Rochester, New York

• 1. Introduction

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  Rochester, New York has worn many names over the centuries. "The Flour City". "The Flower City". "The World's Image Center". Each nickname marks a different chapter in the life of a place that has repeatedly reinvented itself since three men from Hagerstown, Maryland bought a hundred-acre tract along the Genesee River in 1803. How does a city become America's first boomtown, then the global capital of photography, then the cradle of abolitionism and women's rights, and then face the long unraveling that deindustrialization brought? What does it mean to be shaped by Eastman Kodak, by Frederick Douglass, by Susan B. Anthony, by waves of immigrants who kept arriving long after the factories closed? And what happens to a city that, in 2026, is still fighting in federal court over its right to call itself a sanctuary? Rochester's story runs from the Seneca tribe's hunting grounds on the Genesee to a $75 million state park planned around an 80-foot waterfall, and it touches nearly every fault line in American life along the way.

• 2. Boomtown on the Genesee

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  Major Charles Carroll, Colonel William Fitzhugh Jr., and Colonel Nathaniel Rochester chose their site because the Genesee River ran over three cataracts at that spot, offering what they calculated was exceptional water power. They bought the land in 1803. By 1811, with a population of just 15 people, the three founders surveyed it and laid out streets. The Erie Canal aqueduct over the Genesee was completed in 1823, linking the settlement directly to the Hudson River. New commerce arrived almost immediately, and what had been called Rochesterville became the country's first genuine boomtown. By 1830, the population stood at 9,200. By 1838, no city in the United States ground more flour. The city earned its first nickname, "the Young Lion of the West," and then the more practical title of "the Flour City." As the wheat-processing industry shifted westward with migration and agriculture, Rochester pivoted. Nurseries ringed the city, the most celebrated of which was started in 1840 by George Ellwanger from Germany and Patrick Barry from Ireland. Shoemaking followed as the city began to industrialize, and the Flour City quietly became the Flower City.

• 3. Reformers and Radicals

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  In 1847, Frederick Douglass founded The North Star in Rochester, an abolitionist newspaper that reached more than 4,000 subscribers across the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. Douglass was a former slave and a speaker and writer against slavery who made Rochester his home until fire destroyed his house in 1872. A historical marker now stands at the site on South Avenue, and in 2023, plans were announced for a museum dedicated to his life in the city. Douglass was not alone. Thomas James and Austin Steward operated on the Underground Railroad in the area. The connection between Rochester and radical reform ran even deeper when it came to women's rights. Susan B. Anthony lived in the city, as did other notable figures in the movement, including Abigail Bush and Amy Post. Rochester hosted the Women's Rights Convention of 1848, the same year a critical suffragist gathering took place in nearby Seneca Falls. The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, was widely known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment because of her work toward its passage, which she did not live to see. Her home on Madison Street is today a National Historic Landmark. A series of religious revivals tied to the Second Great Awakening had swept through Rochester earlier in the century, including one led by Charles Grandison Finney, and those revivals are understood to have inspired the local social reform movements that followed.

• 4. Optics, Images, and Industry

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  John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb, German immigrants, launched Bausch and Lomb in 1861. George Eastman founded Eastman Kodak in 1892, and the company that would eventually define the city's identity worldwide took root. Xerox was founded in Rochester in 1906 under the name the Haloid Company. The city also produced Wegmans, Constellation Brands, Gannett, Paychex, Western Union, Ray-Ban, and Paychex, each of which carried the city's name into wider commerce. Eastman, in his years as a philanthropist, founded and endowed the University of Rochester and contributed substantially to it from wealth built on Kodak's success. That university today houses the Eastman School of Music, described as one of the most prestigious conservatories in the world. The George Eastman Museum holds the oldest photography collection in the world. The concentration of imaging and optical science in Rochester proved self-reinforcing, as companies, universities, and research programs clustered around the same technical traditions. A photonics research hub has operated in the city since 2015, following federal and state investment. FedEx founder Fred Smith has said publicly that Xerox's need to rush copier parts to customers was one of the factors that led him to pioneer overnight delivery in 1971, and because Xerox manufactured in Rochester, the city was among the original 25 cities FedEx served on its first night of operations, the 17th of April 1973.

• 5. Upheaval and Unraveling

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  Rochester's population reached its peak of 332,488 in 1950, and the Census Bureau that year recorded the city as 97.6% White and 2.3% Black. Over the following decade, the Black population tripled to more than 25,000. Most African Americans in the city held low-pay and low-skill jobs and lived in substandard housing. In July 1964, discontent erupted in a three-day race riot that left five people dead, 350 injured, close to a thousand arrested, and 204 stores looted or damaged. In the aftermath, the Rochester Area Churches and Black civil rights leaders brought in Saul Alinsky of the Industrial Areas Foundation. Together with the Reverend Franklin Florence, they formed FIGHT, an acronym for Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today. The organization successfully pressured Eastman Kodak to open up employment and city governance. The labor movement had already left its mark in 1946, when an estimated 50,000 workers across multiple sectors walked out in support of hundreds of city employees fired for attempting to unionize. Rochester was one of very few American cities where labor was strong enough to mount a general strike on that scale. In 1997, Kodak announced it would lay off 10,000 employees globally, a cut described at the time as the largest single job-cut announcement in U.S. history. Kodak, which had long been the city's largest employer, eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The University of Rochester assumed the top-employer position in 2005 and holds it today.

• 6. A City Remaking Itself

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  By 2022, Rochester's population had declined to 209,352, with 45.1% recorded as White and 38.4% as Black or African American. The composition of the city had shifted dramatically over the previous seven decades, driven by immigration and demographic change. Rochester had the highest percentage of Puerto Ricans of any major U.S. city in 2013. Its Bhutanese and Nepalese communities are among the largest in the United States, concentrated primarily in Jones Square and Edgerton. In 2012, a report by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf found that 3.7% of the Rochester metropolitan area is deaf or hard of hearing, and the city has been reported by the New York Times as having the largest per capita deaf population in the nation. The city affirmed its status as a sanctuary city in 2017. In April of 2025, the Trump administration sued Rochester over those rules. A judge dismissed the case in November of that year, but the government immediately refiled. As of early 2026, Mayor Malik Evans has led the city's argument that it holds a Tenth Amendment right to choose which federal laws it helps enforce. Also in early 2026, New York State committed $75 million to give Rochester its first-ever state park, covering more than 40 acres around the 80-foot High Falls waterfall, as part of a broader plan to draw tourists and businesses back to downtown.

• 7. Culture and Daily Life

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  The Rochester International Jazz Festival, established in 2002, draws over 200,000 visitors annually to dozens of clubs, concert halls, and free outdoor stages across downtown in late June. The Lilac Festival at Highland Park has been held annually since an 1898 gathering and features the largest collection of lilac varieties in North America. The Strong National Museum of Play and the George Eastman Museum anchor the city's museum landscape. The First Unitarian Church of Rochester, designed by Louis Kahn, was described by critic Paul Goldberger as one of "the most significant works of religious architecture of the century." The Midtown Plaza, which first opened in 1962, holds the distinction of being the first downtown shopping mall in the nation. On the street level, Rochester lays claim to the Garbage Plate, a dish trademarked by Nick Tahou Hots that traditionally combines macaroni salad, home fries, and hot dogs or cheeseburgers topped with mustard, onions, and a meat hot sauce. French's Mustard was originally made in Rochester, at an address the company listed as 1 Mustard Street. The Rochester subway, built in the abandoned bed of the Erie Canal, ran from 1927 to 1956 and made Rochester the smallest city in the world to operate such an underground transit system. The tunnel it left behind became a site for graffiti artists and, until 1997, was used by the Gannett Company to deliver paper to printing presses for the Democrat and Chronicle.