I’m a big fan of tall and skinny little buildings. I wish our city were full of them, Amsterdam-style. Unfortunately, I don’t live in that Rochester; however our little city did have a handful of cute architectural gems during its long history. I’ve touched upon a pair of elegant, tall-and-narrow iron-fronted buildings that used to stand in the Four Corners in a previous entry. Today, I’d like to look at another sweet little building that stood long ago on West Main Street.

This 1908 image is of the buildings on the southwest corner of West Main Street and Fitzhugh. It has been cropped and zoomed to frame the narrow building sandwiched between the Rochester Savings Bank, center-left, and the old “Rochester Chemical Works”, AKA the C. B. Woodworth perfumery building, right, marked “POOL”.

The history of this quaint four-storey brick building is closely tied with its much larger, more ornate, and also long-destroyed neighbor, the Rochester Savings Bank building at the corner of West Main and Fitzhugh. It’s amusing–sort of–to focus my efforts on this little building when such a massive historical wedding cake stands literally next door, and yet it’s precisely because the beautiful old Rochester Savings Bank draws so much attention that I feel compelled to draw its small companion, No. 59 West Main, out of the shadow and into the limelight.

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Chicken Row

Prior to 1853, the south side of Buffalo Street west of Fitzhugh was home to a ramshackle row of flammable old derelict shops and boarding-houses, known affectionately by the epithet “Chicken Row”.

Chicken Row was purchased in part by the Rochester Savings Bank in 1853, as grounds to erect its new bank building.

The next day after its purchase was finalized, Chicken Row burst into flames seemingly without cause. Hours of firefighting came to naught as the fire gradually spent itself of fuel. The gathered crowd produced a rope and, as one, pulled down the remaining structures of Chicken Row.

Somehow, these pulled-down ruins themselves burst into flames, turning the last vestiges of Chicken Row into soot and cinder.

The Rochester Savings Bank and C. B. Woodworth & Son’s perfumery built up their buildings upon this plot, but a vacant lot was left between the two for many years. In 1868, William Corning of the prominent Webster family purchased this vacant lot, for construction of his bank building.

The earliest photo of No. 59 West Main Street I could find is below; No. 59 is on the extreme right, shoulder-to-shoulder with the old Rochester Savings Bank. At this time, however, the address was No. 109 Buffalo Street; the addresses would change in 1884, at which point it would become No. 59 West Main Street.

Right off the bat one knows this photo isn’t from 1853; it is more likely to be sometime between 1870 and 1873; Corning’s building was built in 1869-1870 and appears in the photo, but the Academy Building on Fitzhugh, constructed 1873, was not yet built in the photo.

Still, only a difference of two decades.

A clearer version of the photo can be found on mcnygenealogy.com, albeit with the right side cropped:

Below, a photograph of the corner in 1880, with the Academy Building and the additional levels of the Rochester Savings Bank–added 1877–in place. No. 109 Buffalo Street, now No. 59 West Main Street, is absolutely dwarfed by its ostentatious neighbor.

The 1888 “Ye Citie of Rochester” shows No. 59 as a barely-rendered rectangle with some simple windows, next to the ornately-detailed Rochester Savings Bank.

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The Cornings

The William Corning who had No. 59 West Main Street built was a well-known figure in Webster history from the time it was known as North Penfield. He and his brother Timothy B. Corning arrived in the village in 1827 and took on a number of enterprises, including a general store and a hardware store. Eventually, in 1832, they began a general mercantile banking establishment under the name “T. B. & W. Corning Banking-House”.

The above Corning homestead was demolished in 1983.

In 1878, William Corning would purchase the former Elwood home at No. 636 North Saint Paul [eventually to become No. 860 N. St. Paul]:

This would become the final home of William Corning.

William Corning’s brother, Timothy B. Corning, senior partner of the T. B. & W. Corning Banking-House, died in 1874 in the city of Saginaw, Michigan, where he had removed with his son Gurdon to take on lumber interests.

Gurdon Corning remained in Saginaw, working in the banking and lumber industries:

Despite T. B. Corning’s death, the banking house continued to operate under the name T. B. & W. Corning.

Ill health forced William Corning to remove himself from active business in the late 1880s, his sons J. Sherwood and Edward taking on the business.

After William Corning’s death, all of his surviving children found themselves in court over various legal wranglings. Edward Corning, executor of his late father’s estate, was eventually arrested on charges of contempt of court. J. Sherwood reneged on a contractual deal selling the Century Club on Gibbs Street to the East Avenue Baptist church, causing him years of litigation; at one point he was summoned to court while on the pier, leaving for Italy. Anna Sherwood ended up in a long legal battle with her neighbors when she dammed up a creek passing through her Penfield property, flooding numerous nearby farms.

However, most of the time the Corning kids were out travelling, collecting art pieces for their many homes–by the time of Anna’s death, a tally of thirteen.

One-by-one, the siblings died; Edward in 1908, J. Sherwood in 1923, with Anna being last to go in 1927. The following year, the house on St. Paul at Scrantom Street was opened for a public auction of all the Corning family’s considerable treasures.

The Corning lot on St. Paul and Scrantom was purchased by the belt company Hickok Manufacturing Company,

During the period preceding Anna’s death the Corning estate seemingly held on to No. 59 West Main Street, but it is uncertain what–if anything–they were doing with it beyond leasing the spaces out to various offices and saloons. It does not seem as though the T. B. & W. Corning Banking-house remained an active lender.

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Late 1800s

But that’s all getting ahead of ourselves.

In 1877, while adding new storeys, the Rochester Savings Bank built a lovely walled garden with a fountain in the space between the bank building and the adjacent Rochester Free Academy. This fountain would have been directly to the south of No. 59 West Main Street; a small space would have existed between the frame rear of No. 59 and the 7-foot wall enclosing the bank garden.

I was, unfortunately, unable to find any images of this garden, though I did find textual references:

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1900

In 1900, No. 59 West Main served as the Rochester offices of the Warren-Scharf Asphalt Paving Company.

Above is a brief run-down on Warren-Scharf’s history in the business of asphalt paving, including streets laid and a nod to their source of “Pitch Lake” in Trinidad.

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1910

Come 1910, No. 59 West Main Street is host to a saloon, proprietor Louis Schneider. Louis Schneider seems to have been one of the Schneider Brothers, a set of brothers including a George and a Michael, who had several businesses including saloons and a print shop.

In the photos from 1911 and 1912, No. 59 West Main Street has a set of awnings on its windows. Cute!

The above postcard artwork gives us a sense of the building’s red brick with white trim aesthetic.

Though the time is uncertain on the below photo, it is likely to date to the 1910s based on comparison to other photos:

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No. 59 Razed

No. 59 West Main Street remained standing nearly two decades into the 20th century. The last directory where the building appears as occupied is the 1917-1918 directory, where it belongs to Henry F. Oberst, a saloon-keeper.

In the following directory, 1919-1920, the building is vacant.

By 1922, the building is gone. Just like in the 1860s, there was a space between the Rochester Savings Bank and the former Woodworth perfumery building. This time, however, the gap was filled in with a single-story expansion to the Rochester Savings Bank, in stonework [mostly] matching the original.

The clearest photo I could find closest in time to the razing date was the one below, showing the Knights Templar walking down West Main Street towards Fitzhugh. The gap between the Rochester Savings Bank and No. 61 West Main Street is evident at upper center; a stone addition to the bank has been constructed in the space.

A seam is visible where the new stonework meets the old above the third pilaster from the right, and the new stonework is a visibly different color than the old:

The unusual angle of the photo below is thanks to a tragic fire at the Fay’s Vaudeville Theatre, another lost gem of old Rochester. The placement of the camera and the date of the event reveal something interesting, at least for my purposes here in this entry:

If one looks closely at the photo above, it’s possible to discern a faint discoloration in the outline of the old No. 59 West Main; the contour of the mansard roof is unmistakable.

Above is the last photograph of the old Rochester Savings Bank before its demolition. The one-storey addition between the bank and Nos. 61-69 can be clearly seen. The foundation in that section appears differently-colored.

In 1955, the old Rochester Savings Bank building was razed and, in its place, a new building was constructed.

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So, that’s that. The fifty-year life of a building that lived in the shadow of a far more well-known, grandiose building. It’s hardly noticed by the casual observer, whose eyes hungrily take in the fanciful architecture and the soaring sculptures of the Rochester Savings Bank. Yet this sort of humble brick edifice was the mainstay of an earlier, more human-scaled iteration of Rochester, one which I would have loved to walk through. Alas.

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