Rochester Development Blog

 This is the post in  this series that I originally wanted to write, I got a little side-tracked by describing the rest of the project. In 1935 the northern part of Rochester looked like this. Actually it pretty much looked like this up until the installation of the inner loop. Call it three slices separated by N. Clinton going northwest, and North street going northeast. Here's a cool historic aerial shot (historicaerials.com) No major changes were made to the street pattern from the 1935 map to the 1951 photograph, maybe there was some major world event diverting our energies at this point? Anyways, focusing on the north. The new inner loop cut around a public school, paved over a solid two blocks of residential housing, curved down to cut in front of a very nice, very large post office, and in doing so cut Franklin Square park in half, the loop curved north again and cannibalized Central Ave, hugging the rail line across the bridge over High Falls, and branched into an inte...

In my previous post I talked a little bit about about the loop and racial disparities. This time I'll be a little more methodical, talk about the city layout before, during, and after the inner east was put in and later removed, and then look forward a bit to what to do about the northern part of the inner loop. Pretty much all the maps in this series are from https://maps.cityofrochester.gov/historic/ check it out yourself! The Inner Loop project started at Rochester's economic peak, in the 1950s. Rightly understood, Rochester is laid out according to a pentagonal pattern. The Inner loop was made to essentially follow along this pentagon, while connecting to I-490 in the south and west. 490 was built over a canal that connects up with the Erie Canal, and the west, over blocks and blocks of residential houses, more on that another time. The interchange between 490, the old inner-loop, and the streets of downtown Rochester bulldozed several blocks and is a confusing nightmare of...

 Urban highways have been getting a lot of attention recently, especially through the lens of race. In "The Color of Law" Richard Rothstein explored how red lining by the federal bureaucracy induced greater segregation in US cities by race, and Sec. of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said that "racism is physically built into some of  our highways". I've written about the extent to which Rochester's neighborhoods are segregated . The patterns of the city continue to map to the history of redlining, the policy of the government to split up cities by neighborhood to determine which property would have mortgages insured by the government. https://twitter.com/salimfurth/status/1409987611796586499?s=20   The red areas of this map correspond to the economically distressed and racially segregated areas of the city today. And it's no surprise that when urban highways were being planned they came to these areas, and it may come as little surprise that now highway...