Category: Animals
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At the turn of the 20th century, a small streetcar station stood at the corner of East Main Street and Chamberlain Street, a little grassy corner that now stands in front of the RTS building. Though small, quaint, and unassuming, this little station was the portal leading from the city out to the pleasure resorts…
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This is the second part of my presentation, “Lost in Highland Park”, commissioned by the Highland Park Conservancy. I presented this at their annual meeting on April 29th, 2026, and have been posting the contents piecemeal via this blog. You may click the following link to access Lost in Highland Park Pt. 1: The Foreman’s…
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If you’re a Rochesterian, there is one crucial aspect without which no picture of daily life is fully rendered; a familiar and frustrating piece of the Rochester experience that can’t be left aside. I’m speaking, naturally, of snow and its removal, which you may have gleaned from the title. Rochester has long been gifted with…
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Last time we went into the history of one corner of East Main Street and Elm with the entry Before Midtown; let us now cross over Elm Street to another history-rich lot of land. Vaguely triangular in shape, this expensive lot of commercial real estate was once the site of Rochester’s most prominent homes. For…
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The familiar present-day greenspace of Parcel 5 on East Main Street, between Cortland Street and Andrew Langston Way, was a commercial and recreational hotspot since the 1840s. While in living memory this space held McCurdy’s–and, notably, the Midtown Plaza of which McCurdy’s comprised a large part–that was but the most recent of the decades of…
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August 14th, 1947, was a hot day. The masonry was baking like it was back in the kiln, and down on the street the temperature was merciless. The heat kept building, and building, all throughout the day. And then, just a few minutes after six o’clock in the evening, it collapsed. In the blind attic…
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I’ll admit that I tend to shy away from topics that have been covered in more depth by far more adept historians than myself, and those topics which are more well-known by the general Rochesterian public. After all, I pretend to have neither any sort of special insight into history nor access to any special…
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It can be fully shocking how much of an impact Rochester’s development has had on the landscape around it. More than two centuries of human habitation can cause some major changes; one of the most impressive may be the complete filling in of the Deep Hollow Creek. Once a magnificent natural feature of Rochester’s west…
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Content warning: this entry contains references to killing birds. If it helps, nobody manages it very effectively. It was the spring of the year 1900, and a strange new bird had been spotted flitting around the streets of Rochester. The unfamiliar avian was black and shiny, whistling a merry tune, and perching atop streetcar wires.…