Sometimes I like to imagine.

I’m fond of one imagined scenario in particular: imagining what a normal, everyday activity like getting a cup of coffee would be like if I were to suddenly and inexplicably start slipping through time.

Say you take a street corner and you find yourself encountering a vista from 1920? What if you looked up from your smartphone and your coffee only to find a row of 19th-century houses where you’d expected a modern concrete building? What if unrealized plans made themselves real as you watched? If civic infrastructure that had been pitched into the dustbin of history, now was flickering, glitching into reality?

It’d be pretty freaky, wouldn’t it?

Well, I’m going to subject you to just that. This is a little scenario I like to call “A Gibbs Street Multiverse”. As you may have gleaned from the title.

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An Upset at East Main

At last, after a long ride, you’ve almost reached your favorite cafe; Java’s, on Gibbs Street. There in the inspiring heart of Rochester’s downtown arts district, you are surrounded by the legacy of George Eastman’s love of music and the arts. The strains of instrumental practice float down from some unseen height.

You slow your bike to allow a group of Eastman School of Music students cross East Main Street, carrying their various oddly-shaped instrument cases. While there, you take in the ornate poster-frames on the Eastman Theater.

Suddenly, the street shifts strange. There’s a queasy feeling that comes over you, like you’re floating between passing moments. Where the Eastman Theater once stood you see a small handful of large, ornately-built houses. They look very old indeed.

This home would belong to Theodore Bacon, son-in-law of Judge Henry Selden, until his death in 1911. After that it would be owned by Anna London, who ran the house and the adjacent house [left, below] at No. 431 as a boarding house and dining room.

You shake your head, attempting to dispel the strange vision when a sudden cacophony directs your attention to happenings on the street. Men and women are shouting and screaming as a stagecoach–a stagecoach? It certainly looks like one–hooks the corner of Main Street onto Gibbs too quickly, tipping and at last overturning as you watch in terror.

In the midst of a cloud of stirred-up street-dust a crowd converges and sets to work; the injured are extricated from the stagecoach with haste. “Bring them to Mr. Bacon’s!” you hear shouted. The houses you saw at the corner–where Eastman Theater really ought to be–now were serving as imprompu hospitals, as the most grievously injured stagecoach passengers were brought in for treatment.

You’re unsure how to help or even if you can; the scene is unfamiliar, the events bizarre. And yet all that ever separated you from this moment was elapsed time. The sensation is dizzying.

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A House on the Move

Nonplussed by this sudden and shocking turn of temporal events, you attempt to continue your journey, hoping that history will reassert itself as you walk. It does, temporarily; the familiar surroundings of 2024 Gibbs Street return. Confident that whatever spell overwhelmed you has passed, you carry on to Java’s.

As you approach Barrett Alley, the wall of Eastman Theatre seems to give way, time’s façade crumbling before your eyes to reveal a site of intense activity. A massive brick edifice is being arduously moved from its position adjacent the alley by a team of workers, the whole great structure propped upon risers on rollers, inching gradually upon rails in the roadbed.

The huge brick house at No. 26 Gibbs Street once held the offices of George Eastman’s esteemed friend and physician, Dr. Edward Wright Mulligan, whose home was at No. 788 East Avenue.

During the construction of the Eastman School of Music, this imposing brick building was moved ever-so-slowly southeast, crossing Swan Street, where it was settled in its new spot on the east side of Swan Street.

Oddly, though No. 26 Gibbs Street was moved to No. 6 Swan Street, it apparently maintained its former number, becoming No. 26 Swan Street. At least, that’s how it seems to have shaken out.

No. 26 Swan Street as the office of Burroughs Adding Machine Co. can be seen in the below photograph, behind this stately East Avenue mansion on the corner of Swan street:

Cropped and zoomed, one can see the BURROUGHS sign oriented vertically along the side of the building.

The next owner would be Robert V. Deverian, of the prominent Armenian family whose local dealings in oriental rugs and decor has been ongoing for generations. The building would be used for rug cleaning, while apartments would be rented out in the rest–fully furnished with oriental rugs! I’m sold, personally.

More than just a rug-cleaning establishment, No. 26 Swan Street would serve as the Robert V. Deverian Galleries, wherein fine items of art and decor were displayed for sale:

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Nos. 37 & 41 Gibbs

Unsettled by this moving house where once a stately theater stood, you shake your head, and cast your eyes across the street to the Miller Center, but instead glimpse a set of ornate Queen Anne style houses. A matronly and stern-looking woman strides up to its porch, followed like a general by a column of primly-dressed young women. Their shoulders upright and books on a strap by their side, you quickly surmise the group of girls to be students beginning their day.

In the photo below taken during the 1918 War Chest Parade, the view is from the east side of Gibbs Street looking northwest towards East Main Street. The numbers of the visible houses at the time were [from left to right] 37 and 41. The wooden balcony along the brick building in the background was on the back of Nos. 407-415 East Main Street.

In the photo below taken during the 1920 construction of the Eastman School of Music you can see the very tops of the same two houses from above. The view is from the east side of Gibbs Street looking up at girders being erected; the tops of houses on the west side of Gibbs Street are visible. The numbers of the visible houses at the time were [from left to right] 31, 37, and 41. The wooden balcony along the brick building in the lower right-hand corner was on the back of Nos. 407-415 East Main Street.

These houses are also visible in the lower-left of this glorious 1922 photo shot from the roof of the newly-constructed Sagamore Hotel:

At last, in 1924, the house was sold to undisclosed interests; this was probably its death knell. Before long, the structures on this side of the street were targeted for replacement with office buildings.

Time seems to lurch ahead–speeding through decades at a blur. The beautiful houses come down; in their places go up buildings, full of shops and offices and apartments.

These buildings, the Elbs Arcade and the Gibbs Apartments, were constructed by John G. Elbs, whose fortune had been made in the apparently lucrative egg tray business:

These buildings would last until 1983, when they were demolished:

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Genesee Valley Clubhouse

You sit down at a cute cafe table with your favorite drink. Maybe it’s a chocolate sitch, or a terrapin, or a chai latte. You sip, and scroll along your phone, ignoring that novel you brought along to read.

Perhaps you’re reading Gonechester. Meta, isn’t it?

That same strange shifting of reality you’d felt before comes over you again; you look up, surveying the street in trepidation. Once again, the scene was wrong–where usually Miller Center [the former Eastman Place] stood was a large overbuilt structure of brick. You can hear the chatter and laughter of men wafting from the upper balconies.

Increased urbanization and heightened traffic along East Avenue made the site significantly less attractive for the club set, and so the building was sold off to other interests, becoming the Lawless Building. The Genesee Valley Club moved to a building at East Avenue and Alexander Street, and the old clubhouse was refitted with shops and offices.

In 1950 a section of the storied structure would become the charming and well-loved Town and Country Restaurant at No. 11 Gibbs Street.

It would remain open until being squeezed out in 1969 by the actions of a surprising set of unscrupulous absentee landlords–the wealthy Astor family of Great Britain.

Apparently in the early 1960s British tax law exemption loopholes caused the aristocratic Astor family to make numerous real estate purchases in the area, including the old clubhouse on the northwest corner of East Avenue and Gibbs Street. Later on, after further tax law changes closed the loophole, the Astors would divest themselves of these properties; the clubhouse would be slated for demolition by Allright Auto Parks, Inc., for more parking.

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The Skyway Bridge

You’ve warily turned back to your beverage, contemplating whether you should go home, or go to the hospital. Moments tick by without any strange visions. Perhaps the past has passed.

Movement catches your eye, and you look to see people walking–some fifteen to twenty feet above the ground. Seeming almost to flicker into and out of reality, an elevated walkway stretches between the Eastman School of Music and the Eastman Place/Miller Center building across Gibbs Street. A stream of students passes back and forth over Gibbs, glancing down at cafe patrons like yourself, below.

Part of the plan for Eastman Place, now Miller Center, was to have a pedestrian bridge over Gibbs Street, connecting the new building with the Eastman Theatre. If all went to plan, this would continue the path of the planned pedestrian bridge between the Metro Center Garage (the East End Garage) and Eastman Theatre, which similarly never came to fruition.

The planned skyway bridge is visible on the left-hand side of the below architectural drawing. Its western endpoint appears to be second floor above the present main entrance of Eastman Place/Miller Center, which seems to imply it would have angled northward to meet the Eastman Theater at its eastern endpoint.

The planned pedestrian bridge over Gibbs Street was also drawn into the diagram included in the below 1985 article:

Obviously, this bridge connection never came to be, like many other bridges in the skyway system. But that’s probably an entry for another time! In the meantime, this possible parallel universe is but a flicker in our character’s peripheral vision, a reality that never was.

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And So On…

Obviously, if I touched upon every change on this segment of Gibbs Street in the last century-and-a-half, it would make for a violently oversized entry. Therefore, I selected a few items of interest to illustrate my scene.

It is interesting to think about how much we rely on the passage of time to make sense of the world. Imagine events like the above, where what was past no longer determined what was to come. If moments of time could be shuffled randomly, defying our concrete conventions of cause and effect, what madness it would cause in the human mind! For as difficult as it is to truly grasp the passage of time, we’ve built our lives around it; it”s the medium in which we move, like water to a fish or space to an alien blob monster.

Tempting as it is to think, “I’d love to go back again…” We go forward. That’s what we do. And that’s part of what makes history so intriguing; the feeling that we’re so close, but forever divided.

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