I miss this place.

(via fuckyeahrochester)

madamagda:

bensgrabbag:

I could get behind any and all of these proposals to bring Rochester into the 21st Century.

1. Light rail okay, yeah

2. a…a what? a canal in downtown? fill the inner loop with water to make a venice in america? what? why? people…drive there….And has anyone looked at/smelled any water running through or near rochester?

3. reopening a restaurant that was iconic in the 70s will help bring us into this century ok

4. new amtrak and bus terminal. okay. that is probably a good idea.

5. an observation deck on the xerox tower? really?

How about instead of a fucking 100-300 million dollar urban canal we spend 100-300 million dollars on the rochester city school district. maybe instead of focusing on tourists, the people that live in the suburbs, and vast amount of college students we could do some things to actually help the people who actually live in the city. and i dont mean the hipsters in the south wedge. 

really? an urban canal? 

In response to #2, bear in mind that the Inner Loop was created to separate the city from the suburbs (read: whites from blacks). It allows suburbanites to go downtown without going through “scary“ neighborhoods that could benefit from their traffic. I also rarely saw anyone on it during my four years in the city. 490 can easily handle Inner Loop traffic. 

More importantly, you assume that spending is a zero-sum game; that if we spend money on infrastructure we cant spend money on education. You are wrong. The point of this article was to present ways to make Rochester relevant again. In order for the Rochester area to grow again we need bold ideas that will make people want to live in Rochester, open up businesses here, etc. A canal may seem stupid, but if done right (i.e. not handled like the Fast Ferry) it will put Rochester on the map again, and maybe provide incentives for college students such as myself to stay in Rochester after graduation (instead of moving back to Chicago like I did).

P.S. Cheap way to fix the school system? Create a county-wide school district. It will probably never happen b/c of the city vs. suburbs mindset (of which you possess to a degree), but it probably would fix most of the inequities in Rochester public schools.

I could get behind any and all of these proposals to bring Rochester into the 21st Century.

Great article on Rochester’s revival by U of R physics professor Adam Frank.

I’m reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and it mentions briefly that Nixon was invited to receive an honorary degree from the University of Rochester. That got me doing some research where I found out that this guy—then the President of the University—invited him to speak at Commencement in 1966 where he would receive his honorary degree. (Wallis was a friend of Milton Friedman and was an economic advisor to Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan; you can probably guess where his politics lied.) Naturally, there was a storm of protest, for not only had Wallis not informed the faculty about his decision to have Nixon speak at graduation and receive an honorary degree, but he had done so after Nixon had publicly condemned then-Rutgers professor Eugene Genovese about his controversial remarks on Vietnam (“Those of you who know me know that I am a Marxist and a Socialist. Therefore, unlike most of my distinguished colleagues here this morning, I do not fear or regret the impending Viet Cong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.”) while campaigning for the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey. Most of academia rushed to Genovese’s defense and viewed Nixon’s stance on the issue as an attack on academic freedom, so Wallis’s invite of Nixon was doubly insulting. In the end, Nixon still spoke at graduation, but did not get his honorary degree as a result of faculty and student pressure. And, to add further insult to Nixon, Genovese joined the Rochester faculty in 1969, eventually becoming chair of the history department before retiring from full-time teaching in 1986. (In the 1990s, Genovese joined fellow Marxist and Rochester historian Christopher Lasch in becoming a paleoconservative.)

More here: http://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V68N3/letters.html I especially like the fact that the current administration building (home to financial aid as well) is named after him (although he does have an institute for political economy run by the Political Science and Economics Departments named after him as well). It’s fitting tribute to a man of the establishment.