All cities, past and present, have a garbage problem. If you gather a lot of people together they’ll create, buy, use, and throw away more garbage than can easily be handled by the municipal authorities. In ancient Rome, Monte Testaccio grew from the deposition of millions of jars of amphorae used to hold olive oil. In early America, when population density was much less, people generally disposed of their trash on their own land or tossed it into areas like Boston’s Mill Pond that became stews of stench and rubbish. As populations grew, land became scarcer, and people began to make more of a link between garbage and germs, municipal garbage infrastructures developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The result was the modern waste disposal systems that keep our landscapes clean from clutter.
Or that’s the idea at least. When Ursula and I made an early morning trip in late April to the next bridge–the Smith St./Bausch Memorial Bridge–the predominant thing we noticed was the trash that littered the landscape. But more on that in a moment….
After parking on the east side of the river we saw this romantically ruined colonade on Bausch Street at one end of the lot where we parked.
Only in writing this blog did I learn that this marked the remains of a much larger complex of buildings associated with the optics manufacturer Bausch & Lomb. Here is a photograph from 1946 that shows what this area looked like then.
That is St. Paul Blvd that bisects the two sets of buildings in that photograph from 1946, and the building on the right still stands and would make a spectacular building suite for companies today with the right developer.
After parking on the east side of the river we crossed the bridge, which affords a nice view of the Genesee River to the North.
And to the south was a spectacular industrial chimney. I was curious what that could be.
But to return to the trash….
After crossing the bridge and as we turned to head back across we noticed a path threading down to the west side of the river immediately next to the bridge. Going down it we were struck by the extraordinary amount of garbage that littered the trail.
It reminded both of us of our trips to Haiti in 2016 and 2017, where we saw garbage everywhere, including on the beach in what could be a postcard-worthy setting but instead had become a dump that was the grazing ground of goats.
Haiti is a failed state, a beautiful country with wonderful people cursed with a corrupt government and deep poverty that is in large measure the consequence of centuries of racist treatment from white leaders in Europe and America who blackballed the country after its populace staged the only successful wide-scale slave rebellion in modern history. But Rochester, despite all its problems, is still an adequately functioning government, so I put the trash on the trail along the Genesee River down to simple neglect. Ironically, this trash was right near ROC Recycling Company, whose motto is “Saving the world, one recyclable at a time.”
And in even further irony, it turned out all this litter was next to the ruined remains of what had once been Rochester’s main incinerator for removing garbage, built originally in 1911 and replaced with the current abandoned structure in the 1940s. This post from Rochester Subway gives more history and lots of pictures of the incinerator.
Continuing over the bridge, the south side looks towards High Falls, over an expansive plain of abandoned industrial sites, what could be a fabulous riverside park like so many cities have created in recent years.
I checked the Roc the Riverway plan developed in 2018, and that report did cast a vision for turning this area into a park (Bee Bee Flats), including spanning the river over an abandoned foot bridge whose piers you can see in the photo above. So maybe there’s hope that this will one day come to pass.
Returning over the bridge, we were treated with further reminders of the importance of Bausch & Lomb for this area. The bridge itself was dedicated as the Bausch Memorial Bridge in 1930, which was the same time that the Veterans Memorial Bridge was being built. There was a lot of bridge building going on at that time, which is some evidence of how prosperous and vibrant the city must have been in the preceding years.
Bausch’s business partner Henry Lomb also received honors as well, as we discovered when we saw a monument dedicated to his memory. It’s a wonderful art deco obelisk in a traffic circle, though it’s definitely showing signs of decay like so many other faded remains of Rochester’s past in this area around the Bausch Memorial/Smith St. Bridge.
Thus finished our trip that day, but as a postscript, while searching for pictures of the Bausch & Lomb building I came across this early 20th century image of the predecessor to the Bausch Memorial Bridge, the Vincent Street Bridge that was built in 1873 and demolished in 1929 before the construction of the current bridge.
And here are two more photos of Bausch & Lomb when it was busy and active.
Bridges of the Genesee River 
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