Peter
Tautfest, a well-known European journalist who died this past winter, was truly
a man of the world. He was born in Berlin, grew up in Chicago, was educated in
Texas, and served as a foreign correspondent in Washington. His paper was
Germany’s most interesting daily, Die
Tageszeitung, which not long ago helped disclose US corporations’
meretricious deals with Saddam Hussein. Tautfest’s lifetime itinerary shows he
knew cities inside and out.
Oh yes, he made at least one
fieldtrip to Rochester. He made contact with local journalists. And he liked it
here.
Over coffee at Village Gate one day,
Tautfest oohed and aahed over Rochester’s wealth of 19th century buildings,
starting with The Gate itself and moving through downtown proper. At first
hearing, that struck us as weird. How could a cosmopolite from “Old Europe”
delight in an upstart New World city?
Then we thought about it.
Like millions of Germans, Tautfest
was weaned on cities that were stripped of their older building stock in the
wartime bombings. Take his hometown. The German capital is still rising from
the ashes, thanks to targeted investments, including money from the Marshall
Plan. In many instances, Berliners were restarting with little more than
skeletons of old architecture. But the “urban removal” philosophy seems not to
have applied a death-grip. All over Berlin today, you can see buildings
restored to their old contours by the artful blending of old and new — often
a lot more of the latter than the former.
Think of it this way: What if
Rochesterians had reconstructed old St. Joseph’s downtown by fleshing out the
shell with new, imitative materials — and constructed an active church rather
than a mute memory?
St. Joseph’s
remains a
Rochester success story. At least there’s something left. Thankfully, St. Joe’s
didn’t entirely meet the fate of churches like the original Asbury Methodist.
The latter stood on the southeast corner of East Main and Clinton till shortly
after “farewell services” in 1884, says a blurb from a photo collection held by
the Rochester Museum and Science Center.
But take a quick diagonal look from
the old Asbury site, and you realize that Rochester’s spirit of preservation
has a lot further to go.
Over there, on the northwest corner
of Main and Clinton, some 19th century buildings — not shells or remnants,
but whole organic structures — are in the crosshairs. In particular, three
small buildings sit where a new “Rochester Central Station” may be built to
accommodate transit and intercity buses.
By now the political tug-of-war has
almost exhausted the community. Even the key players — station proponent Bill
Nojay, chair of the Rochester-Genesee Regional Transit Authority; opponent
Louise Slaughter, the US Representative in whose district the site lies; and
the wavering Rochester Mayor Bill Johnson — sometimes seem strung out. And
media attention has been, well, obsessive.
Suffice it to say: Since early July,
when US Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly expressed
support for the plan, the construction of the new station has drawn much
closer. And the three corner buildings’ days are less generously numbered.
But as with many things that gain
significance only in extremity, some people are looking at the buildings
afresh.
First, you must realize these brick,
iron-framed buildings are not exactly “abandoned” nor are they necessarily
“eyesores.” (Admittedly, there’s vacant space behind the few businesses left
operating in them, and the whole package is the realtor’s “fixer-upper.”) And
they’ve got integrity, of the architectural type: They’re units of an unbroken
line of commercial structures that give the north side of Main Street its
continuity — a key draw for pedestrians.
So let us introduce you to them,
their names and numbers:
• 216 East Main. This building,
whose first floor houses Famous Jewelry, has two upper floors with large
multi-paned windows. Since there’s a southern exposure, the windows could
abundantly illuminate the space within. The façade has a few reminders of —
cynics might call them cheap versions of — classical columns and an
entablature. Cheap or dear, the details are worth looking at.
• 220-222 East Main. This structure
houses Off the Hook Urban Wear; each of two upper floors has three
solid-looking windows with masonry heads and sills.
• 224-226 East Main. With Dixie Wigs
and a discount jewelry shop sharing the ground floor, this building has a
façade whose upper floors are almost wholly covered by a signboard. But old
photos show it has attractive shallow bay windows which may still exist intact,
or at least not fatally damaged.
The tenants in this cluster of
buildings include at least one de facto preservationist.
Mike Picow, owner-operator of A-1
Buyers-N-Sellers Pawn shop, says he spends his workdays “in a 10×10 cell” at 3
North Clinton, a few yards around the corner from 226 East Main. City
officials, he says, once told him “nobody could make a living in such a small
space.” Yet he’s done so for eight years at this location, and he says he wants
to stick with it.
A Bronx native who now lives in
Greece, Picow is direct.
“What the RGRTA is trying to do to
little dickheads like us!” he says with exasperation. Because of the transit
station plan, he says, “they’ll send people to the unemployment line to fester,
to start all over again.” He wonders why, instead of spending $58 million on
the station, officials don’t spend a mere million on a facelift for the
existing buildings. (The owner of the space Picow occupies, Edwin Cohen, could
not be reached for comment.) “Why borrow $60 million to do a job that could be
done for $6 million [in the Sibley’s building]. Am I happy about moving? No. Am
I happy about downtown looking the way it is? No.”
Architectural
experts have been sizing up the situation in their own way.
“The three were given a
‘green-minus’ rating” in a 1980 study, says Cynthia Howk, the Landmark
Society’s architectural research coordinator. Green-minus means a building
should be “saved or restored if possible,” she says. “These are among the few
remaining smaller [19th century] commercial buildings in downtown,” she says,
dating the buildings at circa 1860-1870.
There’s no doubt that mid- to
late-20th century encrustations have taken the bloom off the buildings,
however. And as anyone can see from photos in the city archives, the Rochester
Museum and Science Center’s collection, and other historical sources, large
commercial ads are a special problem. And overwhelmingly large ads have been
attached to the buildings since the 1940s.
“What’s been difficult is that you
have the wrap-around signboard [at the very corner],” says Howk. “The first
floors are what people have trouble getting past.” (Today the signboard, which
sticks out a foot or more from the exterior possibly to accommodate the bay
windows, bears a recruiting ad from Monroe Community College. MCC’s Damon City
Campus is located across the street in the old Sibley’s building.)
Context is very meaningful in
architecture and street design, of course, and the corner buildings have plenty
of it. Just to the west, the former McCrory’s building has a mid-20th century
Art Deco façade, just the sort of thing that’s greatly risen in value in recent
years. Compare the old Hallman’s Chevrolet showroom at 200 East Avenue, now the
bustling Spot Coffee. Moreover, right around the corner on Clinton Avenue
you’ll see other upper stories with attractive windows and possibilities. Even
much-ignored Division Street, a narrow urban canyon with rear entrances and
bricked-upped windows, could become a pedestrian-friendly commercial area,
given the right formula.
Howk also cites 190 East Main. Home
to the I&S Variety Stores, this tall, thin building’s façade is graced with
decorative faux pillars, complete with two modest gargoyles.
Current plans for Rochester
Central Station, though, could doom or compromise all these buildings and their
context.
And this doesn’t set well with Joni
(pronounced “Johnny”) Monroe, an architect who’s now executive director of the
fledgling Rochester Regional Community Design Center.
“One of the things I think is
interesting about Main Street is it’s pretty much intact from Stillson Street
to St. Paul,” says Monroe, a city resident. She notes that this half-mile
stretch of commercial buildings, which includes the historic Granite Building,
Sibley’s and Edwards department stores, and the former Scrantom’s book store,
among others, is uninterrupted. “But it’s been bastardized,” she says.
The illegitimation, so to speak,
could get worse if the new Central Station is built without regard for
relationships to nearby buildings and sidewalks.
As things are now, says Monroe, the
north side of Main Street downtown would be the envy of many other cities. She
recalls a recent trip to Nashville, which, she says, “has destroyed a lot of
its downtown area.”
But Maine’s largest city could serve
as an example for us, Monroe says. Portland’s downtown, she says, is comparable
in size to Rochester’s. But unlike Rochester, Portland, she says, has
“methodically renovated and restored” its old buildings. And the actual port
area there, she adds, retains “the grittiness” appropriate to such a
neighborhood.
(Many people have commented on the
sterility of parts of downtown Rochester, which once boasted its own gritty
commercial areas, especially on streets close to the Genesee River.)
Coming back to
the corner of Main and Clinton, Monroe wonders if the threatened old buildings might
survive in a retooled design of the station. “They could be integrated into
something built behind them,” she says. “I don’t know how easy that would be to
do.”
But Monroe is careful to say that
she and her organization, by consensus, support an alternative plan: nixing the
transit center on the northwest corner of Main and Clinton, and creating a more
modest facility for bus riders in part of the old Sibley’s building.
The building of consensus is
important: As Monroe says, the RGRTA-Nojay plan sprang from a very “top-down”
process. “My hope,” she says, “is that there will be an opportunity for public
discussion” on the plan and alternatives. She concedes “it’s a sensitive time,
a delicate time” politically.
What about the timing? Will people
get turned on to the threatened buildings before it’s too late? Monroe cites an
architectural dilemma: “They’re very vernacular buildings,” she says, “and some
people wish they had the character of Sibley’s.”
But there’s clearly value in them,
individually and in context. Says Monroe: “We should be trying to celebrate the
diversity… the combination of buildings reflective of the development of the
American city.”
She mentions that the Design Center,
now sharing space on Meigs Street, will be looking for its own permanent
office. For future reference: It’s still possible there’ll be some bright,
nicely renovated 19th-century lofts available at the corner of Main and
Clinton.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2003.
