Category: Businesses
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In our last edition of Gonechester, we touched upon the Warner Observatory, an astronomical observatory on East Avenue at Arnold Park which was funded in large part by Hulbert Harrington Warner. Warner, a quite wealthy man with great import in the Rochester business community, was initially a producer of safes, but later pivoted to a…
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Updated September 24th, 2026. Once upon an increasingly long time, Rochester was home to the largest and most advanced telescope in the United States of America, outside the Naval Observatory. This powerful astronomical instrument set Rochester apart as a star-gazing capital in the 1880s, and drew much admiration and attention from the astronomically-inclined set. Like…
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Updated September 19th, 2026 Every now and then, I come across names of streets which have long ceased to be. Sometimes those streets literally stopped existing; other times, they were devoured by larger, more traffic-heavy streets; sometimes, they were simply renamed. So it was when I was stumbled upon several entries in 1830s Rochester city…
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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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The crazy thing about time is that it can hide an entire building. A big old brick building on the corner, dwelling place of many and site of shops frequented by many more, can be utterly obscured by history’s shroud. How? All it takes is absence: no camera pointed that direction, no images kept in…
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The old and venerable Blossom Hotel stood on the north side of Main Street, near the corner of St. Paul Street. A respite for travelers along road or canal, the Blossom Hotel enjoyed a high profile reputation. Wamsley Brothers was comprised of Joseph, Thomas, and Edward Wamsley, milliners and silk merchants. The Wamsleys moved their…
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In honor of the self-selected birthday of Frederick Douglass, I spent an agonizing amount of time digging into the history of his briefly-held home on Alexander Street. Long now lying as a parking lot, this unremarkable site on the west side of Alexander Street had a long history–much of which is quite difficult to piece…
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On the northeast corner of East Main and Culver, there is now a McDonald’s. Yes, classy, I know; that’s not the thrust of this article, though. What’s really in question, as per most Gonechester articles, is what came before, and how it came to be, in the end, a McDonald’s. At the outset of its…
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