rail Transit Committee, is outspokenly advocating a revival of regional rail transit. They have even created their own system map. 

The proposed system connects most of the region of now about 1.2 million – spread out all over the place – connects the airport to the rest of the city, gets down to the University of Rochester, the region’s single largest employer (Wegmans, the grocer, is second largest, and Kodak now a distant third), and hooks up the High Falls and the river downtown to Charlotte and the Lake Ontario beaches to the north. Oh, and reuses the old subway tunnel. Not a bad piece of work, really. The four cardinal shopping malls aren’t part of the system – they aren’t really sustainable for too much longer anyway - but the baseball stadium AND the soccer stadium are on the green line.

And so, like many other American cities, an unsustainable auto-dominated present is built upon the foundations of a past which featured a rich array of mobility assets.  

Back to the future!

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The Next Chapter Begins

Rochester and its river, the Genesee.

What better way to get to know a new home place than to imagine it as a case study for examining the next city?

Here we are in our new neighborhood, and in between fresh paint, endless trips to the hardware store, and nearly daily (but very enjoyable) snow shoveling, I am spending time getting to know how Rochester got to be the city we inhabit today. I do this in the hope that I can use Rochester as a kind of object lesson in how our cities can make themselves into fit and durable communities for the future. It’s going to take a while to figure this one out.

Every day brings new discoveries. I have learned the very hard way that only by understanding a city’s past can one speculate about a useful future. And so I have been trying to mine the rich history of this place, trying to understand some of the layers of now vanished Rochesters that have been the progenitors of the city we inhabit today.

Every city disappears every day. What was is gone in an instant, replaced by some new place, altered to fit new circumstances and needs. The bank building at the corner a few  blocks away (I think it was a bank building – maybe it was an office building – but it looked like it was about 25 or 30 years old), with its attached multistory parking garage, has mostly vanished since we arrived. We’re not sure what comes next, or why, but that urban fragment is gone, and with it one version of this entire place.

So here are some early thoughts, observations, and discoveries.

As a kind of urbanism, Rochester is as dominated by the automobile as any you know or could imagine. The city of about 210,000, and the region of about 1.1 million, is filled with evidence of sprawl everywhere you go. Downtown has almost no retail, though it was all there once, and almost nothing else, either. Offices for Kodak and Xerox, lots of surface parking lots, but none of the bustling activity that was once daily life. Four big shopping malls, one out in each quadrant of the region, replace what was once all centralized downtown.

The downtown of the present is ringed by an inner expressway loop. And the city, and all its suburbs, are connected by an outer loop. Because Rochester is on a river and on the south shore of Lake Ontario, this outer loop of highways is three-sided, with water on the fourth. Like this:

And here is a look at downtown, encircled by the truly unfortunate inner loop in a kind of shoe shape, like this:

That darker line that enters the picture from the left, humps northward, and then goes out of the frame diagonally on the right – that’s the railroad, the CSX right-of-way also used by Amtrak. The rail alignments have always been central to defining the character of the city. I sensed this, but it was made clear when I made a discovery yesterday afternoon. Here’s what I found:

It’s easy to see the rail line, in the same place in this map of the region created in 1912 as in the shot from Goggle Earth. But even more interesting is another discovery.

In 1911, the Rochester Civic Improvement Committee commissioned Arnold Brunner (who worked with Daniel Burnham on the 1903 “Group Plan” for Cleveland, and sat with Burnham on Washington, D.C.’s Commission of Fine Arts), and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (whose father was so instrumental in creating Central Park and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Rick, as he was known, worked very closely with Burnham in Washington, and probably needs other introduction), along with rail transportation expert Bion Arnold to create a “City Plan for Rochester.” (An interesting side note: The Rochester Civic Improvement Committee was chaired in 1911 by James G. Cutler, who was both a very noted Rochester architect, and the City’s mayor from 1904 to 1907).

Brunner and Olmsted, using a version of the map above, made a plan that looked like this:

This is where things start to get really interesting. Olmsted’s and Brunner’s greenways are now almost all expressways. The late 20th century expressway system was founded on abandoned railroad rights of way, proposed but never realized greenways, or the alignment of the old Erie Canal, which was replaced by the Erie Barge Canal not long after the 1911 plan. Just one example: the greenway running east and west just north of downtown, between the Genesee River on the west and Irondequoit Bay on the east, is the precise alignment of the Keeler Expressway, local route 104, built in the 1960s and 70s.

I guess it will take a while to peel this particular onion….

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A Town Square – On the Move

Hecker and Decker are on the move – to Rochester, NY. Here’s a look at our new neighborhood.

Rochester at 20,000 feet.

Stay tuned for further developments as we settle in to a new home place.

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