Photo Illustration of Rochester Skyline c. 2020. (Traci Westcott / twestcott@postbulletin.com)
There’s a saying about downtown Rochester in the 1970s and early 1980s: if someone set off a loaded cannon on the corner of Fourth Street and First Avenue, the ball would sail through the air a long time before it struck anything.
The lack of activity was a symptom of spiking interest in the “cornfield” communities, which offered bountiful parking spaces and plots exponentially cheaper than what developers could acquire in the city’s center. Retail powerhouses migrated to surrounding malls, leaving the downtown gutted.
“If you were walking down Broadway, it was almost like a ghost town,” said Terry Spaeth, assistant city administrator.