New Tower in Downtown Rochester

 

Construction of the new Butler/Till building in midtown Rochester 4/23/2021

260 East Broad St. In downtown Rochester is getting a new 5 story building. The Butler/Till Building will provide mixed-use business, retain, and living space in the heart of Rochester. The corner of Broad St. and Clinton. This new building is at the site of the old Midtown Plaza, the economically distressed downtown mall built by the Austrian-born inventor of the modern shopping mall, Victor Gruen.

Victor Gruen moved to the United States following the German annexation of Austria, and here in the US he started designing department stores. He broke new architectural ground by designing the Northland Mall, the first open-air suburban shopping mall, and the Southdale Mall, the first enclosed shopping mall. Ironically, contra to his original ideal of creating more urban and pedestrian places the mall became a symbol of the emptying of the downtowns of American cities and the flight to the suburbs.

Between 1962, when the mall was first opened to 2007 when the plaza was demolished Rochester went from having over 300,000 residents to just over 200,000. Economic distress will befall any region that loses a third of its population. And Midtown Mall didn't escape this fate. Rochester got newer, bigger malls in the suburbs where land was cheap and parking spaces were plentiful. Midtown Plaza shut its doors on July 29, 2008, anticipating the great recession.

 

Midtown plaza Parcel 2 as seen from Google Streetview, in 2007

 A new building, the PAETEC headquarters was supposed to replace it, but the Great Recession hampered those plans, and the lot stood empty for over a decade. But a new mixed use development is now taking its place. Following the Inner Loop East removal project the city is trying to attract new residents to its downtown core.

 Buckingham properties is building a 5-story building to include ground-floor retail, 28 apartments and commercial space for Butler/Till, a media and communications agency currently headquartered in Henrietta.

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