Category: Landmarks
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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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This entry is a bit of a departure; while usually I’m plumbing pretty deeply into the past and drawing up places long gone patronized by persons long dead, this time I’m dropping my line into the shallower end of history’s fishpond. Come with me back to a cozy and familiar café in the heart of…
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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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Sign of the STEAMING tea-kettle. The word caught my eye. “Steaming”. Did the tea kettle actually steam? I had to know more. Why, you ask? If you’re a regular reader, I admonish you; you should know better than to ask me why I need to know more. That’s what this is all about. If this…
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Updated August 21st, 2026. Time moves ever forward at an inexorable pace. Long before the internet, long before the atomic clock and even a bit before the quartz clock, these mechanical marvels ticked away the seconds through the sheer wizardry of cogs and sprockets. Standing proudly on pedestals beside the street, or clinging to the…
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Before its annexation by the City of Rochester in 1904, the intersection of East Avenue and Winton Road [at that time known as North and South Avenues] was the center village of Brighton, the heartbeat of its folksy commercial and social life. With its close proximity to the old course of the Erie Canal, this…
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Updated August 16th, 2026 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…