For more than 25 years, the Cunningham Carriage Factory building at 33 Litchfield Street in the Susan B. Anthony Neighborhood sat vacant. That changed when DePaul, a nonprofit housing and social services organization, bought the property and began developing it into housing. Now, construction crews are stripping the sturdy brick building down to its bones. From […]
Brownfields
Rochester’s poisoned past
A graffiti-covered building hulks over the end of Flint Street — a dilapidated monument on a blighted landscape in southwest Rochester’s Plymouth-Exchange neighborhood. The building is part of the Vacuum Oil site, a 24-acre property along the Genesee River waterfront that once held an oil refinery (it shut down in the 1930’s). In the decades […]
A boost for Rochester riverfront development?
The Vacuum Oil industrial site in southwest Rochester typified the city’s manufacturing muscle in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when busy factories dotted the area. But the now-rundown 25-acre collection of public and private properties on the west bank of the Genesee River at Flint Street could see a revival. A bill sponsored […]
Resurrecting the urban wasteland
It took a public shaming from the New York Times before it was released, but state money to fund brownfield cleanups is finally flowing to where it was intended. Last week Governor Pataki and the leaders of both houses of the state legislature announced a breakthrough that freed $30 million to help with the cleanup […]






