Downtown Rochester’s transformation: Creating ‘a new sense of place’

From both his office and his bike, Chris Hill, a passionate cyclist and chair of the Rochester Downtown Development Corporation, has seen great growth in the city’s downtown over the past few years.

There’s the ongoing removal of the Inner Loop, the anticipation over Constellation Brands moving into the historic Aqueduct Building, the expansion of the Strong National Museum of Play, and people … more people.

“We just hit the 10,000 mark for the number of people living downtown,” said Hill. “Traditionally, for the past one-hundred years downtown was a business district and now it’s a neighborhood.”

Part of what is drawing more people to call downtown “home” are increased residential housing options, like Gallina Development‘s Innovation Square in the former Xerox Tower. This creative living and learning space at 100-140 South Clinton Ave. was designed as a collaborative campus for students attending Rochester’s many colleges and universities.

It boasts shuttles to and from the University of Rochester, an on-site café called Bite, a large theatre for live performances and other gatherings. It also has a gaming lounge, fiber optic high-speed internet service from Greenlight Networks, a co-working space, a fitness center, soundproof music practice rooms, an outdoor lounge and many other amenities.

“Historically there’s been very little housing specifically for students downtown other than dorms for students at the Eastman School of Music and a sprinkling of other places here and there,” said Andrew R. Gallina, president of Gallina Development Corporation. “That’s why Innovation Square is so exciting. Our hope is to create an environment where students will love downtown, work downtown, and stay in Rochester when they graduate.”

About 275 students, primarily from the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, St. John Fisher University, and Nazareth College are currently living at Innovation Square, Gallina said. That number will increase as more floors of the 30-story tower are completed.

Gallina sees student housing as a continued growth opportunity for Rochester in the next few years, as well as affordable housing, noting, “I anticipate a continued interest in market-rate apartments and a market that is robust for people who want to live downtown.”

Tony Soprano, vice president of preconstruction services for DiMarco Constructors — part of the DiMarco Group, whose work downtown includes WinnDevelopment’s Liberty Lofts at Sibley Square, is also seeing market rate and affordable housing demand “busy across the board,” and does not anticipate it ending anytime soon.

Galin Brooks, president & CEO of the Rochester Downtown Development Corp., also believes there is plenty of opportunity for continued residential growth downtown as increasingly more people want a walkable, urban living experience. She points to the evolving Gateway Building rehabilitation on East Main Street as an example of one of the newest affordable housing projects in the pipeline.

The project to transform the vacant building is being planned by SAA|EVI, a Baltimore-based developer, whose website states, “By revitalizing urban transitional neighborhoods experiencing high residential and retail demand, SAA|EVI seeks to replace vacant properties with affordable and work-force housing, local businesses and a new sense of place.”

Brooks is a new City of Rochester resident herself — she moved here from Washington, D.C. in June to assume leadership of the non-profit where the mission is to drive economic vitality downtown.

She spent the past nine years working on planning, infrastructure and parks initiatives for two business improvement districts in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, she worked for Hudson River Park Trust in Manhattan. She earned a master’s degree in urban planning from New York University and a bachelor’s from University College Dublin in Ireland.

Read our profile on Galen Brooks

“I’ve been enjoying walking to work every day and enjoying the festival season,” said Brooks, about her time in Rochester thus far. “I started [at the Rochester Downtown Development Corporation] at the end of the Jazz Festival and the Fringe Festival is happening now — I’m seeing a lot of activity and life in the city; it’s been a tough couple of years with the pandemic and people want to do things, to see things, and to be seen. I see this happening in downtown a lot right now.”

This weekend — from September 30 to October 2 — the city will host Roc the Riverway Weekend, an event to celebrate the Genesee River and its integral part in not only shaping the history of the Rochester region but the role it will play in the future too thanks in large part to the ROC the Riverway initiative.

Announced in 2018, ROC the Riverway is a large-scale and multi-dimensional public works infrastructure project aimed at leveraging Rochester’s location on the Genesee River. Several ROC the Riverway projects have already been successfully completed, most recently a riverfront theater and an overlook that was part of the Rundel Memorial Library North Terrace Improvement project.

In March 2022 Gov. Kathy Hochul shared her support of Phase 2 of ROC the Riverway, which would include a new state park in the High Falls region downtown. The park would be highly accessible to the public, allowing a more intimate and interactive relationship with the gorge and riverway. This greater accessibility and the opportunity it will give Rochesterians to reconnect with their historic river will be “transformational” Brooks said.

Caurie Putnam is a Rochester-area freelance writer.