Rochester Memories
I spent more than a month last year in Rochester, NY. This morning I found something I wrote about it:
Rochester is an old city. Kodak is headquartered here and they have a massive gothic building downtown with a clock tower. The building I'm working in isn't massive but it's old. There's this odd mix of old and new; old buildings and an old city and in an age of new technologies and new ideas.
You can tell how the shaping of cities has changed over time as you go west. Rochester has a distinct 'downtown', unlike familiar West Coast cities. It isn’t zoned, or at least not to the degree of a Los Angeles or San Diego. The strip malls don’t seem to have the cold logic of the West Coast: stores by association and Starbucks for the proverbial rest stop. There is a lot of brick downtown as well as old concrete. Old concrete – the kind that has different stains of gray, the washing over time. There are many smoke stacks. You can see them rising from old factory buildings downtown, almost as high as the clock tower on the Kodak building. The closest belong to the old Rochester Coal and Electricity Company, which had been long closed. The building is abandoned. It’s funny: on the West Coast we rarely think of the industrial age because we cannot feel its presence. We never see massive broken buildings, smoke stacks, old clock towers – we never see brick and all our concrete moves past us over the speed limit as we hustle our way through L.A. freeways.
Rochester is no Akron, Ohio though, where the cold remnants of the dead industrial revolution feel like a cold wind that never stops blowing. I once worked in Akron, at a Tire Factory that Goodyear attempted to convert into office space – it still smelled like burned rubber. But that is another story.
It's amazing that in every place one finds people there is a social concious, a soul that emerges in that place from the collective energies and attitudes of its inhabitants. As I travel one of the most delightful effects is not only to begin to understand the soul of a place but also become a part of it. I was on the sidewalks of Rochester then, to one side abandoned buildings and urban decay, an old barbershop where an aging black man told me about civil rights and invisible lines and then I was on the other side - the noveau riche suburbs where new franchises bought and inhabited old buildings and one could buy coffee for $4.50.
What is the soul of your city?
7:14:56 AM 
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