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Rochester, NY Main and Clinton 1925
main street WRITER: HOWARD S. DECKER, FAIA
What to do with Main Street, we ask with increasing alarm?
What should Main Street become, as we reflect on the future of that important street and of our central city? Perhaps a look back will help us find our way forward.
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P REM IERE ISS U E
In 1928, the City asked noted urban planner and traffic engineer Harland Bartholomew to make a study of downtown traffic congestion. Between 1922 and 1928 the number of cars in our town had doubled to over 90,000 (there are over 800,000 in our region today), and we had begun to realize that all we wanted was one thing: OUT! Out of town, out of traffic jams, out of the crowds on Main Street, out of the streetcars and subway. Into the suburbs, into a parking space, into the comfort and autonomy of our own personal transit devices. Let’s go: faster, further, and alone. The Rochester that automobiles engulfed in the late 1920s was a breathtaking place. It was dense (nearly twice as dense as today, and nearly twice as populous), vital, bustling, alive, and importantly, designed for feet. And Main Street, in what some call its golden age, was a place meant for walking, strolling, or at most biking or streetcar-ing in. Photographs by the extraordinary photojournalist Albert Stone bring that other Rochester, that magnificent Rochester, into vivid and captivating focus. His images offer views of a city teeming with life and activity and energy. Not exactly neat and tidy, but surely a city that, if it were still with us, would be a prime vacation destination for us all – as good as anything we jet to across the globe these days. And we demolished it. On purpose. For a variety of reasons, that city and its Main Street are gone. Today, with almost half the land within the Inner Loop occupied by parking lots, we realize that we got what we wished for – our own place to park. Great. Now what? What we had was robust, durable, complicated. And that city was sustainable, in every sense of that word. CITIZENROCHESTER.COM