The Old Third Ward is chock-a-block with history, and far too much of it is gone. The gas-lit brick streets of the prosperous old neighborhoods met the modern day with a destructive crash, leaving dozens of architectural gems razed in favor of the Inner Loop, Civic Center, and myriad other brainchildren of the city fathers.

A quaint remnant of an older time once existed where now there is only parking outside the Public Safety Building. Evocative memories of the old corner grocery, houses from the 1820s, a beloved, dusty old bookstore, a saloon filled with dancing; it’s a charming sort of picture, even if it’s a conflation of multiple decades.

I first read about this small slice of our city in the below 1917 article, the narrator of which wanders down Spring Street until he or she meets a faded sign, a relic of a simpler time: Mogridge Court.

Intrigued, I dug in more to Mogridge Court. As with many stories, the story of Mogridge Court begins with a man buying a graveyard.

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The Bicknell Houses

The first of the Mogridge Court structures to be built were the famous Bicknell houses, a set of houses constructed along Falls [now Spring] Street between Sophia [now Plymouth Ave] Street and School Alley. Caleb Bicknell, who had a blacksmith’s shop at No. 5 Spring, erected the houses around 1823.

The site Bicknell had purchased for his construction had been, up until that point the first cemetery of Rochesterville. Upon passing to Bicknell, the remains in the grounds were disinterred and moved to the West Burying Ground on Buffalo Street [West Main], then moved again to Mount Hope when City Hospital was built on the abandoned Buffalo Street grounds.

Note that the above photograph contains the merest glimpse, at far left, of the porches of the brick building at the southeast corner of the Mogridge Court complex, adjacent to School Alley. This was likely the building on which the faded old “Mogridge Court” sign was displayed.

No. 67 Spring Street was probably most famous as the bookshop of George P. Humphrey, a well-known and well-loved bookseller.

No. 67 would pass from George P. Humphrey’s hands into those of artist Trijinko [or Trynko] “Teddy” Wolfard and his wife Clara. It became the first home of the Wolfard Gallery before its move to a carriage house at No. 9 South Goodman Street.

No. 63 Spring Street–the brick house on the corner of School Alley–would gain its own renown as the House of Foran, a saloon popular with the swing-dancing set for its lively jam sessions.

Being the oldest remaining houses of the old Third Ward, the Bicknell houses and Nos. 63 & 67 would become a popular subject for artists. The Rochester Athenæum & Mechanics Institute, ancestor of the modern RIT, would be built across Spring Street from the houses, making them attractive sketch studies for students.

Woodcut artist Norman Kent was fond of the houses, creating at least two works inspired by them; “63 and 67 Spring Street” and “The Old Bookshop”.

And, of course, Ralph Avery did numerous sketches and paintings of Spring Street and the Bicknell Houses:

Interestingly, according to the above, the door of No. 63 Spring Street would end up on the Phoenix Building in Pittsford:

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John G. Mogridge

John Mogridge was born in South Molton, Devonshire, in England in 1833. In 1852 he emigrated to America [sailing from Bideford Quay], where he entered the grocery business in Rochester, NY.

Or wait, I guess it was Rochester, New Zork. My bad.

Mogridge purchased a property on Plymouth near Spring Street, and built an expansion onto it at the corner of Plymouth and Spring. There, he operated a grocery store for over thirty years.

In July of 1885, Mogridge took out a permit to build a large brick business block at the corner of Spring Street and Plymouth Avenue, designed by architects Warner & Brockett. The contractor is given in American Architect and Architecture as “W. N. Gorshire” but, as nobody of that name seems to exist at all, I’m fairly certain they mean William H. Gorsline.

By November of 1885, the new block was completed and accepting tenants:

The large Mogridge block can be seen in the photo below; the view is towards the southeast corner of Plymouth and Spring, thus Spring Street to the left and Plymouth at foreground and to the right. The Bicknell houses can be seen at left. A large sign atop the cornice says “MOGRIDGE BUILDING”.

It was taken in 1922, as the late John Mogridge’s daughter Mary M. Watkins arranged a sale to Horace I. Kendall, an insurance broker.

Mogridge Court at time of sale consisted of the large brick block on the corner of Spring and Plymouth, taken together with the two Bicknell houses on Spring, a brick house on Plymouth, an apartment building on School Alley and a frame house accessible by Mogridge Court, the L-shaped access road linking Spring Street with School Alley.

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[An Aside on Aaron Erickson]

I’ll stop here to briefly comment on the interesting note above, about the window being removed from No. 63 Spring Street, the brick Bicknell house, and placed in an East Avenue home.

Young Aaron Erickson worked for a year as a blacksmith for Caleb Bicknell, and boarded at Bicknell’s house during this time. Gaining a fortune in wool and other industries, and founding the Union Bank, Erickson moved to a large and attractive mansion at No. 421 East Avenue. Erickson died January 27, 1880.

Erickson’s daughter, Caroline Erickson, married Gilman [not Gilson] Hill Perkins, and together founded the Western New York Institute for Deaf Mutes [a progenitor of Rochester School for the Deaf].

Gilman H. and Caroline Perkins would come to live in her late father’s house, No. 421 East Avenue, now the Genesee Valley Club. It is presumably this East Avenue home where Caroline would install the window originally sourced from the brick Bicknell house on Spring Street.

For more information about the Erickson/Perkins family than you could ever wish, follow this link.

That’s enough for that little aside. Let’s get back to Mogridge Court.

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Midcentury Menaces

By 1950, a small structure had been built at No. 69 Spring street, plugging up the Spring Street end of the Mogridge Court drive.

With the decade of the 1950s came many modern plans to menace the old structures of the Third Ward. First, the Inner Loop was planned to cut through with the inevitable destructiveness of a tornado.

Plans as laid out above did change a bit. Though the Inner Loop’s path was altered somewhat, it failed to save Mogridge Court, which was still torn down for the construction of the Civic Center and associated parking garage.

Judging by the brick building and wooden balcony in the photo above, the sign was hung on the apartment house closest to School Alley, in the southeast corner of the Mogridge Court complex.

And so, it happened once again as it has happened many times in our history; the quaint and storied–albeit disheveled–buildings of the past give way to unwelcoming concrete structures and parking, parking, parking. Though my research into this area paints a rosy picture of a fairy-tale township, there’s no way to know for sure what it was really like; there is no way for me to walk through the door of Humphrey’s dusty bookshop, nor peruse Molgridge’s grocery wares, nor swing-dance at one of Foran’s Sunday Night jam sessions. It’s all gone.

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