I grew up in Rochester. Really glad to see it recognized here.
I like to tell people that there was a time when there was a race to become, frankly, Chicago. Cities like Rochester, Buffalo, (Milwaukee?) competed -- but Chicago prevailed.
Similarly, Rochester was the original Hollywood. The film industry started there, and the original movie stars all had mansions on East Ave -- which are still up today. (Eventually everyone moved west, apocryphally to avoid the mob).
> Similarly, Rochester was the original Hollywood.
I searched for this and couldn't find anything. According to wikipedia:
> In the early 20th century, before Hollywood, the motion picture industry was based in Fort Lee, New Jersey across the Hudson River from New York City.[75][76][77] In need of a winter headquarters, moviemakers were attracted to Jacksonville, Florida due to its warm climate, exotic locations, excellent rail access, and cheaper labor, earning the city the title of "The Winter Film Capital of the World.
There's a new book out [1] that examines the role of technology in the early film industry. One of the tensions is between the camera, sound, and lighting technologies mainly based in East Coast cities such as Rochester (home to Kodak, which basically had a monopoly on film production until DuPont entered the fray) and the production studios in Hollywood. Rival technical societies (including the organization that now hosts the Oscars) developed that mostly catered to an East Coast or West Coast audience. In an era before jet travel, attending a technical conference in New York was a much bigger commitment for a cameraman based in California.
The movie business was also for quite some time a niche audience. There wasn't much of a market in developing specialty cameras for Hollywood--the real money was in home movies. A few firms such as Technicolor emerged to cater directly to the movie picture industry. Eventually, a tech cluster developed in Los Angeles.
And regarding Fort Lee, my understanding is that it remained a center of the animation industry until around the 1940s when Walt Disney moved to California.
When people are done with their tech tours, Rochester is an absolutely fantastic city to consider for your post Silicon-valley life. Biggest challenge is the weather: embrace the cold by picking up winter sports. There is a coziness to that sort of snowy weather you can't find in other climates.
To this day Eastman’s legacy keeps Rochester punching well above its weight for cities of its size. The Eastman School of Music is arguably one of the top two of music schools in the country.
The Rochester International Jazz festival is fantastic too.
Absolutely. I tell people that to think of Rochester like Pittsburgh, only delayed by 10 years. Lately, it seems like the real estate market agrees with me. :-)
As a current resident (hopefully changing that soon!), this place has gone seriously downhill. Used to be super cool, now... there are serious problems, and people have been shot on my street twice this month.
I’m curious, which neighborhood, or quadrant, are you in? Some parts of the city have had pretty serious violent crime problems for many years, but many haven’t.
Previously in Churchville, short stint in the 19th Ward, now near West Ridge in Greece.
Churchville is an idyllic little town, because it's far enough out that the inner-city problems don't reach it. I don't feel safe downtown, and I understand why CCW applications have skyrocketed.
Wow, I grew up in Churchville. Spent some time in Pittsburgh and Boston and now I'm back in Rochester (East Side). Never thought I'd see my tiny hometown mentioned on HN.
That's the thing, it's spreading. Used to be that Lyell Ave was the "bad part" of town, now it's everywhere except in close proximity to the gentrified areas.
Upstate native here. Not sure I’d buy the Chicago narrative at all.
Rochester and Syracuse got their economic genesis in large part from the Erie Canal (leading to the NYC RR which terminated in Chicago), Buffalo to a relatively lesser degree but at no point was the economic magnitude of these ever in the same ballpark as Chicago which was an mercantile center long before the Rust Belt population and GDP peaking. There’s a nice recent article in the Atlantic about Kodak. Much like Pittsburgh (which is probably a more apt comparison) with US Steel and Alcoa.. Rochester relied on a oligopoly of Kodak and Xerox (that willingly gave up doing anything notable with all the great things from PARC). When they dwindled so did the city basically. Chicago has already lost even larger employers than Kodak (Sears, Motorola alone), the economy of the greater Chicago area is incomparably larger - I think even Schaumburg or Bolingbrook alone are bigger than the Rochester metro, certainly if you exclude URMC.
For the Rust Belt, Chicago was always literally the second city in terms of the railroads. So I’d argue all those cities listed prevailed in part because of Chicago.
In terms of Erie Canal, didn't Buffalo have a bigger slice of the pie? Rochester isn't even really on the canal. Buffalo still has enormous artifacts of the canal industry, like the grain silos.
What I meant was, since Buffalo already had access to a major waterway it’s rise wasn’t as entirely dependent on it.. ie it had other reasons for being relevant.
And are you kidding?? The Erie Canal ran right through the city (likewise Syracuse, Utica, etc) and crossed the Genesee river on an old aqueduct that is still there today and interestingly carried the short lived Rochester subway.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Street_Bridge_(Rochest....
The Canal put those places on the map and the New York Central maintained them there heading into the 20th century.
Ah, sorry, not a native. I know it was rerouted slowly over time but I guess my mental map had the canal much farther to the south than it is (aka, eating ice cream on the tow path in Pittsford).
Yep the waterway through Pittsford was actually also the original canal but it routed north into the city.
The Erie Canal was replaced by the New York Barge canal system which avoided the cities other than NYC and was ironically much larger than the Erie Canal though eclipsed by the railroads in fame by that point. Numerous sections in Western NY such as through Pittsford reused the Erie.
You have it wrong. Rochester certainly was on the canal. The canal was rerouted. There is a bridge in the middle of the city, a block from Main which used to be an aqueduct, running the canal over the river.
Part of one of the expressways, I490, runs through downtown and still has some of the old canal locks next to it as the expressway approaches downtown.
I worked in Endicott, NY for a while which is where IBM started and I always wished I could see "Upstate" New York in its heyday. Eastman Kodak, Corning, GE Research, and IBM all located in generally the same area. It basically was the Silicon Valley of its day.
I spent my first five years in Rochester. Xerox was very big back then. Then I returned to complete my degree at RIT. There was a Bausch and Lomb building on campus and another named after Kodak. Imaging and vision were very big.
And two of my co-op assignments were with IBM. With the Federal Sector Division in Owego and one of the labs in Endicott.
It's actually just a bit over a 2 hour drive from Owego to RIT.
I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs sometimes had that long of a commute between Pixar and Apple, given the traffic we have here.
Lockheed Martin still has a site in Owego, NY doing what IBM originally opened the site for in the 50s - avionics. Main building still looks the same [1].
Apparently located out there for defense reasons, easier for test flights outside major cities. All day long you see/hear helicopters taking off and landing
"Same general area" is doing a fair bit of work there :-) Schenectady is probably a 3 or 4 hour drive from Rochester. But to your basic point, there were many (and still are a fair bit) industrial/technology companies in Westchester and points north/west in NY state.
It’s an east coast west coast thing. Four hours is nothing in the west…the drive to the nearest Montana Costco or West Texas Walmart so to speak. Four hours of driving from Las Vegas just puts you in a more remote part of the desert.
I was commenting more on Silicon Valley vs. a much bigger area.
But I agree with the basic point (much less a contrast with much of Europe).
The first couple of times I planned a trip in the West that involved driving to different areas, I remember having to significantly modify plans when I realized I'd be driving rather than doing hikes.
George Eastman was one of the greatest philanthropists of his era. And unlike many of his peers he never created a foundation, but did all his giving directly.
It's called Western New York to people who live in the upper New York. It's called upstate New York to anyone who isn't aware that New York has more than just NYC in it.
Like Google Maps clipping off minor towns as you zoom out, there's a level of detail filter being applied. Within my town, I'll give my neighborhood. Within my state, I'll give my town. Outside that, it'll be "Boston". Farther afield, it might just be "the Northeast [US]".
I'd say Rochester is quite distinct from the Finger Lakes and "Western NY" is far easier to grasp. From this New Englander's perspective, I'm not sure everyone here could place the Finger Lakes on a map.
Its entirely upsetting that such a great city has fallen behind in the technology space. Remnants are still floating around in the city and in the Universities but it is a shell of what was once there.
Being an RIT alumni who left for warmer climes I think the quality of life issues with upstate New York are underrated by people who stay.
I have a decent number of classmates who stayed and can afford much larger houses than I can in sunny and expensive California. But they need that larger house because they can't do anything outside for 5 months of the year.
>they can't do anything outside for 5 months of the year
Yes, there's a real snow belt east of the Great Lakes. But with respect to there being "winter," you could say the same thing about a vast swath of the US. I live near Boston and I assure you there are tons of things I can do outside for those 5 months.
There's plenty to do outside in the snow for those who aren't turned off by the cold. Having grown up in Canada and now living in Rochester, I like having actual seasons :)
Helped with some chip production quality management software at Kodak in Rochester back in 1992. It was really scary seeing this behemoth company with its lunch canteens full of top engineers as the numbers were headed steeply down and the bleak future was already unfolding. Strange how at that time the rank and file, to the extent that average engineers could be called that, could clearly see that digital was the future and yet their latest offerings were mediocre performers with lots of overdone features hardly anyone used that cost a ton to develop.
Kodak’s inventors were top notch back then. They had a ton of patents for digital photography, but the executives were incompetent at best and let it all slip away.
Also don’t forget Kodak had a huge presence in Germany. Kodak AG was an incredible source of innovation.
My father (Roy E. Hickey) worked for Graflex for many years as an engineer and designed several of the audio-visual products mentioned in the article. He said the company never made money after it moved to Pittsford (a Rochester suburb). I still have some Graflex prototypes/cameras.
The weather wasn't great but the area is beautiful. I rember reading his Fortran manual in 1965 which he was using for designing optics.
Yeah, I saw a lot of those. Evidently people still use them with new lenses. I've read that its focal plane shutter made race cars look like they have oval wheels, something that got picked up in cartoons to show speed.
I would also posit that CA coast (and west coast in general) weather, geographical amenities, and food are a big draw for many people. Fruits and vegetables taste better when they come from an hour away rather than across the country.
Plus, CA’s labor laws giving clear rights to people for their work on their own side projects and prohibition of non competes make it quite attractive for tinkerers and innovators.
I’m not sure it did. What the west coast has is a new money investor class which seeks profits from equity growth rather than out of annual cash flow and that’s Silicon Valley’s advantage.
The equity growth priority allows SV to hire talent from around the world before achieving profitability.
There’s a lot of tech talent in east coast finance. But it’s just the hired help for old money. And there is lots and lots in the defense sector, but it doesn’t seek publicity.
As a graduate of RIT I feel comfortable in advising that you visit any other city. Rochester is devoid of hope, and was the only place that helped me enjoy Ohio.
As a current faculty member at RIT, I feel comfortable saying I love it here. While I can understand how it's not a fit for everyone, I think Rochester is a great place to live :)
Besides Wegmans, I struggle to argue your point. I really keep hoping for change and feel like the opportunity to use the local Universities as a source of economic growth just continue to be missed.
The campus is just too far from anything relevant, and building it on a swamp probably didn't help. Plus the weather, which is best described as seasonally awful.
I like to tell people that there was a time when there was a race to become, frankly, Chicago. Cities like Rochester, Buffalo, (Milwaukee?) competed -- but Chicago prevailed.
Similarly, Rochester was the original Hollywood. The film industry started there, and the original movie stars all had mansions on East Ave -- which are still up today. (Eventually everyone moved west, apocryphally to avoid the mob).
Lastly, did you know that there was a nuclear reactor in the basement of the Kodak building? Apparently the mayor, city council etc, never knew. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/local/2016/08/18/...
Rochester is great!