“April is the cruelest month.”
-T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Spring is my least favorite time of year in Rochester. The cold continues long, usually supplemented by a biting wind, with drizzle thrown in for good measure. Skies are gray and, except for a warm day or two that teases but never fully satisfies, springtime feels oversold and overblown when it comes to Rochester. Only in May does the tide feel like it’s truly turned, and then we enjoy a few weeks of pleasant temperature before summer heat begins.
It was on such a cold, grey, wet, miserable day that I set out to visit the Ford St. bridge, the next stop in my journey. It didn’t help that it was Good Friday, the bleakest day on the Christian calendar, the day when Jesus was crucified and died. The physical and spiritual universes seemed to be in harmony, each playing in a somber, minor key.
If one hopes to finish a journey, however, one must need press on, even when the weather is miserable. I’ve always loved J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and that tale is, at its essence, a long journey, from The Shire to Mount Doom in the land of Mordor. Along the way there were plenty of adventures, and pleasant moments, like the interludes in the Elvish havens of Rivendell and Lothlorien, but there also was much mucking through dreary and miserable landscapes. Tolkien sometimes elided over these stretches of travel quickly, telescoping weeks of travel into a paragraph or two, but they were an important part of the journey. The same has to be true for me. Bridges don’t visit themselves, and if I ever hope to visit every bridge on the Genesee it means visiting some bridges on dreary days like this.
So on April 15, I went with Ursula and Jacob to the Ford Street bridge. We stopped first for lunch at Tony D.’s then drove through the Corn Hill neighborhood on the west side of the river to find a parking spot near the bridge. There weren’t many options, so we tried a small lot near a red brick building that had a vacant lot.
The small sign looked hand lettered and simply said RCF, though a more official sign just beyond the place where we parked warned that if your car continued on the drive it was subject to search. Ursula was doubtful about whether or not we should park there, but I didn’t see anyone in this lot or the one beyond it so I figured, why not? It would be a quick visit to the bridge as we had to leave soon to make a meeting for our daughter’s wedding venue. So we parked and started walking to the bridge.
It was a short walk, as within a few seconds of setting off a woman in a uniform called us back and let us know–very nicely–that this was part of the Rochester Correctional Facility and we couldn’t park there. Returning to our cars we headed across the river and found a short, dead-end street, Hanna Place, that was cute but a little run-down.
By this point the weather was taking a nastier turn, beginning to rain, so our trip to the bridge was rather brief, which was too bad since it afforded a lovely view of downtown. The current bridge was built in 1918, and a renovation of the bridge in 2001 nicely incorporated elements from earlier iterations into the remodeled structure. The trusses rise through the roadway, giving it a feel of a mixture of a railroad and automobile bridge.
The view of Rochester looking north, framed by the girders of the original bridge, is lovely. The skyscrapers of downtown Rochester made an interesting silhouette against the grey sky.
To the right is a set of multicolored buildings–Erie Harbor Apartments and the Hamilton–that were developed about ten years ago. At the time a lot of people complained that their multicolor panels didn’t mesh with the historic architecture of the South Wedge, the neighborhood they sit in, but I like them and find them interesting.
The view to the south is less dramatic, stretching out towards the University of Rochester on the left, but hidden by a bend in the river.
I did enjoy the actual construction of the bridge, which is called a pony truss bridge because the trusses extend above the roadway but are not crossbraced at the top. As noted above, the bridge itself was built in 1918 but significantly redone and remodeled in 2001.
Originally it had been named the Clarissa Street Bridge, as Clarissa Street was the main connecting route on the west side. The Clarissa Street neighborhood was a largely Black area, with a thriving cultural scene but also an area burdened with problems of overcrowding and decaying housing. The Black population of Rochester had grown quickly in the 1950s, but discrimination excluded many from high-paying jobs at Kodak and other firms and the decline of many industries in Rochester meant that work was harder to find for those with the requisite skills. Poverty was rampant. Restrictive real estate practices prevented Black residents from moving into other parts of the city.
In 1964, riots convulsed Rochester on a hot July night, starting near Joseph Avenue and spreading on the second day to the Clarissa Street neighborhood (the 3rd Ward). These were the first major outbreaks of unrest to occur in the north in the 1960s, prompting the deployment of the National Guard. Some would even dispute that they should be called riots, arguing that they might be better termed rebellion or simply unrest. Whatever the label, widescale destruction devastated largely Black neighborhoods, and while it led to some economic efforts to redress inequality it also accelerated the white flight to the suburbs, increasing the overall problem of segregation in the region. For those interested in learning more about the events, there is a powerful and an insightful documentary (including commentary from well-known jazz musicians Chuck and Gap Mangione, whose father ran a well-known store in the Joseph Avenue area). Given the history in recent years here in Rochester and nationally associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s hard not to see these events of the past few years as echoes of incidents almost a half century ago.
Clarissa Street never fully recovered from the violence, its own day of death and destruction. In 1996 an annual Clarissa Street Reunion was launched, with the hope that it might contribute to the rebirth and resurrection of the area. This coincided with the redevelopment of the Corn Hill neighborhood, though much of the development there has been targeted to higher income residents.
So what future will the Ford Street Bridge see? On the bleak Good Friday that I was there, it seemed hard to be hopeful. But Easter was coming, with the promise of resurrection. Perhaps the same is true for this area.
I began this blog with the opening line of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, so perhaps it’s fitting to close with some lines from his series of poems Ash Wednesday. In the church calendar, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the 40-day period that leads to Easter. It is a day of repentance, and Eliot weaves those somber thoughts through his poem, writing near the end these words:
“Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings”
The Ford Street Bridge is a brief transit, though whether it sits between profit and loss, birth or dying, is still uncertain. There’s a lot of history to overcome.
Bridges of the Genesee River 