Hacker News Reader

Comment by sayhar | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in Rochester. Really glad to see it recognized here.

I like to tell people that there was a time when there was a race to become, frankly, Chicago. Cities like Rochester, Buffalo, (Milwaukee?) competed -- but Chicago prevailed.

Similarly, Rochester was the original Hollywood. The film industry started there, and the original movie stars all had mansions on East Ave -- which are still up today. (Eventually everyone moved west, apocryphally to avoid the mob).

Lastly, did you know that there was a nuclear reactor in the basement of the Kodak building? Apparently the mayor, city council etc, never knew. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/local/2016/08/18/...

Rochester is great!

View on HN

> Similarly, Rochester was the original Hollywood.

I searched for this and couldn't find anything. According to wikipedia:

> In the early 20th century, before Hollywood, the motion picture industry was based in Fort Lee, New Jersey across the Hudson River from New York City.[75][76][77] In need of a winter headquarters, moviemakers were attracted to Jacksonville, Florida due to its warm climate, exotic locations, excellent rail access, and cheaper labor, earning the city the title of "The Winter Film Capital of the World.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film

There's a new book out [1] that examines the role of technology in the early film industry. One of the tensions is between the camera, sound, and lighting technologies mainly based in East Coast cities such as Rochester (home to Kodak, which basically had a monopoly on film production until DuPont entered the fray) and the production studios in Hollywood. Rival technical societies (including the organization that now hosts the Oscars) developed that mostly catered to an East Coast or West Coast audience. In an era before jet travel, attending a technical conference in New York was a much bigger commitment for a cameraman based in California.

The movie business was also for quite some time a niche audience. There wasn't much of a market in developing specialty cameras for Hollywood--the real money was in home movies. A few firms such as Technicolor emerged to cater directly to the movie picture industry. Eventually, a tech cluster developed in Los Angeles.

And regarding Fort Lee, my understanding is that it remained a center of the animation industry until around the 1940s when Walt Disney moved to California.

[1] Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building the Studio System by Luci Marzola. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/engineering-hollywoo...

When people are done with their tech tours, Rochester is an absolutely fantastic city to consider for your post Silicon-valley life. Biggest challenge is the weather: embrace the cold by picking up winter sports. There is a coziness to that sort of snowy weather you can't find in other climates.

To this day Eastman’s legacy keeps Rochester punching well above its weight for cities of its size. The Eastman School of Music is arguably one of the top two of music schools in the country.

The Rochester International Jazz festival is fantastic too.

Absolutely. I tell people that to think of Rochester like Pittsburgh, only delayed by 10 years. Lately, it seems like the real estate market agrees with me. :-)

> Rochester is great!

As a current resident (hopefully changing that soon!), this place has gone seriously downhill. Used to be super cool, now... there are serious problems, and people have been shot on my street twice this month.

I’m curious, which neighborhood, or quadrant, are you in? Some parts of the city have had pretty serious violent crime problems for many years, but many haven’t.

Previously in Churchville, short stint in the 19th Ward, now near West Ridge in Greece.

Churchville is an idyllic little town, because it's far enough out that the inner-city problems don't reach it. I don't feel safe downtown, and I understand why CCW applications have skyrocketed.

>short stint in the 19th Ward, now near West Ridge in Greece

There's your problem. If you want to be in the city, stay in the SE quadrant

That's the thing, it's spreading. Used to be that Lyell Ave was the "bad part" of town, now it's everywhere except in close proximity to the gentrified areas.

Wow, I grew up in Churchville. Spent some time in Pittsburgh and Boston and now I'm back in Rochester (East Side). Never thought I'd see my tiny hometown mentioned on HN.

It really is a lovely place. I grew up next to the Black Creek dam, used to take a coffee out there and just watch the sun rise.

Upstate native here. Not sure I’d buy the Chicago narrative at all.

Rochester and Syracuse got their economic genesis in large part from the Erie Canal (leading to the NYC RR which terminated in Chicago), Buffalo to a relatively lesser degree but at no point was the economic magnitude of these ever in the same ballpark as Chicago which was an mercantile center long before the Rust Belt population and GDP peaking. There’s a nice recent article in the Atlantic about Kodak. Much like Pittsburgh (which is probably a more apt comparison) with US Steel and Alcoa.. Rochester relied on a oligopoly of Kodak and Xerox (that willingly gave up doing anything notable with all the great things from PARC). When they dwindled so did the city basically. Chicago has already lost even larger employers than Kodak (Sears, Motorola alone), the economy of the greater Chicago area is incomparably larger - I think even Schaumburg or Bolingbrook alone are bigger than the Rochester metro, certainly if you exclude URMC.

For the Rust Belt, Chicago was always literally the second city in terms of the railroads. So I’d argue all those cities listed prevailed in part because of Chicago.

In terms of Erie Canal, didn't Buffalo have a bigger slice of the pie? Rochester isn't even really on the canal. Buffalo still has enormous artifacts of the canal industry, like the grain silos.

What I meant was, since Buffalo already had access to a major waterway it’s rise wasn’t as entirely dependent on it.. ie it had other reasons for being relevant.

And are you kidding?? The Erie Canal ran right through the city (likewise Syracuse, Utica, etc) and crossed the Genesee river on an old aqueduct that is still there today and interestingly carried the short lived Rochester subway. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Street_Bridge_(Rochest.... The Canal put those places on the map and the New York Central maintained them there heading into the 20th century.

Ah, sorry, not a native. I know it was rerouted slowly over time but I guess my mental map had the canal much farther to the south than it is (aka, eating ice cream on the tow path in Pittsford).

Yep the waterway through Pittsford was actually also the original canal but it routed north into the city.

The Erie Canal was replaced by the New York Barge canal system which avoided the cities other than NYC and was ironically much larger than the Erie Canal though eclipsed by the railroads in fame by that point. Numerous sections in Western NY such as through Pittsford reused the Erie.

You have it wrong. Rochester certainly was on the canal. The canal was rerouted. There is a bridge in the middle of the city, a block from Main which used to be an aqueduct, running the canal over the river.

https://www.cityofrochester.gov/eriecanal/

Part of one of the expressways, I490, runs through downtown and still has some of the old canal locks next to it as the expressway approaches downtown.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com