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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
