Tag Archives: Rochester

Old-Time Depots (and Where to Find Some!)

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“Millions of people in this country still couldn’t find the airport, Lyndon. But they sure as hell know where the depot is.” – Harry S. Truman, 1964.

Harry Truman’s long-ago advice to President Johnson is, well, long ago. For almost a hundred years this country’s economy rose or fell with the railroad, just as it rose or fell with the car for most of OUR lifetimes. Nowadays, though, the railroad doesn’t mean what it used to.

But the train still runs, and even where it doesn’t, our region is still dotted with the stations and depots where travelers once huddled from the rain, checked their ticket for the dozenth time, bought a magazine to read along the way. For many military personnel, the depot was the last sight of home. For far too many families, the depot was the last place they ever hugged their son or dad or husband, the last place his voice was ever heard, in the town that heard his very first cry.

For most soldiers, they knew their war was finally over when they jumped off the train and raced back into the oh-so-familiar hometown station, not even pausing in their rush to the street beyond.

Some depots are pretty uninspiring, but others are worth a little trip. The DL&W depot in PAINTED POST (277 Steuben Street) is in the pagoda style – a very early example of company branding, with the roof flared out on both long sides, and braced by elegant external buttresses. This depot was actually prefabricated, shopped out by rail in sections, and assembled on site! It was a makeshift morgue after the 1972 flood, and it’s Now home to the Painted Post-Erwin Museum at the Depot. All three metal “Indian” figures that preceded the current Chief Montour statue are on exhibit here.

The Erie Depot in HORNELL (111 Loder Street) is now creatively called the Hornell Erie Depot Museum. “Hornellsville” was a modest unincorporated settlement when Millard Fillmore and Daniel Webster came through on the ceremonial first Erie Railroad train, connecting Lake Erie with New York City. The company decided that Hornell (as we know it) would be a great spot for their main repair and maintenance shop. The Maple City started to boom as an industrial center. Railroads are still big business in Hornell, and the historic depot reflects that.

As far as I can tell, the B&H depot on the waterfront in HAMMONDSPORT (7 Water Street) was a pretty routine piece of work until World War I or later, when it took on the railroad gothic form that’s now been the beloved village symbol for decades. The swooping spire, weathervane, deep overhang, and rows of buttresses seize the memory, along with the background of Keuka Lake and the Depot Park. Glenn Curtiss and Alexander Graham Bell knew this place, which helped make feasible their early experiments in airplanes and motorcycles. This was the northern terminus of the Bath & Hammondsport Railroad – the entrance to the Lake, or the portal to the world. (It’s now the Village offices.)

The 1905 Lehigh Valley station in ROCHESTER (99 Court Street) is now home to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que! The squat tower, and its position above the falls of the Genesee River, make it unmistakable. Both the station and the 1892 Court Street Bridge are on the National Register of Historic Places… as is the Painted Post depot.

While you’re in ROCHESTER, stop by at Amtrak’s Louise K. Slaughter Rochester Station (320 Central Avenue). This modern 2017 intermodal facility is a reminder that trains… indeed, PASSENGER trains… are still a part of our life and our economy. Long may they wave!

A Walk Through History in Mount Hope Cemetery

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If you’re in Rochester, and you want someplace interesting and inexpensive in which to walk about and recreate yourself, you might try Mount Hope Cemetery. A lot of people might be baffled by the thought. If so, they don’t know Mount Hope.

It started out small, as these things do, and it started out early. (Nathanael Hawthorne wrote that whenever you have a new community, no matter how idealistic, the first things you build are a jail and graveyard.) As usual they relegated the cemetery to the least useful ground – the ground they could grudgingly spare from food production. It was hilly, rocky and confusing (people got lost), with pockets of mist, and a reputation for haunting that went back to the Iroquois days.

In the mid-19th century views of death started to change. Queen Victoria, losing her husband young, set off on a decades-long career of Mourning, and just as today, the British royals set the mode. Death and burial became a little less homespun, both now involving dedicated spaces and dedicated professionals. The Civil War brought forth hundreds of thousands of new mourners. People didn’t want graveyards and more. They wanted cemeteries.

Enter Frederick Law Olmsted, godfather of a new field of endeavor – landscape engineering. He created Central Park in Manhattan, and Highland Park and Seneca Park in Rochester, plus the original Cornell campus. Meticulously manicured spaces didn’t look natural – they looked BETTER than nature. Olmsted created dramatic folds and dells and hills and dingles, diverted streams and gave them rocks to play with, planted forests. City folks could feel that they were getting a day in the country, but without the long trip, the manure, the brambles, and the resentful rustics.

Mount Hope became one of many cemeteries that took a leaf from Olmsted’s book. It became something new – a “rural cemetery,” off (at that time) on the edge of the city, and landscaped to be something of a park.

The city has caught up with the “rural” cemetery, but Mount Hope still covers 200 green-clad acres with 350,000 interments, and 500 to 800 more each year. It’s the final resting place for Nathanael Rochester – Frederick Douglass – Susan B. Anthony – newspaper tycoon Frank Gannett, who got his start in Elmira – Seth Green, “the father of fish culture” – Mr. Bausch, AND Mr. Lomb.

(Some are worried that Miss Anthony’s gravestone is being loved to death, covered all over each election year with “I Voted” stickers.)

One section near Strong Hospital includes a TALL 19th-century firemen’s monument, and a burying ground specifically for fire fighters. (It also includes a memorial to the old-time horses.) Nearby is a monument to Boyd and Parker, who were killed near Cuylerville in Sullivan’s invasion during the Revolution, and a mass grave of unknowns, relocated from the neighborhood of the early poorhouse, prison, and insane asylum.

One very moving space is dedicated entirely to veterans of the Civil War. This includes the massive 1908 sculpture of a soldier and a drummer boy, “Defenders of the Flag.”

A stroll through the stones is a hike through Rochester history, with every ethnic group, every religion, every occupation represented. Some stones are in Hebrew, some in Cyrillic script. No doubt if I explored further, I’d find inscriptions in Arabic and in far eastern scripts. It’s inspiring. It does a heart good.

Eminent Rochestrians — Mitch Miller

Once when I was teaching an ElderHostel (now RoadScholar) course at Watson Homestead, one participant told us a story.

*She had been on the island of Corfu, looking across the sea toward Greece, when a voice behind her said, “Now there’s someone from Rochester, New York.”

*She turned around, and it was Mitch Miller.

*They chatted a little, and she asked how he knew she was from Rochester. “I could tell by the accent,” he replied.

*Well, Mitch no doubt had a very good ear, but he came by his knowledge of Rochester accents honestly, having been born in the Flower City in 1911.

*He took up the oboe in junior high, and by age 15 was playing with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. After graduating from East High he went on to Eastman School of Music, and finished there with honors, then signed on with the Rochester Philharmonic.

*By the late 1940s he was a record producer, charged with finding, developing, and directing talent. He gave Aretha Franklin her start, and worked with dozens of top vocal stars.

*He despised rock-and-roll, and so missed the boat on a lucrative new field. (More to the point, his company also missed the boat.)

*All of this was more or less “insider baseball,” but as a sideline he created a men’s choral group, performing as Mitch Miller and the Gang. In 1961 NBC brought forth a weekly show, “Sing Along With Mitch.” Families crowded around the sets to sing, and suddenly Mitch, along with what was now called the Sing-Along Gang, were household names.

*They were popular enough to be parodied by Steve Allen, Alan Sherman, MAD, the Chipmunks, and even the Flintstones.

*The songs were old-time hits of previous generations, all the way back to the Civil War. In my case, it was my first exposure to Gilbert and Sullivan. But if the music was staid, some of the values were cutting edge. Even a male choir needs a few female singers, and Leslie Uggams was one of the first African Americans to have a weekly TV appearance outside of playing a traditionally black role. She got death threats.

*In line at the old Borders Books and Records store in Rochester once, I saw that I was likely to be waited on by someone who appeared to be a Serious Music Person. Great, I said to myself. Here I am looking for two copies of “Holiday Sing Along With Mitch.” But another clerk stepped into the breach.

*The show ended in ’64 but Mitch kept working and performing, at least until the late 1990s. He was married to Florence Alexander for 65 years, and died at the age of 99.

*Each week as the show ended Mitch and his Gang sang, “Let me hear a melody, a simple singin’ song… loud and strong… I love to sing along! Let me hear a melody, a simple singin’ song, and I’ll sing along.” Words to live by!

Eminent Rochestrians: Louise Slaughter

Back in days of yore there was a book on “Eminent Victorians” – British folks from the high days of the British Empire. The book was famed for dishing the dirt.

*For some time now I’ve been ruminating on a POSITIVE series about “Eminent Rochestrians,” and who better to launch this intermittent series than Louise Slaughter.

*Her story started in 1929. Herbert Hoover became president in March of that year, and the stock market crashed in September, making her a child of the Great Depression. It was 81 years since the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, and nine years since the 20th amendment opened up voting to all American women. Talking movies were just becoming popular. Lindberg had flown the Atlantic two years earlier. Racial segregation looked like it would last forever.

*Her father was a blacksmith. One of her sisters died, of pneumonia, in childhood. She graduated from high school which, while not uncommon by then, was definitely still not the rule. Then she went to the University of Kentucky for a bachelor’s degree in microbiology, and a master’s in public health.

*At this point she was indeed venturing into the realm of the uncommon. Women were usually discouraged from hard science fields, and those who persevered were still pretty much considered quirks of nature. Besides getting the degrees, she convinced Procter & Gamble to hire her.

*Even so, once she married she followed her husband’s work to Kodak and Rochester, where the couple reared three children. Over time she became more and more involved in community activism and then in elective politics, serving in Monroe County Legislature and the New York State Assembly before winning her seat in Congress in 1982. She successfully defended that seat 15 times – enough times to become the oldest sitting Member of Congress. She was the only microbiologist in Congress, and the only woman ever to chair the House Rules Committe (often called the POWERFUL House Rules Committee). She was 88 when she died earlier this month. (Her husband predeceased her four years ago.)

*Besides being a trailblazing woman in science and in politics (as if that wasn’t enough!), she co-authored the Violence Against Women Act, and wrote the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act. She helped lead fights for breast cancer research, genetic information non-discrimination, and better body armor for military personnel.

*She also secured substantial funding for R.I.T., for U. of R., and for building Rochester’s new Amtrak station – which will now be named in her honor, as is a hall at R.I.T. Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and the great John Lewis have carved time at short notice from their hectic schedules to come and speak at her funeral. Quite a life, Louise. Well done. Safe journey.

Wanna Buy Some Books?

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More than half a millenium ago Chaucer wrote about the Clerk (or learned man) of Oxenford. He wears threadbare clothes, his horse is as thin as a rake, and he himself is so thin he looks hollow.

*Ah, but he has books… TWENTY books, in a day when every one was painstakingly copied by hand, and hardly anyone could read. Few institutions had twenty books back then. His “library” (kept right next to his bed) represented a fortune, and whenever he scraped up some money, or even when he could borrow some from friends, he bought even more… not as investments, but because “Gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.”

*Books are far far cheaper today, but no less wonderful. If like the clerk (and like me) you like to prowl around ferreting out more books to buy, where can you go?

*Well, if you want the big-box big selection, complete with cafe, there are Barnes & Noble stores in Elmira/Big Flats, in Ithaca, and in Rochester. The Rochester selection is a little smaller, since it doubles as the U of R bookstore, but also includes a nice sampling of books by U of R faculty and alumni. Besides, you can just walk up the block from Strong Hospital, if you have someone spending time there. (This store also makes a good break if you have to drive up to Rochester to meet the train or do some business.)

*The only independent new-book store in the four-county region is Long’s, on Main Street in Penn Yan. If you like bookshops, take a ride out there. You’ll be impressed by their selection. There’s also a very good local-history section, and a large selection of cards, gifts, and office supplies. If you’re there on a summer Saturday, you’ll find a sidewalk farmers’ market out front.

*Across the street is a used bookstore, Belknap Hill Books, though in my experience the hours there can be whimsical. A block or two down Main is Books Landing, a friendly used-book place in a welcoming space, with a great selection of used jigsaw puzzles.

*Also on the used-book side, try The Paperback Place on Main Street in Canandaigua, or Autumn Leaves on The Commons in Ithaca. Autumn Leaves has a magnetic effect on me whenever I’m in town. It’s a large store for used books in a university community. There’s ALWAYS something interesting.

*That’s also true at Book Barn of the Finger Lakes, out between Dryden and Ithaca. Just prowling through the place is half the fun.

*Over on Geneseo’s Main Street, Sundance Books has held its own for decades.

*Henrietta Library has a year-round book sale room. Dormann Library in Bath has its Wednesday “book barn” on the grounds whenever weather suits. Libraries in Corning, Ithaca, and Hammondsport have significant sales from time to time.

*If you want graphic novels, go to heroes Your Mom Threw Out (Elmira Heights), Comics for Collectors (Ithaca’s Collegetown) or Pulp Nouveau (Canandaigua).

*Each of these towns is interesting in and of itself, and there’s always someplace not too far away to get ice cream. Take a ride. See the sights. Buy some books.

Good Memories at Strong Museum, and the National Toy Hall of Fame

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What toys do you like best? What toys do you remember best? What toys do your kids spend most of their time with?

*Every couple of years we visit the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, and on any given visit, it seems like we get through about half of the place. (It’s big!)

*Earlier this month, I committed to spend some time on the upper level, in the Toy Hall of Fame, which showcases 62 toys (so far) that have been selected for the honor.

*One of the great things about the Toy Hall of Fame is that it takes a very broad view of toys and playthings. So honored inductees include the stick (inducted 2008), the blanket (2011), and the cardboard box (2005).

*There were three inductions last year: Dungeons & Dragons, the swing, and Fisher-Price Little People. That makes a good picture of the breadth. The granddaddy of modern role-playing games, an ancient low-tech plaything, and an enduring, well-loved proprietary set of toys.

*When you wander the Toy Hall of Fame, you wander through a memory gallery that ranges from A (alphabet blocks, 2003) to almost-Z (View-Master, 1999).

*I have to say that I no longer remember any specific story on my View-Master. But I certainly remember pressing down that little button on the right, the satisfying “clunk” as the disc advanced, and the exciting 3-D effect, which I now know mimicked the old-time stereopticon.

*And how I loved my Lincoln Logs (1999), building anything imaginable, often in combination with my plastic dinosaurs or my little green army men (2014). Each Christmas, I used Lincoln Logs to make up a Nativity scene.

*My grandfather taught me checkers (2003), but my father taught me chess (2013). My mother taught me to ride a bicycle (2000). We bought our kids G.I. Joe toys (2004), and Star Wars action figures (2012). When I was at a very low time in my life, shortly before we came to Bath, our younger son bought me a jar of bubble water (2014), and I spent many calming hours on the steps, making bubbles and watching them float on the breeze, and thinking about what an insightful guy he was.

*Nowadays at our house we don’t go in much for Atari (2007), Barbie (1998), skateboards (2008), Easy-Bake Ovens (2006), or Rubik’s Cube (2014). But we DO spend time with Scrabble (2004), and with jigsaw puzzles (2002).

*Besides the main Toy Hall of Fame, the Strong is also home to the Toy Industry Hall of Fame (honoring people), the World Video Game Hall of Fame, and the D.I.C.E. Awards from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.

*Near the Toy Halls of Fame is the America at Play gallery, a chronological look at three centuries of play and recreation. I was thrilled to find a full-size fishing diorama here, complete with a Penn Yan Boats “Cartop” boat from the 1950s. I was intrigued to see one of the early circular Monopoly boards, hand-drawn by Charles Darrow.

*Since I’m a big fan of comics and cartoons, I enjoyed spotting playthings of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Popeye, Barney Google, Spark Plug, Peanuts, and Dick Tracy.

*We also took in Reading Adventureland; American Comic Book Heroes; and the Berenstain Bears “Down a Sunny Dirt Road” space, besides catching the last day of a dinosaur exhibit, and poking around the Field of Play room. And that still left almost half the museum untouched. Which just means we have to go back! And we will. You might like it, too.

A Warm Spot in a Cold Blast — Lamberton Conservatory

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Where do you go when there’s an arctic cold line dropping down from Lake Ontario?

*Why, to Rochester’s Highland Park, of course.

*When we there a couple of weeks ago under just such circumstances, snow was falling onto Frederick Law Olmstead’s Upstate treasure. Kids were sledding and skateboarding down the steep slopes of a little dell or dingle, to their parents’ delight. As we made our way farther off, excited voices faded to a snowy hush. Here and there a squirrel skittered, and we said that all we needed was a lonely lamppost. And we found one.

*Our photographer son Josh was in his element, but one of a series of arctic waves came down on us and I’ll confess that after a while I pointed out that according to his own words, I had a debilitating disease (a WEIRD debilitating disease, he corrected me), and the new wave of cold was leaching me out, so while he went forging on, I went backtracking. As for Joyce her journey had been even shorter – from the car to the Lamberton Conservatory.

*Three cheers to Monroe County for maintaining not only the gorgeous park, but also, since 1911, the conservatory. It’s a never-ending battle to keep up such a site, and many operators fall by the wayside. Just short of the century mark, the Lamberton was taken down and then painstakingly reproduced on its original site – an undertaking at once valiant and heroic.

*You can guess that it was noticeably WARMER when we stepped inside, but we were not entering a sweltering ambiance. I only saw a couple of thermometers around the place, and they both read 62. Still, in an instant we were warm, even as we watched the snow (fallen and falling) through the glass-paneled walls.

*I did not set myself to acquire knowledge on the Conservatory’s prolific fauna… I just wandered and wended to grok the whole experience. Certainly I DID observe that one room was pretty much a desert environment (lots of cacti), and one was something of a tropical rain forest (more humid, but not aggressively so), while another was more like our own climate, albeit with an endless summer, or at least an endless late spring.

*Josh joined us eventually, and of course we all got a charge out of the FAUNA mixed in with the flora. A terrarium had four tortoises (I found ’em all) and three box turtles (found two). In one lovely artificial stream I counted seventeen turtles, most “sunning” themselves but some swimming, and in another room another six.

*Keep you eye peeled and you also spot quail zipping in and out of the undergrowth – little guys about five inches tall, I’d say. While we were there, many of them tended to congregate within a few yards of some pans of grain laid down for them, but keep at it long enough and you may find them anywhere in this large space, even across the stream, so I suppose that when the coast is clear they use the footbridge.

*That tropical dome space is the biggest in the conservatory, and it’s also the highest, making space for tall growth. Here there are three stories of growth – both here and in the adjoining room, orchids hang down within reach, along with epiphytes.

*Benches scatter here and there, and on one an elderly man sat reading. There’s a little lending library in the entry lobby, or you can bring a book of your own. It’s a lovely place to sit and read on a wintry icy day, enjoying your book and your warmth and your lovely lush surroundings, glancing up now and then to see the snowy world outside.

*Highland Park covers more than 150 acres, essentially straddling South Ave between Mount Hope and South Goodman, with Highland and Reservoir being the main east-west streets. Besides the glory of the setting itself, the space has been created as an arboretum. With a free brochure you can explore various kinds of plantings. It costs two bucks to enter the Conservatory. The park itself is free for all to wander, dream, explore, and snowboard.

“Bravo” for Geva Theatre

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Soooooo, after twenty-two years of living in the western Finger Lakes, we finally made it to Geva Theatre. We were there on the Sunday before Christmas, taking in the noon matinee of that perennial Geva favorite, “A Christmas Carol.”

To take the performance first; it was loads of fun. This is a Rochester tradition – our son reminds us that he went, in middle school – so the house was packed with old and young and everything in between. Nobody was hamming it up, but production and performance were both energetic, reaching out to every age in the house. Guy Paul, playing Ebenezer Scrooge, projected his character’s aggressive misanthropy without turning himself into a cartoon.

Geva puts on part-Equity productions. Guy Paul has a lengthy list of Broadway and West End appearances. Joel Blum (Fezziwig) has been twice nominated for Tony Awards, and once for a Drama Desk Award.

But it’s also a teaching theater. The children’s parts were played by regional children with stage experience and enthusiasm. From there the players climb the ladder of experience. We were stunned to learn from the program that Christmas Past was being played by a seventh grader – we’d never have guessed. Tess DeFlyer, who delightfully plays Belle and two other parts, has a BFA from Nazareth in musical theater.

So the cast were all more than satisfactory, and so was the adaptation. (If we understand it right, Geva has performed several different adaptations over the years.)

The sets were clever, with an overhead catwalk or balcony on which some of the action takes place, a symbolic window frame that’s raised and lowered, and a huge set for Scrooge and Marley’s, which cast and crew nevertheless struck offstage and on very quickly. Scrooge’s bedstead, when reversed, became Scrooge’s tombstone – a nice touch.

Special effects included two ghosts lowered from above, silhouettes through the scrims, fog, and projections. We had second row seats, at the extreme stage left, which was great except that we were right next to the loudspeaker, which was fine except for the bells and the thunderclaps. The house itself was very comfortable, and easy to get around in, and easy to get in and out of. Performances continue through Christmas Eve.

Growing up in Rhode Island we had ample access to high-level theater. Top road companies came through with Broadway Theater League, or in the round under “the tent” of Warwick Musical Theater. Rhode Island College and Brown University put on their own first-rate productions (Viola Davis is a RIC alumna), and hosted professional performances. We had a very strong regional company in the Trinity Square Repertory, and good community groups such as Cranston Players.

All of which reminds us what a regional treasure Geva is. In action since 1972, and in its downtown Rochester Woodbury Avenue home since 1985, Geva seats 160,000 audience members A YEAR, including 16,000 students.

That last figure should get us all dancing in the streets. We read years ago that the worst play is better than the best movie, and while that’s hyperbole there’s nothing in the world like a life performance. Sixteen thousand should be just a starting point.

And without taking anything away from Geva we also have our own offerings closer to home… Clemens Center, Keuka Lake Players, the colleges and universities, even the high schools. When the lights go down we join millions of other playgoers running all the way back to when young master Shakespeare took his place in some courtyard at Stratford. We can’t wait to see what happens next.