In the Flower City, Take Root

When I tell people that I live in my hometown of Rochester, N.Y., their most common response is, "Why?" Rochester is the fifty-first largest metro region in the United States, a tad smaller than Buffalo and a tad bigger than Tucson. The local delicacy is called the "garbage plate" and is best served after 2 a.m., with a side of Lipitor. Rochester is a snowy place. It is a place where corporate giants—Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb—once stalked the land but now skulk amid layoffs and falling profits. Rochester is a city with grinding urban poverty, but its suburbs are rather prosperous places from which crops of upwardly mobile students are harvested each graduation season. These students often leave the region, either for college or for work, and many never return. The city elders wring their hands over this "brain drain." The downtown core of the city is deserted after dark and, increasingly, during the work day. Large suburban business parks with rolling green lawns and constructed drainage ponds are luring businesses from the central skyscrapers. Some have characterized Rochester, along with cities like Buffalo, Detroit, and Baltimore, as dying. If I lived in New York, Washington, Boston, Seattle, or San Francisco, no one would ask me why. And yet when people ask how it is that I live here, I am eager to tell them.