Category: Fields
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Since last time we did the northeast corner of East Main Street and Culver, why not do the even more historic northwest corner, just across Culver Road. This started out as the very old and rustic farmstead of the Schanck family, a prominent pioneer family whose Brighton home was early gobbled up by Rochester’s eastward…
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This is a repost of the original 2025 post: [https://gonechester.com/2025/01/06/twelfth-night-bonfires/] Starting in the early 1930s, there was a revival in the celebration of Twelfth Night–or the twelfth day after Christmas–on January 6th by building a massive bonfire of old Christmas trees, wreaths, and laurels. An old custom, its renewal was inspired by local artist George…
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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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While perusing the Plat Maps–how many times am I going to start an entry this way?–I took note of an intriguing building which didn’t seem to fit with its neighborhood friends. As it was facing diagonally on a north-south street, I got the sense that this was a house far older than its fellows. You…
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Updated 8/1/2026 If the road we knew today as Atlantic Avenue were to wander back in time to the turn of the previous century, we would see it pick up its old sobriquet of University Avenue from the horizon line, dust it off, and cross the Central-Hudson railroad tracks with it. There at the crossroads, on…
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During the 1950’s William Ringle Jr., reporter for Gannett, would write a column for the Rochester Times-Union which presented brief histories of street names around Rochester, NY. As his fellow avid toponymist, I have collected these articles whereever I have found them–and was most enthused when I came across a full scrapbook containing the cut-and-pasted…
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In my research regarding my local neighborhood one name comes up prominently again and again: Allen L. Wood. Wood’s extensive land holdings meant his name became ubiquitously written across the plat maps of subdivisions along Culver road, between Garson and Atlantic, and stretching east nearly to Akron Street. The reason for these extensive land holdings…