On a quiet stretch where Routes 5 & 20 cut through Lima, there’s a low-slung building that doesn’t call much attention to itself. You could pass it without realizing that, on certain nights, it becomes one of the most intimate blues rooms in the Northeast. Inside Fanatics Pub, something unlikely has been unfolding — steady, […]
George Cassidy Payne
Posted inMusic
The Local Sound Collaborative follows the music to East and Alexander
Rochester is not always loud about its cultural shifts. More often, they show up in patterns only noticeable once they have taken hold. Each June, that pattern becomes easier to see during the Rochester International Jazz Festival. The city absorbs thousands of visitors, stages multiply across downtown and music becomes one of the main ways […]
Posted inMovie Previews
Mara Ahmed’s cinema of the unseen wound
Best known for her non-linear multimedia work, filmmaker Mara Ahmed creates documentaries, soundscapes and visual art projects that challenge colonial narratives and cross political and cultural borders. Born in Lahore but educated in Belgium, Pakistan and the United States, Ahmed’s work reflects those layered histories and displacements. She has directed five films, including “The Muslims I Know,” “Pakistan One […]
Posted inCulture
Monroe Theatre’s historic façade and unused space is a landmark and a question mark
Along Monroe Avenue, buildings don’t just stand. They lean into traffic, watch the sidewalks and quietly record the neighborhood’s evolution. The Monroe Theatre, with its Art Deco façade still intact and its marquee frozen mid-thought, feels less like an abandoned structure than an unfinished sentence. People notice it. They ask about it. They debate it. […]
Posted inArt
Haudenosaunee art show marks America’s 250th with a living vision of peace
What if the most radical way to commemorate a war … was peace? As the United States gears up for its 250th anniversary in July, the usual pageantry is already taking shape: fireworks, reenactments and the familiar theater of patriotic memory. But a few miles east of Rochester, at Ganondagan State Historic Site, the celebration will […]
Posted inCulture
Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School relocates from the hill to the heart of downtown
For nearly a century, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School sat like a sentinel above the city, perched on the hill at 1100 South Goodman St., its Gothic towers peering over Highland Park. Designed by James Gamble Rogers, the same architect who left his mark on Yale and Columbia, the campus radiated a stately stillness that […]
Posted inCulture
Native Made Market, a hub of Indigenous heritage, returns on Small Business Saturday
On a crisp November morning in Rochester, the doors of the annual Native Made Market will once again swing open, and the room will hum with voices, laughter, drums, rattles and the quiet shuffle of footsteps across wooden floors. For founder Angelina Marie Hilton, the annual event, which returns on Saturday, Nov. 29 for year […]
Posted inCulture
Legends & Lore roadside markers chronicle folk tales, oral traditions and local myths
The fog drifts in like a breath held too long. The trees hush. Near the edge of Lake Ontario, a story lingers. You’re walking the winding trails of Durand Eastman Park. Maybe alone, maybe not. Maybe you’ve heard the tale before, around a bonfire on the beach or whispered over too many Genesee Cream Ales. […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
I.M. Pei left his mark on Rochester, too
I.M. Pei, one of the world’s most iconic and prolific architects, has died at the age of 102. Among his works: the University of Rochester’s Wilson Commons.
Posted inNews & Opinion
Trump’s Riyadh speech and the roots of terrorism
Donald Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia was willfully ignorant about America’s role in terrorizing Middle Eastern nations
