“Nico would like to visit a bridge.”
Now there are few words that will warm the heart of a dedicated bridge hunter more than a request to visit a bridge. I don’t care if it was shameless flattery. It worked! Nico, my daughter Abigail’s boyfriend, was willing to spend part of his four-day visit from Indiana walking across a bridge with me and I was all too ready to take him up on the offer. So I took the day off work to make sure there was plenty of time for a leisurely visit.
We began by having lunch at The Gate House, one of our family’s favorite restaurants in Rochester. It’s housed in Village Gate, which is a complex of stores and restaurants occupying a series of large, formerly abandoned factory buildings, including the site of the old Stecher-Traung Lithographic Co. (It turns out we have a number of old lithographs from Stecher in the collections of Strong National Museum of Play where I work.)
The overall redevelopment of Village Gate was brought to life by Gary Stern, who began a decades long revitalization effort in the 1980s to build an urban mall. Today it’s a vibrant mix of restaurants, shops, and offices.
After lunch we decided to stroll over to the Memorial Art Gallery for a quick pre-bridge visit (Nico was going to get his money’s worth). As we walked through the Village Gate Complex, however, I noticed an A-Frame sign advertising that the Military History Society of Rochester was open. I had read about this organization and suggested we visit that instead. What we discovered was a small space filled with an impressive collection of artifacts documenting the participation of Rochesterians in military conflicts from the War of 1812 up to the present day. Its founder Chuck Bayliss regaled us with fascinating stories about the contents of the museum….
….including this Norden Bombsight which used a variety of ingenious analog computing devices and sensors to account for things like wind speed and temperature to aim bombs accurately during World War II, Korea, and even Vietnam.
We spent much longer than expected in the museum and after a brief tour of the rest of the Anderson Arts building (filled with artists’ studios) we thought it best to head to our destination, the Andrews Street Bridge.
As it turned out, lots of things captured my attention as we walked to it after parking, including this six-story high mural painted in 2012 by the German art-duo Herakut, part of the city’s amazing Wall\Therapy program of adorning Rochester with spectacular paintings.
This doorway for the Rochester Journal-American, a newspaper that was owned by William Randolph Hearst, also caught my eye.
At last we reached the bridge, however. It’s a stone’s throw away from the Inner Loop bridge and is at the site of a bridge originally built by Samuel James Andrews. He, like me, was from Connecticut. A prosperous merchant, he lost much of his wealth to British privations in the War of 1812 and decided, at the age of 50, to move to Rochester where he owned some land. Settling there he constructed an early stone house and he and his descendants became prominent leaders in the community. They are buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery.
The bridge itself is composed of a series of modest but elegant stone arches.
It was constructed in 1893, and the Rochester Public Library has a series of photographs documenting its construction.
Also in that collection was a wonderful picture of a previous bridge on this spot engulfed in the massive floods of 1865.
Floods like this no longer devastate the city, but the river still washes up a fair share of debris which gets stuck against the bridge. Indeed, at the end of October (a couple of weeks after we visited) the city closed the bridge down for a day in order to clean this detritus that had piled up.
The debris had been there long enough for mushrooms to begin growing on it.
Looking up, the view to the south of the bridge towards downtown Rochester is quite lovely.
But the best view of all was that of Nico and Abigail, who were kind enough to indulge me in a visit to another bridge.
Bridges of the Genesee River 
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