Rochester is one of those northeastern cities that destroyed its own downtown neighborhoods for the sake of building a moat of highways around the city center. As a visitor, it was depressing how detached the city center was from anything, and how pedestrian-unfriendly and relatively dead the streets were, filled with large office buildings, surface parking lots, and not much else. It’s a “great driving city” because there’s more empty road space than anyone knows what to do with. Enormous waste of space, infrastructure money, and human potential.

The pictures from before the 1950s vs. after are stark. http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/