A new arts-focused, grassroots campaign wants to put a community vision for Parcel 5 into practice. The Parcel 5 Community Programmers, spearheaded by arts activist Ray Ray Mitrano, will collectively organize and fund a series of monthly events at the controversial downtown space. The idea is to gather together a group of individual city residents […]
Parcel 5
Posted inNews & Opinion
Feedback 3/28
We welcome your comments. Send them to themail@rochester-citynews.com, or post them on our website, rochestercitynewspaper.com, our Facebook page, or our Twitter feed, @roccitynews. For our print edition, we select comments from all three sources; those of fewer than 350 words have a greater chance of being published, and we do edit selections for publication in […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Downtown residents form a new urban coalition
The number of people moving into downtown Rochester during the last decade has steadily increased, and proposals for more housing and other development haven’t slowed down. While downtown’s buildings were once largely devoted to retail and commercial uses, the focus has changed. Now the area is evolving into a patchwork of small neighborhoods, and some […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Feedback 3/21
We welcome your comments. Send them to themail@rochester-citynews.com, or post them on our website, rochestercitynewspaper.com, our Facebook page, or our Twitter feed, @roccitynews. For our print edition, we select comments from all three sources; those of fewer than 350 words have a greater chance of being published, and we do edit selections for publication in […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Parcel 5 theater’s next act: an economic-benefits study
If you’re tracking news about the proposed theater for Parcel 5, put July 31 as your next check-in date. That’s the deadline for a new study that Mayor Lovely Warren wants done about the impact of the theater. It’s “reasonable to assume” that the project won’t move forward until that study is completed, says Warren […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Parcel 5 theater plan reboots
At a press conference this afternoon, city officials in effect rebooted plans for a theater and apartment building on Parcel 5, a prime part of the former Midtown Plaza site downtown. The basics of the plan remain the same: A 3000-seat theater, fronting on Main Street, with a 150-unit apartment building at the rear. The […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
A new City Council will face big challenges
Rochester’s city government will enter 2018 with a major change in its legislative branch. A third of City Council’s nine members will be new. And Council will be losing a lot of institutional memory: two of the three members who are leaving – Carolee Conklin and Dana Miller – have each served on Council for […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Feedback 11/1
We welcome your comments. Send them to themail@rochester-citynews.com or post them with articles on our website, rochestercitynewspaper.com. Those of fewer than 350 words have a greater chance of being published; we edit selections for publication in print, and we don’t publish comments sent to other media. ‘No’ to ConCon On the November 7 ballot proposal […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Urban Action 10/25
This week’s calls to action include the following events and activities. (All are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.) Exploring ties between Jews and Muslims Nazareth College will present “Jewish and Muslim Relations: Past, Present, and Future,” a talk by Reuven Firestone, on Thursday, October 26. Firestone, a professor at Hebrew Union […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
A theater for Parcel 5?
A strong argument for the theater: If you increase the number of people walking around downtown, you increase people’s comfort level.
Posted inSpecial Sections
Rochester Fringe announces 2018 dates, expansion
The KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival keeps on growing. Organizers on Thursday announced that the 2017 Fringe was its largest event so far. Attendance at the approximately 500 performances and events is estimated at more than 78,000, which is a 15 percent increase over 2016. This has prompted organizers to add an 11th day to its […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Imagining a downtown
What’s your vision for downtown Rochester? Some of the candidates we’ve talked with this summer have brought up that issue, and it’s a good time to talk about it. What do we want for this essential part of the city? Rochester’s downtown has changed dramatically over the past several decades, and it’ll likely never again […]
