Category: Churches
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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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Death is deep. Deeper, even, than the grave. Long after their lives have ended, the remains and memories of the dead are still in the care of the living–and often left to specific individuals. An immense amount of trust is placed in the hands of the grave-keepers and cemetery sextons; they are tasked with maintaining…
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Every young city lived in fear of fire. Old wood houses were a veritable tinderbox, and there was no dearth of combustion sources; this was an age of wood- and coal-fired ovens, of gas lamps, of railroads putting off sparks, of incautious industry tossing smoldering, chemical garbage into the dumps. These were times when oily…
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The first public timepiece in Rochester, NY was a sun-dial which stood in the yard between the Presbyterian church and the first court house, on the east side of Fitzhugh Street. A wooden upright in the shape of a Latin cross, it was affixed at a forty-five degree angle to a base made from an…
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Very obviously, the Sagamore Hotel isn’t entirely gone; the building itself yet remains, albeit altered irrevocably through decades of residency, renames, renovations and resales. If one wants to be poetic and speak of the soul of a building, there’s a good argument that the Sagamore qua Sagamore died and its unspectacular corpse has been shambling…
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It is as inspiring as it is slightly unnerving how the work of an artist’s hands can go on existing for so long after the artist has left us. The act of bringing sculptures and paintings into the world is one of planting seeds of trees under whose shade one may never sit. The artist,…