Tell It Like It Is

Downtown Rochester New York 1932
Downtown Rochester New York 1932

Can downtown Rochester ever get its mojo back? Just about every old warehouse, school, factory or department store has been converted to lofts for young urbanites or old empty-nesters but the streets don’t have as much life as this 1932 photo.

Thomas Grasso, president of the Canal Society of New York State, wrote a dreamy guest editorial for the Democrat & Chronicle over the weekend that proposed re-watering the portion of the Erie Canal that used to cross the Genesee River on the Broad Street aqueduct in the middle of downtown Rochester. The idea has been gathering steam for some time now and is really not any more unlikely than filling in half the Inner Loop seemed only a few years ago. It is a far better proposal than Frederick L. Olmstead’s arcade and certainly better than the bone-headed idea of putting city government subsidized shops in the former dank underground homeless refuge.

So let’s make this one happen. A simple diversion of a portion of the canal’s current path would carry water downtown and across the river. This has four season potential as a big draw, a man made marvel created almost 200 years ago, a giant magnet.

And while we’re dreaming, I read Eugene Robinson’s editorial on MLK’s call for economic justice in 1968. “One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality,” King said. “That America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. . . . But as we assemble here tonight, I’m sure that each of us is painfully aware of the fact that there is another America, and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.” The speech, made just before he was shot, was brilliant but what was more striking than the excerpts was the realization that we have no politician or civic leader today that can talk like that.

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