Inner Loop North: Part 3

 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 interchange with the new I-490. I'm sure I'll have more to say on this highway in due time.

I found a blog post about the old Franklin Square park, it used to be a really nice, landscape placed. It was renamed Schiller Park after the Schiller monument from Anderson Park was relocated there. Anderson park was also cut in half to make space for an Inner loop on-ramp and was not restored in the previous inner loop east removal. Observe the waste of space that is the double-entry ramp to the eastern portion of what remains of the inner loop.

 

And here's the current inner loop, east of the river.

 

 

Here's a postcard of the post office, near what used to be Franklin Square Park. The post office still stands but it's hardly a destination, used now as a business park.

And here's one of the old NY Central train station. It was demolished in 1965, around when the Inner loop was completed, and the new Amtrak station that stands where this one was takes a lot of design cues, but also stands quite a bit smaller.

So what are the plans to get rid of it? The site innerloopnorth.com shows a few plans under consideration.

One plan leaves much of the loop intact. But even this, the least ambitious frees up a lot of space for new development, restores Anderson Park, adds greenspace to a nearby schools, and adds a separated bicycle lane.

Another concept takes a completly different tact, doing as much as it can to erase the inner loop and restore the grid.

This other one is more middle of the road, filling in the old loop, and freeing land around it, much like the inner-loop east project.

Of these my favorite is by the city grid restoration. It comes the closes to what I think the ideal would be, though I also think University should connect up instead of connecting with Delvan. Any of these plans would be a major upgrade to the expensive waste of space that currently befalls the city.