The best way to get to know
a city is to explore the off-limit areas. Riding on the back of subway trains in
Boston, leaping across townhouse rooftops in Washington, DC, and poking around
boarded-up hospitals and vacant office buildings in Philadelphia in my reckless
youth taught me more than any Chamber brochure ever could.
                 Getting to know Rochester takes guts, patience, and
in some cases, connections. But if you’re sick of the same old cityscape, crawl
inside and give it another look.
The subway
The 2-mile-long subway
tunnel lies under the city like a dead body in a shallow grave. One leg sticks
out behind Dinosaur Bar-B-Que as if thrown off the Court Street Bridge after a
fight. The coroner’s report reads: The passenger line breathed its last breath
in the early morning hours of July 1, 1956, and the flow of freight trains
stopped 15 years later.
                 Follow the steep grassy hill down from South Avenue
toward the perfect crime scene. The remnants of a destroyed oil house — once
used to store lubricants for the trains — are surrounded by mountains of
trash.
                 Appropriately, I’ve chosen a city cop to accompany me
on my adventure down here. He’s big and burly and packing. But it’s not his gun
I’m interested in. It’s his flashlights. Never go down here with fewer than
three, he says.
                 We pick our way around the spokeless bicycle wheels
and broken bottles toward the mouth of the tunnel that will lead us under the
library and along the aqueduct over the river. The path is rough and the tracks
are gone, moved to the New York Museum of Transportation in Rush by train buffs
in the 1970s.
                 The subway was built in the canal trench when the
Erie Canal was relocated to south of the city in 1919, according to Chuck Lowe,
a trustee of the New York Museum of Transportation and author of Trolleys to Glen Haven. “They had to do something
with it,” he said. “It was an eyesore, unhealthy, and full of standing water.”
                 At the time, Lowe says, no fewer than five train
companies were shipping goods and people to and through Rochester from New York
City, Baltimore, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and points west. In 1927 the subway opened
with two sets of tracks, one for passenger trolleys and one for freight trains.
                 We enter the 20-foot-high tunnel slowly, allowing
our eyes to adjust. It’s windy in here. It turns out none of the three
flashlights have much juice in them, so we walk in the dark. The ceiling soars
so far above us that there’s no echo — sounds get swallowed up.
                 Soon we are walking toward the light again at the
crotch of the tunnel. We follow the leg that bends over the river. The other
leg continues straight under South Avenue to the RG&E plant where,
I’m told, homeless people drape themselves precariously over massive heating
ducts in the winter.
                 We’re under the library looking over a pool of
water that pours out of half-moon-shaped arches into the river below. The
arches and their reflection on the calm water mirror each other. I’m waxing
about the lost beauty of this place when my companion, Investigator Tom Klein,
stiffens and holds his hand up.
                 “Wait,” he says, turning away from the sunlight and
toward the darkness where the other subway leg separates. I can’t see a thing,
even with my flashlight.
                 “It’s a good idea to be aware of the people around
us,” he says. Black shapes in the black tunnel move away. I’m glad I’m with this
guy.
                 A little house next to the staircase for the South
and Court subway entrance appears in the gloom. Coming upon this house is a
little like Planet of the Apes, as
Lowe put it. This dispatchers’ house, he explains, was outside when the subway
ran in an open canal trench. When the library was built in the 1930s, the
subway was covered, house and all.
                 We walk along the aqueduct under Broad Street,
which is like an elaborately decorated belt of fanciful graffiti.
A couple of hundred pitch-black yards past the aqueduct, we approach a vast wall that has
thwarted a generation of subway explorers. Behind it the main downtown station
once stood, under the Democrat and
Chronicle and government buildings. The D&C sealed off the station in the early 1980s to use it for paper shipments and
storage until 1997 when the company moved its printing operations offsite.
                 To our surprise, a small door in the wall has been
kicked in. We step over the twisted metal into a warm, humid cavity. The floor
is smooth concrete and a hissing sound, like air escaping from a punctured
lung, unnerves me. We take a few precious moments of flashlight energy to
orient ourselves. A thin metal pipe on the right drips and hisses. Newish
fluorescent fixtures dangle from the walls, remnants from the station’s second
life as a paper warehouse.
                 This is the inner sanctum; a place so recently
opened that there is no graffiti. A few paintballs are the only evidence of
prior tourists. One of the original painted columns from the subway broadcasts
an age-old admonishment: NO LOITERING.
                 We leave the warm, breath-like air of the chest
cavity through another small, kicked-in door. Back in the cold tunnel we walk
in the dark for what seems like an eternity. I’m hearing things, I’m having
visions, I’m sleepwalking.
                 Dim gray light ahead. If the tunnel is a body, then
this must be the head. We approach two ramps on either side of the track bed
that open like sky-blue eyes. One eye frames a lone reader. He sits above us on
a wall along the ramp dressed in a plaid flannel shirt and knit cap. Klein
greets him and asks where we are. The reader puts his paperback aside and tells
us we’re at Jay Street, beyond Frontier Field.
                 Klein and I hike up the ramp and let the tunnel
rest in peace.
Sibley’s Restaurant
The secrets of Rochester
Past are languishing in a turret on the sixth floor of the Sibley Building.
Okay, it’s not a turret, it’s a restaurant.
                 The Tea Room, as it was once called, was a
full-service restaurant for shoppers that opened in 1926. In the years before
it closed in the mid-1980s, the restaurant became a crucial part of the
middle-class downtown experience.
                 To property manager David Lang, the restaurant is
something of a damsel in distress. His eyes sparkle when he discusses the
potential of the grand, if now shabby, space. “Isn’t this great?” Lang says,
spreading his hand out toward the bandstand. “There was music. The room was
beautiful. Can’t you just see it?”
                 Sibley architect J. Foster Warner, who designed
Sibley’s no-nonsense street facade, pulled out all the stops for the
restaurant. Every wall and window, every mirror and column is lovingly
decorated. The marbleized columns still radiate a posh golden splendor in the
light filtering through the lacy shutters. Bands of egg-and-dart molding run
along the ceiling, plaster wreaths and fruit adorn the walls, and a massive
dark wood sideboard with mirrors and columns anchors one end of the room.
Diners entered through the once-elegant elevator lobby, which still has an
intricate mosaic of green, yellow, and black tiles.
                 I try to ignore the sound of a day-care worker
screaming in the playground six flights below and turn my head away from some
water damage on the ceiling. With a little effort, I can hear ice cubes
tinkling in glasses over a light jazzy tune. I can smell the “young roast
turkey … with cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and creamed asparagus tips,”
items from a 1940s menu.
                 Once I’m in the swing of things, I recall how
important good service was back then. I imagine a row of attentive waitstaff,
who’ve just committed to memory this line from a 1950’s employee brochure: “As
important as a smiling countenance, is a well-combed head, a spanking clean
shirt or collar and well-kept nails.”
Lang hopes to rescue the restaurant by bringing in a culinary school. The kitchen is
sunny and spacious. If Lang could find the right organization, or even a solo
chef, to open a school here, he thinks the place would spring back to life.
                 There’s something about such a large, lovely room
that inspires. I can’t really blame the folks who looked at this space in the
late 1980s and said “Disco!” It’s just too bad they installed a dance floor and
transformed the circular buffet — a Sibley trademark — into a tacky,
mirrored DJ booth.
                 Lang has his work cut out for him. Patches of white
plaster cover areas of water damage. Smudges mar the walls. Graffiti is
scattered throughout.
                 No problem, says Lang. A little spit-and-polish and
this beauty will be ready for anything — celebrity chefs, luncheon conferences,
and wine tastings. People will come, he says, not just because the room is
elegant. They’ll come because they remember.
                 “You can walk up here and just imagine,” Lang says.
“The memories are here. People will flock to it.”
Eastman Theatre
The phantom of the RPO, if
there is one, should ditch those under-stage passageways and make his hideout
in the desolate world above the Eastman Theatre’s ornate gilt ceiling. He could
lurk over the audience and peer through the lacy grating surrounding the
chandelier.
                 From down below it’s hard to believe there is
anything above those impenetrable gilt rosettes, never mind a warehouse-sized
technical area of walkways and pipes, I-beams and suspension chains.
                 And from up here, it’s hard to believe that the
lathe-and-plaster mess below the catwalk I’m standing on is the flipside of any
ceiling, never mind such an attractive one.
                 My guide, director of stage operations Ron
Stackman, explains that the ceiling is suspended by thousands of small metal
strips. They and the other supports that connect the ceiling to the roof create
a spider’s web of metal bands and I-beams extending far above us into the
gloom.
                 Standing above the 3,094 seats of the theater,
which was designed by McKim, Mead and White, I listen to a lone musician
tapping out a beat on the bongos. Lest I get carried away, Stackman reminds me
to watch my footing on the rickety metal catwalks that are probably as old as
the building, which opened in 1922.
                 No one has ever fallen from here, but in the 1970s,
Stackman tells me, a portion of the ceiling did fall down during an orchestra
rehearsal. No one was hurt.
The few openings from below don’t let in much light, so Stackman flips on single bulbs
to provide light for each section we pass through. The path to directly over
the stage is an obstacle course of narrow steps, ottoman-sized ducts, and
overhead pipes, which Stackman navigates with ease.
                 We approach a vintage klieg light, a 3-foot long
“instrument,” as Stackman calls stage lights, that pokes down through a
trapdoor formed by one of the ceiling rosettes pulled up by a wire.
                 “I use these to illuminate the front musicians,” he
says. “They give the orchestra a good wash of light, and they give the
conductor light to see his sheet music.”
                 Ninety feet below me swim the stage and front-row
seats. Suddenly I’m nervous, but it’s not acrophobia. It’s worse. I have an
irresistible urge to throw something. Or spit.
                 “Has anyone ever thrown anything?” I ask Stackman,
trying to act casual.
                 “Not during my watch,” he says. There’s always a first time, I think.
                 He has heard rumors, he says, of students dropping
things on the audience. In the 1970s during the cannon fire of the 1812
Overture, students dropped feathers on the audience. And he’s heard the story
about ping-pong balls raining down.
                 Glad to be moving away from the opening above the
stage, I follow Stackman over a duct that blocks the walkway and into a bright
little room that was once used for pumping the organ sound out over the
audience.
                 Every surface has graffiti, some of it dating back
to the 1920’s, when the electrician noted his visits on the plaster wall. It’s
not as lonesome up here as I thought. If a phantom were to lurk above the
Eastman Theatre, he’d probably be trampled by all the visitors.
                 And reading some of the graffiti, I realize that
terrorizing the audience is not a top priority for students who find themselves
up here. A vintage example: “I screwed Veronica here 7/6/65.”
                 Of course. A private room, a rousing orchestral accompaniment…
who can blame those crazy kids?
                 Stackman, who has worked with Eastman students for
nearly 14 years, is not convinced. “I think that’s just wishful thinking,” he
says.
This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2002.
