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THE COURSE OF EMPIRE/CONSUMMATION IV (of IV), SCHENECTADY AND TROY

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Storefront on State Street, Schenectady

The downtowns in Schenectady and Troy are both success stories. They are similar-sized small cities, with commercial centers that developed in very different ways, likely because of the different periods that proved to be their hay-days. Both have populations substantially below their peaks (Schenectady, now 70,000, peaked at 95,000 in 1930; Troy, now 50,000, peaked at 76,000 in 1910). Both have anchor institutions of higher education. Union College, founded in Schenectady in 1795, and now with 2,200 students. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institution was founded in 1824 and has 8,000 students in Troy. Neither particularly has the feel of a college town, though. They are certainly archetypes of what the downtown of a post-industrial Mohawk Valley city can be—even despite a one-third decline in population from their largest. What signifies that these places are successful? They are busy and lively, they have few empty storefronts, their buildings are architecturally interesting and well maintained, and they have an interesting mix of ground floor uses. 

What is particularly impressive about Schenectady is the harmony between old and new buildings along State Street, its main commercial corridor. All down State Street the street wall is continuous, the building heights are consistent and the facades of the new developments, several of them mixed-use retail/residential and others retail/commercial, are respectful of their context. None of these new developments draw attention to themselves, and all are knitted into the urban fabric, while clearly marking themselves as someplace interesting and new. It appears that several of these structures were designed by a local firm. State Street has to be one of the best main streets in the country, by most measures. For example, it feels more substantial and more modern (less like a stage set), than Corning’s famous downtown. 

A new, mixed-use structure that fits right in

Schenectady was the corporate home of General Electric (before it veered away from manufacturing to become a brutally managed ponzi scheme of financial services), which retains a small presence in the town – but is nowhere near what it once was. GE had both corporate offices and manufacturing facilities in the town. A large historic factory structure continues to bear a gigantic sign for the company. A fun fact is that because of GE’s presence, it had the country’s second commercial radio station. Railroading was also a major factor in Schenectady’s economy. The New York Central stopped in town, and it continues to have Amtrak service. But, at least equally important, it was the manufacturing home of the American Locomotive Company, a major American builder of steam, and then diesel, engines for trains. That company no longer exists.

Jay Street Mall

The city mostly has the feel of a leafy suburb with an attractive downtown and a self-contained, traditional college campus. One of the features of the commercial district is a very good looking and interestingly tenanted pedestrianized alley that leads from State Street to the near the train station, called the Jay Street Pedestrian Mall. It is clearly well managed and maintained. State Street also features a 1926 Proctor’s Theater that remains active and in use. The beautiful homes lining the residential streets are very much the result of the cadre of well-compensated GE executives who once made their homes in Schenectady and a community planned by the company to attract them. 

It seems pretty clear from walking around that Schenectady’s is a planned, managed success. Civic leaders focused their efforts on State and Jay Streets and created and enforced smart zoning and design standards. No doubt it was just as devastated by the GE’s downsizing and ALC’s demise, as Amsterdam was with the collapse of the local carpet manufacturing business. But use was made of its in-place social infrastructure to produce what is likely a very, very nice place to live, work or shop. 

A taste of Troy’s charm

Troy is different. It has more of a downtown area than a main street. Troy was a major commercial center very early in the history of the country. Located on the Hudson River at the point where it ceases to be navigable, it was already a locus for transportation before the construction of the Erie Canal, which met the Hudson near Troy and super-charged the local economy. The railroads, similarly, used Troy as a center, where the Hudson could be bridged to connect them to the West. If you were traveling west from New York City, you either had to take a ferry across the Hudson to Hoboken or Jersey City, or a train which turned to the west at Troy. This was true, and mostly remains true, for both passengers and freight. The Amtrak station in Rensselaer, just south of downtown, serves the city of Albany and is a major link between the state’s capital and its largest city. 

Troy Savings Bank Music Hall

With its access to coal and iron via waterways, canals and ultimately railroads, Troy was also an important, early steel manufacturing center. As a commercial center beginning around 1800, it is interesting to note that Troy’s population peaked before then that of other Mohawk Valley cities, but began to decline at around the same time. 

Today you can get a sense of Troy’s history by watching “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes American version of Downtown Abbey, where some of exteriors are filmed, and are easily distinguished from the scenes with absolutely dreadful computer-generated backgrounds (the CGI exteriors being the worst part of an otherwise enjoyable entertainment). The downtown retains its early 19th century character and charm. Troy is also known for the concert venue in a (now former) downtown bank, with renowned acoustics often used for recordings during the gold age of the LP. Troy’s historic downtown is made up of many full blocks. It is more of a neighborhood than a commercial strip, I would imagine this reflects its early 19th century origins and development patterns from that period. It has the kind of vibe that you find in New York City’s Greenwich Village or Brooklyn Heights, developed at around the same time, and now are among New York’s most desirable and visited places. While Troy had a number of major 19th Century fires, the blocks of the downtown remain remarkably well preserved. Venerating these blocks isn’t simply historic preservation idolatry or some kind of return to a romantic ideal, but a recognition of the importance of human scale and the centrality of a mixture of uses to creating the kind of places where people want to be. There certainly are people who spent millions of dollars to live on high floors in Hudson Yards, but I would venture to say that those are people who have values that are in the very skinny end of a bell curve in terms of their distribution. 

Troy is a little different, in having a commercial area, rather than a commercial corridor. That makes it less of a model for many other small cities. But like Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, a vibrant commercial district can be an ever more powerful driver of urban vitality, and is certainly a place worth looking at for examples of success.

One of the many retail blocks in Troy

The Mohawk and Hudson valleys are places that continue to stop human beings in their tracks with their beauty. The construction of the Erie Canal was a critical milestone in every aspect of the growth and development of the United States. The area has an abundance of natural and social assets, including a large number of important educational and cultural institutions. It also has access to water (not a given in many places today) and a climate that, for better or worse more globally, has grown more temperate as the climate changes. Some of the cities whose growth was fostered by the canal have not yet recovered from the post-World War II deindustrialization. While others, like Schenectady and Troy are thriving. They are models for what is possible. What places like Syracuse and Amsterdam (as well as Utica) need are most importantly a desire to change and a willingness to accept new people, new ideas and new forms of economic and social activity. We know how to do downtown restoration, and we have the cities that demonstrate that. Where an old guard clings to the remnants of the dregs of former expansive wealth and power, desolation remains. 

The Consummation of the Empire, Thomas Cole

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE III/DESOLATION – SYRACUSE

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The Course of Empire, Desolation, Thomas Cole

Why do the prospects for downtown Syracuse seem so much bleaker than those for Rochester? Syracuse has a current population of about 150,000 (from a peak of 220,000 in 1950), while Rochester’s population is 210,000 (peak of 330,000 in 1950). Those seem like about the same orders of magnitude, and in fact, the depopulation of Rochester over the decades has been more severe. Syracuse has a very important anchor institution in the Upstate Medical University, with over 10,000 employees and a budget of almost $2 billion. It also has Syracuse University, with 4,500 employees and 21,000 students. The University, unlike any of those in Rochester, has a noted sports program, with a high-profile basketball team. The Syracuse metro has a population of about 670,000.

Clinton Square on a Friday afternoon.

But something about downtown Syracuse gives it a feeling of desolation and lack of activity. Its public spaces are empty and poorly maintained. It has acres of surface parking lots (presumably where abandoned buildings were demolished), while Rochester has an extensive network of structured parking. Syracuse’s nods to current trends in urbanism, like shared scooters, fixed public seating, Victor Stanley trash baskets, and expensive newly installed hardscape like distinctive pavers and traffic calming bump-outs (traffic calming, where there is no traffic?) feel like afterthoughts. This is probably because they are so static – with almost no pedestrian activity. Of course, at one point in the 80’s built pedestrian skybridges were built, to get office workers off the “unsafe” streets and out of the winter weather – a move that has proven disastrous for most places. There also appears to be a small amount of residential development downtown, following the trend (including adaptive reuse of commercial structures) – but I would imagine downtown life in Syracuse to be a hard sell. 

One observation I drew from the Rochester/Syracuse comparison is that in terms of a perception of safety and activity downtown, parking structures do way less damage than open lots. This isn’t something I had previously noticed. Garages continue the street wall and give at least some sense of activity – although they generally, unless they are well designed, present blank walls to the street and create pedestrian dead zones. But walking around Syracuse leads one to conclude that flat parking conveys a much stronger feeling of a lack of activity and dereliction. Continuous street walls, even ones without ground floor retail activity, are important to a sense of urbanity. Lots full of cars lead to a feeling of abandonment, particularly if the lots are mostly empty. 

New multi-family housing in downtown Syracuse.

It is highly worth noting that I walked to dinner through the dark, bleak downtown, past the city’s main public space, Clinton Square, which looks abandoned and ominous, to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. I was told that there was a half hour wait for a table. The place next door, Apizza Regionale, was also hopping. So, people were coming downtown on a Friday night for dining and drinking – even though there appeared to be no one on the street. 

My internet search for a distinctive place to stay yielded only chains along highways, with almost no acceptable options downtown (the Trip Advisor reviews of the non-chain places downtown were hair raising) – so we stayed at a bleak Quality Inn, with small (clean) rooms, no closets, outdoor corridors, and a plexiglass window with a slot where customers once slid their credit cards through for payment. The motel was located right next to the elevated IH 81, which slices through the middle of town, and is charged with much of the city’s ills. Planning is underway to tear down the highway as a vehicle for revitalizing the downtown.

The lobby of the Hotel Syracuse.

Oddly enough, Syracuse has a great, historic hotel. The Hotel Syracuse, built in 1924, is beautifully maintained with spectacular public rooms. It is both a Marriott and a member of Historic Hotels of America. Why I didn’t find in in my internet search is a mystery to me (and no one recommend it to me as I was planning the trip). The property also doesn’t come up on Google Maps until you have magnified the image to the maximum. The hotel is a major civic asset, and I was glad I eventually found it during my walking around. It is likely the grandest hotel in Upstate New York. The dark, cramped Quality Inn, at $285 per night, was the most expensive place we stayed on our bi-state odyssey. I have to think this whole business a detriment as to the way Syracuse presents itself to the world, even if I am an embarrassed, incompetent internet searcher. 

Buildings facing Clinton Square

Clinton Square is truly awful. It has some important neo-gothic buildings around it, and those two restaurants are adjacent to it. It is organized around an impressive City Beautiful era Civil War monument completed in 1910. The monument was erected adjacent to the Erie Canal, which in time was covered over and became Erie Boulevard. The square also has seen some recent rebuilding of adjoining sidewalks and curbs. There is ice skating on the square in the winter and it appeared that the infrastructure for the ice rink is just left lying around during the off season. The square looks unused and neglected, with a few scattered desultory benches and picnic tables cemented to the ground. The extensive hardscaping is windswept and empty. 

A historical map of the downtown, showing where the canal used to run

South Salina Street was once the main shopping district of Syracuse and today has many empty stores. One bright spot on Salina is the recently opened Parthenon Books, a large bight store, with a carefully curated inventory. There are a half a dozen midcentury modern office towers nearby. The city has quite a few older architecturally interesting commercial and civic buildings, but they are spread out around the downtown and don’t create any sense of urban synergy. It would be hard to say what the 100% corner of Syracuse is. The downtown doesn’t have a center. Given that, I’m not sure what good tearing down the highway is going to do towards revitalizing Syracuse, particularly if it is replaced with a multi-lane boulevard. The theory is that removing that highway will “reknit” the city. Under present circumstances, there isn’t actually enough downtown activity to be connected. A better focus for Syracuse’s boosters would be to pick a corner (near the book store?) and focus on creating a constant stream of activity at that place – through incentivizing food and drink (with outdoor dining and drinking) and other distinctive retail uses; as well as in activating nearby public spaces with activity. The billions of dollars that will be expended on bringing highway traffic to ground level might be better spent on filling in the gaps in pedestrian activity created by the flat parking. 

The downtown skyline

The University is a good long walk from the downtown and seems to be off by itself. This is most likely by design, to separate the campus in its marketing to prospective students from a drab urban setting. The University certainly needs to be encouraged to be more aggressive about attaching itself to the downtown, by moving high visibility, street level uses there. Also, two and half miles from downtown Syracuse is Destiny USA, built in 1990 and formerly know as Carousel Center. It is a 2.4 million square foot project (the country’s 8th largest), featuring over 250 stores. The mall markets itself as a travel destination. That probably explains a lot about the absence of pedestrian life downtown. 

This about says it all

It is telling that while the Rochester Philharmonic is a first-class organization, the Syracuse Symphony, conducted at one time by Christopher Keene, was allowed to fold in 1991. It may well be that civic leaders of Syracuse don’t much care about how the downtown works. It certainly looks that way. Likely for the corporate leaders who drive in to Syracuse in the morning and leave for the suburbs in the evening, the situation is good enough. The political structure, no doubt, fears that economic or demographic change will threaten its grip on the reins of power, the otherwise comfortable lives they lead outside the downtown and the contracts they let and control. 

There is positive energy to be harnessed in downtown Syracuse as the two busy restaurants and magnificent hotel demonstrate. Again, as with Amsterdam, there is a lot of stranded social infrastructure in downtown Syracuse, at a time when pundits have declared a national housing “crisis” and tens of thousands of people are eager to move their lives to the United States from the many places across the world in turmoil and economic decline or stagnation. It just doesn’t make any sense not to use and leverage Syracuse’s still substantial resources to address those problems. It will take small scale risk taking and large-scale civic leadership, particularly by private sector anchor institutions to make the downtown once again a great place. 

Why are these seats here? Who is going to sit on them? Why would they?

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE/DESTRUCTION – II – AMSTERDAM, NEW YORK

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The Standard Approach to Economic Deevelopment in New York State

Amsterdam is an object lesson in how downtown revitalization and economic development strategy might be better implemented in New York State. Replacing a project-centered and economic sector strategy with a place-centered approach to improving conditions in Amsterdam would likely make a substantial difference in outcomes. A number of expensive, major initiatives implemented in Amsterdam to revive its economy over the past half-century have been failures. 

This small city, located on the Mohawk River between Rochester and Albany, was for decades a major center for the manufacturing of carpets. In addition to access to the transportation advantages of the Erie Canal, the Chuctanunda Creek, running through the middle of the city drops three hundred feet during its last three miles, provided the power that drove the many mills that became central to Amsterdam’s development. With the carpet and other mills running at full production, by 1930 the city’s population grew to 34,000. With the transfer of mill operations away from the unionized north to the lower cost south beginning in the 1960’s, the population has dropped to just over half that. The mill buildings have now either been demolished, abandoned or are lightly tenanted. Nothing approaching the economic vitality of the high value-added textile business has replaced them. 

The New York State Thruway, the major transportation corridor across the state, runs by and has an exit hundreds of yards from the city’s center. This has been less than a blessing for Amsterdam, as the street though the downtown that became the access road to the bridge over the Mohawk leading to the Thruway (built in the 50’s), Route 30, appears to have been widened to increase its capacity, while bifurcating, and effectively obliterating the downtown. 

The Amsterdam RiverFront Center facing Route 30.
Inside The Riverfront Center

Two major traditional economic development projects in Amsterdam illustrate clearly the problems with traditional capital intensive, large scale, “silver bullet” redevelopment thinking. Adjacent to Route 30, just as you drive over the bridge is the RiverFront Center (formerly, the Riverfront Mall). It is a 250,000 two-story, grim structure that appears to sit directly in the middle of what used to be Amsterdam’s main street. The Center has a rather small presentation to the street but stretches way back. It is about half leased, poorly lit and poorly maintained (including non-operating escalators). Most of the tenants are government agencies, social service organizations or health care providers. This project had to have cost tens of millions of dollars and is a net negative for the city, not only because of its utilitarian design, but also because of the sense of failure about it. 

The Mohawk Valley Gateway Overlook crossing the river

By contrast, the Mohawk Valley Gateway Overlook, is beautifully designed and well maintained. The Overlook, completed in 2016, is a pedestrian bridge over the Mohawk leading to a well-landscaped riverbank park, principally designed for occasional outdoor performances. However, access to the bridge and park are very difficult to obtain – making any positive contribution the project might make to Amsterdam’s vitality clearly minimal. The bridge can be accessed from a parking lot across the river from downtown, a few hundred yards from Route 30. We had a difficult time finding it. The greenspace is on the same side of the river as the downtown but is cut off from downtown by the former New York Central Railroad tracks (now used by Amtrak). I saw a bridge over the tracks from the RiverFront Center to the park, but a rather thorough investigation of the Center yielded no access to the bridge – which leads to a very substantial stair structure (with a non-working elevator). As a result, in order to get to the park, one has to drive across the river, find the parking lot, and then walk back across the river on the pedestrian bridge. In addition, in my experience, having a few outdoor concerts during the season provides little economic benefit to the vitality of a downtown. In order for cultural programming to generate the kind of activity that makes a difference, it has to be on a daily, or near daily, schedule. There was no one else visiting the park or the bridge on the day I was there. It’s a shame, because walking across the Mohawk on the pedestrian bridge is a lovely experience, and the riverbank park also provides attractive views of the river and its surroundings. The location between the tracks and the river provides a sense of the richness and importance of the location in the state’s commercial history (even if it is an obstacle to access). There is also an unusual view of the Chuctanunda pouring through an arched viaduct into the Mohawk from the Overlook – providing a tangible idea of the energy of the water that powered the mills. 

The bridge over the railroad tracks and stair tower at the Overlook park

No doubt both of these projects provided local elected officials and civic leaders with a sense of pride and a great opportunity for media attention when they were completed. But then what? Downtowns are rarely revitalized by “projects.” And it is obvious that these two aren’t contributing. Big projects often involve extensive planning and large capital outlays, and if they have problems are difficult to improve or correct. The same is true about industrial parks and multi-million-dollar industrial plant subsidies, often the go to strategy for local economic development. At their best, those kinds of traditional economic development projects are viable for only as long as government hands them money. They rarely become self-sustaining.  For example, projects like the RiverFront Center (and, for example, the former NYC World Trade Center) usually rely on government tenants to fill them up, when the market demonstrates its lack of enthusiasm for a development that isn’t market driven. 

What’s left of Main Street, Amsterdam

Much better is the iterative process of making incremental changes and providing continuous programming, which has worked in successful downtowns (like Corning, Schenectady and Troy). The placemaking approach takes time (and patience) and rarely provides for photo ops, but they generally involve much less money. I did notice one interesting center of activity in a former mill in Amsterdam, a company called “Sticker Mule,” which does internet printing and claims to have an international customer base, seemed to have a full parking lot. I’d certainly want to know a lot more about how they ended up in Amsterdam, what they see as it’s benefits and try to build on that. 

I also wonder whether the kinetic energy of the Chuctanunda continues to have commercial value? Would it be economically possible to install micro-turbines to generate electricity in the old mills built on the banks of the creek? Those mills were designed to use its power to turn the spindles driving the mills, and so might be relatively straightforward to retrofit. Are there other efficient uses of that sustainable source of energy? Gravity has been pulling water down that 300 foot drop of the Chuctanunda for centuries, and will continue to do so without further investment.  

The Castle hotel in Amsterdam — ready for Halloween!

I should also note that while in Amsterdam we stayed in a former National Guard armory that had been converted into a hotel and event space called The Castle. The armory was built in a neo-Gothic style and has all the external attributes of a castle perched on a hill overlooking the river, on the opposite bank from the downtown. The drill hall has been turned into a feasting hall, with suits of armor, heraldic banners and period paintings covering the walls. It’s a total trip. And the rooms are modern and comfortable. It was close to the parking for the Overlook, and equally out of the way, but a find. It is an usual resource that has been turned into a civic asset. The kind of creativity that went into buying and restoring it is what Amsterdam needs more of. It was an obsolete government-owned structure, that rather than being demolished and redeveloped using subsidies, was repurposed into a viable business. 

I note, with a considerable sense of irony, that the Member of the U.S. Congress for Amsterdam is Mega-MAGA Elise Stefanic. It is not a sense of victimhood, nationalism or xenophobia that will improve the quality of life of the people of Amsterdam. It will take some risk taking, creativity and hard work. New York State’s economic development agency ought to make Amsterdam into a laboratory for exploring a range of placemaking initiatives through its underfunded Main Street program. In addition, given that it is half the size it once was, it is another place that might benefit from an infusion of energetic refugees and other immigrants. Clearly, what has been done in Amsterdam over the last century hasn’t worked. It needs new people and new ideas. 

The Course of Empire, Destruction, Thomas Cole

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE – ROCHESTER

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The Rochester Philharmonic in Kodak Hall

The cities that flourished as a result of the construction of the Erie Canal during the first half of the 19th Century are great places, blessed with abundant natural beauty around them. I took a recent driving trip to Rochester, Syracuse, Amsterdam, Schenectady and Troy (with visits to Auburn, Seneca Falls and Corning in the Finger Lakes region as well). Rochester, the state’s fourth largest city by population has a tremendous depth of anchor institutions, and a downtown with great potential for a mixed-use 24 hour downtown. Schenectady and Troy have beautiful, active downtowns. Syracuse and Amsterdam have serious, but solvable, problems. Over the next several weeks I hope to share my thoughts about these visits – my first to all of these places – a trip which I have long wanted to make. This week I will focus Rochester and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Over the distance of almost two hundred years, it is difficult to appreciate the historical significance of the Erie Canal to New York City, New York State, and, in fact to the country as a whole. The Mohawk River Valley, which more or less encompasses the geography between Lake Erie and the Hudson River, is the only flat body of water that crosses what is otherwise the transportation obstacle of the Appalachian Mountain range. The Appalachians, running from Maine to Georgia, served as a barrier to commerce and communications between the eastern and western portions of the early United States (before railroads and the telegraph). When completed, the canal enabled the shipping of commodities from the all over the Midwest to the East, utilizing the Great Lakes, the Ohio River and the Mississippi as feeder routes. At the same time, it permitted manufactured goods to be shipped from the industrial states of the North and the cotton growing states of the South to the growing Western states. At the fulcrum of this commerce was New York City, and its deep and sheltered harbor at the end of the trade route at the mouth of the Hudson River; between east and west, and between the US and Europe as well. It is hard to imagine today, but the rise of the New York City as the financial and commercial center of an empire was nearly entirely originally based on commerce supported by the canal. 

The canal was built over about seven years beginning in 1825, in an effort led by Governor DeWitt Clinton. While it used the water and geography of the Mohawk River, much of the canal had to be dug by hand parallel to the shallow, non-navigable river. The canal was a truly amazing accomplishment of human effort – and of engineering. While the canal was used for almost a century, the development of railroad infrastructure came hard on the heels of its completion, with the final leg of what became the New York Central Railroad across New York State finished in 1839. The “Age of the Erie Canal” was short but world shaking.

The canal required 83 locks along its 350-mile route to move freight vertically along its route, in many places enabling the circumnavigation of waterfalls. The vertical drop between the Lake Erie and the Hudson was only about 700 feet. But even more impressive were the 18 aqueducts that were built to cross over other rivers. The idea of building a structure over a river to carry freight loaded barges on water over other bodies of water is hard for the modern imagination to conceive. The longest of these aqueducts went through what became the city of Rochester over the Genesee River. 

Innovation Square Building

Over the next 150 years Rochester became the silicon valley of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Kodak, Bausch & Lomb and Xerox all got their start in Rochester. The huge Gannett newspaper chain was based in Rochester until recently. Rochester, and the region, also played a large role in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movement. For a large part of his adult life, Frederick Douglass lived in Rochester with his family and published his newspaper “The North Star” there. The level of political and intellectual activity in Rochester and the nearby small Finger Lake towns was truly remarkable (and the number of 19th century-founded institutions of higher education in the region is reflective of that).

The civic and business leadership of Rochester over the many decades took establishing a major metropolis seriously. They created the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, and more recently the George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film. Rochester became an essential part of the US’ art music ecology as the home of the Eastman School of Music (one of the country’s two or three best) and the Rochester Philharmonic. 

The RPO is in the second tier of American orchestras by budget size as designated by the League of American Orchestras. Led music director Andreas Delft, however, it plays at a level that matches those of our largest ensembles (his predecessors in that role included Eugene Goosens, Erich Leinsdorf and David Zinman). It plays in Kodak Hall of the Eastman Theater at the Eastman School of Music. Originally built with 3,500 seats, it is a very, very large, high-ceilinged room – although the seating was reduced by 1,200 in 2009. When I stepped into the tremendous mass of space that is Kodak Hall, sitting about halfway back, I was concerned about the sound possibly being hollow and swallowed up. The orchestra, dressed in the now decreasingly used white tie, filled the space with a rich, clear, accomplished sound. I heard a program that included Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28,” Saint-Saen’s “Carnival of the Animals, with duo pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka.” The program was billed as “Orchestral Showpieces,” and that provided a first-time listener a good idea of the group’s musical capacity. 

The performances were simply excellent with a warm string resonance and glitch free solos – no small achievement in the Strauss’s exposed wind and horn parts. The Strauss was played in technicolor, with the piece’s humor and theatricality highlighted. The color coordinated and brightly dressed Naughton twins attacked their pianos aggressively, with precise coordination in the “Carnival of the Animals”. So much of this music has worked its way into the heart of the culture and is very familiar, none more so than The Swan movement, beautifully played by principal cellist Ahrim Kim. The soloists’ moments in all three pieces were played with great musicality and skill, but without showy virtuosity. This is an orchestra that clearly enjoys playing together with its music director as an organic ensemble. It was particularly evident in the “Petrushka,” another colorful work with comic moments. “Petrushka” is rhythmically complicated and spare, with much of the exposed orchestral scoring that is so characteristic of Stravinsky’s early music (the piece premiered in 1911). The orchestra made a tight, delightful show of its contrasts of both dark and light moments. I walked out after the concert into downtown Rochester musically contented. 

The former headquarters of Gannett Newspapers

Downtown Rochester suffered from the degradations of the now mostly discredited ideas of mid-twentieth century urbanism and design. Its peak population was in the 1950’s, and only in the last decade has the population stopped declining. The downtown is filled with structured parking (and very few parking lots) and has a good number of daunting, tower in the park-like office buildings. The lack of lot parking gives the downtown a feeling of continuity. The city, though, has superficially followed a number of the latest urban trends, with some restored public spaces, scooters and bike lanes (without many people using any of them). Most distressing to me was the empty complex of buildings once occupied by Gannett newspapers in the center of town, before it decamped to a suburban Washington, D.C. office park in 1984 and moved the production of the local paper to another Rochester location in 2016. These are massive art deco and Albert Kahn designed buildings created around now obsolete technologies like the printing press and the typewriter. I am an optimist and have thought that the market will find uses for the post-pandemic half filled, midtown Manhattan, midcentury modern office towers. But walking around the Gannett complex gives one pause about the destructive capacity of modern capitalism and the difficulty of recycling gargantuan 20th century edifices. 

Across the street from the Gannett complex, at the foot of what was the aqueduct across the Genesee, is an 80,000 square foot, mixed-use – loft, office, retail – adaptive reuse development in a former mill that may demonstrate what the future of Downtown Rochester could be like. However, in order to get there, Rochester needs to veer away from both obsolete planning doctrine and the superficial trappings of up-to-date urbanism – a bench here, a planter there, public sculpture somewhere else, and dig deep into placemaking practice in order to become a mixed-use, 24 hour downtown. I even saw a sign opposing the formation of a business improvement district – a thirty-year-old concept, the best days of which have passed, particularly in cities of fewer than one million people.

An unused bike lane on the Aqueduct Bridge over the Genesee. The bridge also has nice, unused benches and planters.

Right now, downtown Rochester is a place designed to accommodate people who drive to work in an office building, and drive home to adjacent neighborhoods and suburbs at night. There is a mindset in Rochester that needs to change to make the most of its substantial social infrastructure. The blank walls and lifeless plazas around the downtown’s major office buildings are a challenge. I even saw a sign on steps leading to what appears to be the city’s leading office building prohibiting sitting on the steps up to its plaza! That is exactly WRONG. Property management ought to be encouraging step sitting and working to animate the baren plazas. The city needs to select a promising central location and build a critical mass of activity around that place. Scattered residential loft buildings throughout the downtown aren’t going to build that critical mass of activity. Especially given the lifelessness around the major office towers. The downtown needs sidewalk activity in the form of restaurants with outdoor seating and public spaces programmed with activity like Bryant and Dilworth Parks. The deep cultural resources of the community, like Eastman School and the excellent RPO, can be leveraged to bring vibrancy downtown, particularly at night. 

Steps to the plaza of the Metropolitan office tower
Sign next to the steps
The tower

With 100,000 fewer residents than at its peak, Rochester is excellent evidence that we don’t have a housing crisis in the United States and in New York State, but rather we have a lack of great places (and a failure to provide adequate mental health services to our most disadvantaged neighbors). Rochester and its neighbors have capacity. Tens of thousands of people, most recently from Venezuela, want desperately to be in the US. Upstate New York needs those people and their expertise and energy. We need policies that move them from the Southern border to our postindustrial cities. The Erie Canal corridor is a place of great beauty and opportunity. Utica, for example, has been recharged by an influx of Bosnian immigrants.  The legacy of the Erie Canal could be more great places across one of New York State’s most naturally stunning locations. More on that when we move on to other Mohawk Valley cities. 

By Thomas Cole