Off to the Races

What’s in a name?

Place names often bear witness to histories that have been long forgotten. When we think of the stock market being on Wall Street in New York City, for example, we don’t think of the wall built by the Dutch settlers to defend the northern border of their settlement on the island of Manhattan. Or if you’ve been to Boston you may not reflect that Beacon Hill is so named because there did, indeed, used to be a beacon to warn of danger on the top of this hill, the highest point in Boston.

Driving Park Avenue in Rochester has one of those names that signals the presence of the past; in this case, as it turns out, a race track. It was Rochester Driving Park, a mile-long course for harness racing that was built in 1874 on seventy acres and hosted tens of thousands of visitors a year and enjoyed national fame until racing began to decline and the grandstands burned down in 1899. The race track itself was foreclosed in 1904 (you can learn more about its history here).

1888 map showing Rochester Driving Park. Image from digital collections of Rochester Public Library.

Inaugural races of Driving Park racetrack, 1874. Photo from digital collections of Rochester Public Library

When the race track was in its heyday, there was not actually any bridge over the river at this spot. Two previous attempts at building bridges had been made, in 1819 and 1856, but the high gorge walls had presented challenges and both structures collapsed within a few months. It was not until 1890 that the first long-term bridge was built, a Victorian triumph of exposed steel and wrought iron, 717-feet long and 212 feet above the water. The bridge looks a little like an erector set, a common aesthetic during that era when bridge builders, especially Americans, looked to build bridges as cheaply, quickly, and sturdily as possible. They found beauty in this minimalist approach that emphasized the engineering by foregoing adornment, as is evident in the contemporaneous Eiffel Tower in Paris, completed in 1889.

Driving Park Bridge, ca. 1890-1894

Today’s bridge replaced the original in 1988 with a design that replicated its predecessor, something you can see in this side-by-side comparison that allows you to slide back and forth between images of the old and new bridge.

My son Jacob and I visited it at the end of his Christmas break. We parked near the Maplewood Rose Garden on the west side of the river and walked down to the bridge (though I couldn’t get a really good picture at this point), passing a statue of Frederick Douglass and a historical marker that provided a reminder of the Native American settlement that once occupied this land.

Historical marker in Maplewood Rose Garden

As you cross the bridge you are able to get a wonderful view of the Lower Falls of the Genesee River to the south, spraying a constant plume of mist into the air, coating us as we crossed the bridge. I imagine the ice builds into spectacular formations on colder days.

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In the summer I’ve gone down below to the river bank (this is a picture from the base of the falls I took with my son Jonny in the summer of 2019) and enjoyed seeing fishermen pull massive salmon from the stream.

Base of lower falls in summer, 2019

Jacob and I found almost as fascinating as the bridge itself the former Kodak Hawkeye Manufacturing Plant on the east side of the river. Built in 1943 with support from the federal government, among its uses was military work, including developing satellites in the 1950s that spied on Soviet nuclear installations. The building is beautiful, with subtle Art Deco touches such as the curved metal roof over the entry. A spectacular industrial chimney soars into the sky and offers a pleasing counterpart to the clean, horizontal lines of the sprawling factory.

Crossing towards Kodak Hawkeye factory

We then crossed back over the river and walked down below the bridge where a path and park offer good views of the river and the bridge.

view from edge of Lower Falls

In the end, I think I enjoyed this trip as much for what I subsequently learned about the history of the area as for the bridge itself. Now when I drive down Driving Park Boulevard I can imagine the roar of a grandstand as harness racers make the final turn of the track, urging their horses onward in a mad dash to the finish. Or I might imagine Kodak engineers building spy satellites in secret in the Hawkeye factory, unable to tell even their families about their work. Whether in the name of a street or the remains of a factory, the past still haunts our present.