Brighton’s Empire
The
county’s plan to award Empire Zone status to more office buildings in Brighton will be
discussed by town officials next week.
The county wants to include in its
Empire Zone the following properties: 200 Canal View Boulevard; a portion of
The Park at Allens Creek on Allens
Creek Road; 100, 200, and 300 Meridian Centre; 172 Metro Park; 70 and 80 Linden
Oaks Office Park; portions of 10 and 30 Hagen Drive, and 2440 and 2452 West
Henrietta Road.
Empire Zone status offers major tax
incentives — most paid for by the state — to businesses located in them.
The county must get the Brighton Town Board’s approval, however.
The town board’s public-works
committee will take up the request at its meeting on Monday night, April 26 —
probably about 8 o’clock, says
committee chair Ray Tierney III. The meeting will be held in the auditorium of
the BrightonTown Hall. The request
will be considered by the town board itself at its meeting on Wednesday, April
28. That meeting is at 7 p.m. at the town
hall.
Jazz
fest line-up
Jazz
lovers can count on a sizable slice of heaven in early June. The Rochester International Jazz Festival will be back for the third annual event from June 4 to 12 with an impressive
artist line-up including Oscar Peterson, Bobby McFerrin,
James “Blood” Ulmer, and Marian McPartland.
And it continues to grow; this year’s model features more than 70 jazz artists
and groups
Peterson’s performance is sure to be
the can’t-miss event of a festival that is packed with great pianists; he’s
been a keyboard phenomenon for more than half a century. Frequent visits to Rochester, her
long-running Piano Jazz radio show,
and a spirit of adventure that won’t quit have made McPartland
a favorite with local crowds.
If past performance is any
indication, Bobby McFerrin & Jack De Johnette
should do more with voice and percussion than is humanly possible. But if
that’s not enough for you, pianist Brad Mehldau, who
can move effortlessly from the cerebral to a light-hearted Beatles tune, will
be opening the concert.
Festival producer John Nugent has
consistently booked the finest local acts, and this year is no exception. The
Campbell Brothers Sacred Steel Guitar perform
absolutely magical jazz-inflected gospel music that has won them an
international following. Pianist Vijay Iyer began
honing his musical skills locally. Now Iyer, who will
perform with saxophonist RudreshManthrappa,
is one of the most widely respected cutting-edge players on the national scene.
Other excellent musicians with local connections include trombonist Dave Gibson
and pianist Deanna Witkowski.
The wealth of talent includes the
great pianist Cedar Walton whose keyboard prowess and composing skills have
been consistently brilliant since his early days with Art Blakey.
Brazilian-born Eliane Elias, another pianist who will
bring her quartet to the festival, has been turning heads with her dazzling
technique for two decades. Other highlights include saxophonist Eric
Alexander’s Trio, trumpeter Wallace Roney’s Quartet,
pianist-singer Mose Allison, gospel great Yolanda
Adams, Harold Danko, and The Rite of Strings
featuring Stanley Clarke, Jean Luc Ponty, and Al DiMeola. For a complete schedule, artist profiles, and MP3
samples visit www.rochesterjazz.com.
There will be several new features
and more community oriented free concerts. Gibbs Street will become Jazz Street, closed to
traffic and open to live music on an outdoor Jazz Stage at the corner of Gibbs
and East Main Streets. On both festival weekends there will be free music from 4 to 11
p.m. Friday through Sunday, ranging from high school groups to
national acts like Paul Cebar & The Milwaukeeans and the Latin Giants of Jazz, featuring
musicians from Tito Puente’s Orchestra.
There will also be a new ClubPass venue: the
10,000-square-foot Club Pass Big Tent at the corner of Gibbs Street and East Main
Street, with bar and food service provided by
Tapas 151.
The ClubPass is still the
great bargain of the festival, covering admission for more than 70 performances
at the tent, The Montage Grille, Milestones, Max of Eastman Place, the Little
Theatre, Kilbourn Hall, and the CrownePlaza’s State Street
Bar & Grill. The cost is $65 in advance (plus service charge) until April
30, and $75 after that date. In other words, for the price of four or five CDs
you can see dozens of acts live.
All tickets, including the ClubPass, are
available at Ticketmaster/Ticket Express outlets and
at www.rochesterjazz.com. Ticketed show prices range from $15 to $65. Tickets
go on sale April 16.
Wegmans on East
Anyone
who has ever tried to shop at the East
Avenue Wegmans on a Sunday knows the perils that
frequently await: parking shortages, jammed aisles, long lines. Wegmans recognizes that it has outgrown its East Avenue location, and
it plans to expand the store to nearly twice its size.
But what’s that going to do to the
rest of East Avenue towards
Winton? Well, for now, Wegmans officials are keeping
their plans under wraps.
“We are not sharing specific details
about the concept plan because it is preliminary, because it is a concept,”
says Jo Natale, Wegmans’
manager of consumer services and media relations.
Wegmans
now owns nearly all the property along its side of East Avenue, from the
store to Winton Road. And its
expansion will require the demolition of all the property it has acquired.
So those storefronts will be gone,
only to possibly be replaced by… more storefronts.
Sib Petix
is president of the Culver-University-East Neighborhood Group. His association,
along with other nearby neighborhood groups, has reviewed Wegmans’
concept plan.
“Along East Avenue, we
recommended a look that would be similar to what you would find in late
19th-century and early 20th-century commercial districts — a series of
storefronts,” Petix says. “It would be similar to
what you’d find along Park Avenue near Berkeley
Street, but they’d be facades. There would be
windows that would at least partially open up into the store and show activity
in the store, for example a flower shop or a bakery. But Wegmans
couldn’t promise that all the windows would open up into store activity. Some
would just be display windows.”
As for the store itself, much of the
additional square footage will be taken up by kitchen space and a seating area.
“People like that Wegmans because of its size,” Petix
says. “We’ve been emphasizing that we’d like them to keep the scale of the
store somewhat similar, as far as the shopping area. If they can keep it
somewhat walkable, it’ll be good for their East Avenue customers,
because senior citizens don’t like to walk around a lot and younger people like
to run in and out. So the actual shopping area will increase, but not that
dramatically, even though the actual square footage is doubling in size.”
But, as Natale
insists, we’re a long way from any final decisions on the store and its impact
on the area.
“There’s a dialogue going on at this
point [with neighborhood groups] and we want to continue that dialogue,” she
says.
Recommendations from neighborhood
associations are just that — recommendations. But public hearings will be
held by the city on the project before the city grants approval. In the meantime,
Petix says his neighborhood group will be meeting on
this and other matters on Wednesday, April 21, at the Brighton Presbyterian
Church, 1775 East Avenue.
Any timeline for the project at this
point is tentative. But Petix says he’s been told it
will require one full year of planning, and another full year of construction.
According to Natale, much of the timing will depend
on other projects Wegmans has in store.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2004.
