Imagine that Rochester’s Main Street bridge was not only a thoroughfare but was also topped with apartment, businesses, and shops like London Bridge of old. Wouldn’t that be just about the coolest thing ever?
OK, maybe not the coolest thing EVER, but it still would be pretty neat. And that’s what makes it all the sadder that Rochester used to have that with the Main Street bridge.
I think the germ of my interest in the bridges of the Genesee River probably grew from an encounter with a painting in the Memorial Art Gallery many years ago. It was an oil painting of some buildings on a bridge. When I first looked it I was shocked to discover that it was not in Europe, as I expected, but here in Rochester. I had crossed the Main Street bridge many times since moving to this area in 1998, but I had never known there were once buildings on it.
Colin Campbell Cooper painted this scene in 1911 while visiting the hometown of his wife Emma Lampert Cooper (also an accomplished artist), and the painting was given to the Memorial Art Gallery by Hiram Sibley. It still is on display at the MAG and after visiting the bridge on a recent wintry day, I went and took another look at the painting. It’s in a more prominent spot in the MAG than it used to be, and a label gives context, including Cooper’s assessment that “Rochester is filled with subjects which need no other idealization to make beautiful than an eye receptive to the glory of light and color and the ability to register these things on canvas.” It makes me think that I need to develop a new appreciation of the luminous qualities of our city, when I am apt to dwell on the inordinate number of overcast, steel-gray days that we seem to have.
The bridge itself was completed in 1857 and buildings stood on it until they were torn down in 1965.
I visited the bridge on a frigid January day in 2022–the thermometer on a nearby building said 19 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind was biting–and after parking on the west side I trudged through the snow on and around the bridge. To be honest, it was too cold to really enjoy the scene, and I’ve crossed the bridge many times and even listened to the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra play there prior to the fireworks show on the Fourth of July.
Part of the river was iced over, though there were some free flowing areas where a pair of mallards were paddling and I saw at least one other duck that I didn’t recognize (I shouldn’t have deleted that handy bird app from the Cornell School of Ornithology!). I took in the scene and looked briefly around at some of the nearby buildings.
There’s a large painting on the back of the Rochester Convention Center by Peter Jemison–descendant of Mary Jemison–depicting a Seneca origin story.
On the west side, one of the many statues of Frederick Douglass that now populate the city stood slightly forlorn in the snow.
Of more interest to me as it relates to Frederick Douglass was a historical plaque put up in 1976 at 25 East Main Street, indicating that this was the spot where Douglass published his abolitionist newspaper the North Star.
I then returned to my car on Corinthian Street (though I didn’t know the name of the street at the time–it’s where I had parked when I explored the Sister Cities Bridge), lured perhaps not only by its proximity but also by the delightful length of yarn bombing on the guard rail.
Only later when I returned home and took a look at my copy of The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass did I learn that this parking lot was once the site of Corinthian Hall, the center of Rochester’s musical and intellectual scene, where Frederick Douglass gave his famous talk “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” in 1852. With the ringing rebuke of an Old Testament prophet he declaimed,
“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy–a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
I’m sure his audience squirmed uncomfortably that day, for even now they’re hard words to hear. Too bad that all that remains is a parking lot.
Building-adorned bridges and orations on injustice and freedom….
Rochester is a city of ghosts and memories.
Bridges of the Genesee River 