Deja Vu, Again: Redeveloping High Falls and More Asininity.
A recurring theme among the dying cities of the "Rust Belt" is that redeveloping their dead downtown areas will revitalize them.
That this "renaissance" will "save" their cities.
It has really never worked in the long run.
This is largely because the proponents for such plans have chosen to ignore the history of the cities in question, of the organic growth that led to making their downtowns vibrant.
They have also chosen to forget that times have changed.
Such is the case of our own fair city, Rochester, New York, where downtown redevelopment has been a stunning failure
Rochester reached its zenith in the 1950's.
With a population of 350,000 souls, its downtown was crammed with all kinds of retail establishments, restaurants, nightclubs and movie theatres.
Downtown Rochester was so congested with people and traffic that the Inner Loop was built to allow people to avoid the crowds.
At the same time, changes had occurred in America that would produce the seeds for downtown's demise, a condition that would continue to this very day.
The relative cheapness and affordability of automobiles allowed many people to pursue the new "American Dream:" A ranch style tract house with an attached garage on a quarter acre of crabgrass in the suburbs.
Suburban shopping plazas and malls were built, filled with the same stores that were downtown, to service the wants and needs of the new suburbanites, lessening their need to go downtown.
The Riots of 1964 merely accelerated the process of White flight to the suburbs, while downtown's slow, sad decline had begun.
This did not go unnoticed and by the 1960's, plans for "redeveloping" downtown were underway, tearing down old majestic, monumental buildings to make way for new ones, most of which would not house retail or entertainment establishments.
Perhaps the chief accomplishment or "urban renewal" in the 1960's was the building of Midtown Mall. From the outside, it was rather plain, if not downright ugly, in a style resembling Soviet Realism.
The interior was filled with stores, at first.
Yet within 25 years it began to empty out and the need for its very existence was questioned until it was finally razed in the early 21st Century.
That brings us to the 1990's, when it was obvious that downtown had reached a critical state.
It was also when Bill Johnson had become Mayor of Rochester, whose administration would become the most successful failure in our city's history.
Bill Johnson was the first Black mayor of Rochester, whose attitude resembled that of the Renaissance popes: "God has seen fit to give us the Papacy; let us enjoy it."
And enjoy it Johnson did.
His twelve-year administration was more of a racket than a regime and his addlepated schemes cost the city millions, enriching himself and his cronies while producing nothing of lasting value and costing the taxpayers millions of dollars.
Most people already know the saga of the Fast Ferry fiasco but, as that did not involve downtown redevelopment, will only be treated perfunctorily here, sufficient to say that Johnson lied throughout that farce.
Then there was the visibly dying Midtown Mall, for which every few years Johnson commissioned studies on how to save it.
Costing hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, each study produced the same conclusion: Redevelop Midtown Mall by inviting retail stores to fill it or raze it.
He chose to do neither.
Instead, he chose to "redevelop" the High Falls area of Rochester, which then consisted of tacky warehouses and decaying old buildings centered around the Genesee River's High Falls.
It was not really part of downtown, and apart from a few Yuppie themed nightclubs, restaurants and a tourist center, and lacking sufficient parking to accommodate the anticipated crowds that would partake of it, High Falls soon proved to be a costly mistake.
It had gotten so bad that Johnson's lapdog on City Council, Tim Mains, was able to push through a plan for free busses to transport people from the dying Midtown Mall to High Falls, from nowhere to no place.
That didn't work either. The nightclubs all went bankrupt and the few restaurants to open there closed for lack of traffic.
Within a few years, High Falls was closed, and all that remained was a tacky metallic sign in pastel colors on the State Street bridge, welcoming people to High Falls.
It's still there.
We'll come back to this in a bit.
Then there was Johnson's involvement in promoting "Renaissance Square," on the northwest corner of Main and Clinton, kitty corner from the now dead Midtown Mall.
The crux of the plan was to place a bus transit center there, build a Broadway-style theatre next to it, to appease wealthy elite contributors to his campaigns and to convert the old Sibley's building to a permanent downtown campus for Monroe Community College.
The estimated cost was originally set at $228 million, with about $20 million in planning costs disappearing.
MCC didn't choose to be a part of the plan, there wasn't nearly enough money to complete the theatre and ultimately the plan was abandoned, although the bus terminal was eventually completed a decade later, becoming the scene of assaults and homicides.
Obviously this would not be conducive to attracting people to downtown Rochester.
Bill Johnson was succeeded as mayor by ex-police chief Bob Duffy, whose chief accomplishment was ridding Rochester of the Fast Ferry succubus while involving us in another farce of downtown development, Paetech Tower.
Paetech Tower was to be a majestic 38 story building on the site of Midtown Mall.
Apart from producing some lovely sketches of what the building would look like, Paetech's owners never committed themselves to anything.
Duffy promptly had Midtown Mall razed to accommodate Paetech Tower, only to have Paetech downsize their plans to an 8 or 9 story building, finally settling on a one and half story building before abandoning the project entirely.
The cost to the taxpayers: $180 million.
This left Duffy with egg on his face and a hole in prime downtown real estate.
For the next fifteen years there were no comprehensive plans for downtown redevelopment, just occasional spot-dabbing on a few buildings on Main Street and continued talk of a Broadway-style theatre that wealthy elites wanted but expected the city to pay for.
Even talking about that had ceased.
Rochester had become a ghost town after 5 PM and on weekends, with shoddy looking buildings and nothing worth coming downtown to see, except perhaps the occasional parades that took place passing through all of this ugliness.
Then came the Evans Administration.
Hailed by a very few as Rochester's "savior" after the Warren regime, Mahweak never really had any plans to do much of anything about revitalizing Rochester, combatting crime or improving our piss-poor schools.
He certainly has no plans for improving downtown.
Instead, he giggled almost girlishly about getting $100 million from the state to fill in the NE section of the Inner Loop, to reunite it to downtown Rochester, where nothing is going on anymore.
That money won't go far and, admittedly, downtown Rochester can hardly boast of congested traffic anymore at night or on weekends, but still, the Inner Loop allowed people to bypass all of that nothingness.
Filling in the SE section of the Inner Loop and constructing tacky apartment buildings was hardly a great success, because incidents of crime rose there, and there are still plenty of vacancies in those apartments.
And it has really done nothing for Main Street.
But Mahweak wants to repeat this lack of success on the NE segment of the Inner Loop.
And then came the plans to redevelop High Falls. Again.
Encouraged by the state, which suggested creating a state park on the site of RGE's waste dump there and contributing $6 million towards realizing it, Rochester's total price tag will be $35 million.
This includes the city developing the old Water Works building as a visitors center.
But we already had that at a different location in the High Falls district.
And it never really served many visitors during the brief, gaudy hour when it was first established there.
I guess there are no plans for using that particular building in this latest reboot of the area.
And none of the powers that be have answered the big question: Why would tourists want to come to an area that has no real attractions apart from the natural beauty of the falls, surrounded by structures of varying decrepitude, no parking and surrounded by some of the most violent neighborhoods in Rochester?
We've already seen that a variety of nightclubs and eateries have failed there during its first inception thirty years ago because of the lack of interest in patronizing them. This latest reboot doesn't seriously take any of that into consideration. In the long run, it will be merely another flash-in-the-pan that people, apart from a few locals, will quickly become bored with.
Of course, the more morbid visitors with a taste for stories of violent crime might find this the perfect destination to explore: It was where serial killer Arthur Shawcross dumped the bodies of the prostitutes he murdered during the late 1980's.
So, what's the one conclusion I can bring the subject of this blog to?
NONE of these plans featured anything to improve the lives of the people who live here. They do nothing about our horrendous increases in violent crime and homicide. They do nothing to deal with the piss-poor performance of our school system. Or the anti-cop attitude of city gov, which hinders our brave law enforcement officers from doing their job, protecting the largely law-abiding citizens of Rochester.
All they have done is serve as a way to distract us from those serious problems for which Mahweak clearly has no answers and no plans to correct.
And there are plenty of suckers out there interested only in bread and circuses.
Mahweak, and most of our elected officials, know this.
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