Category: Restaurants
-
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…
·
-
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…
·
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Before restaurants were really called “restaurants”, there were still places to have a sit-down and some refreshments. During the early-to-mid 19th century, a type of establishment known as a “Recess” was prevalent throughout Rochester. Son of the old tavern, father of the saloon, the recess was a cozy nook of decorative hardwood and brass, easily…