Sebastian White Online :: Toronto-Rochester Civic Clash Unnecessary

OPINION

Toronto-Rochester Civic Clash Unnecessary

Rochester City News | January 15, 2004
By Sebastian White

The ongoing and somewhat laughable civic clash between the cities of Rochester and Toronto, each trying to outdo each other in the battle for tourists once the much-touted fast ferry begins plying the waters next May, has been nothing if not amusing.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the rhetoric being flung across Lake Ontario in both directions by newspaper columnists and elected leaders alike, the debate does seem unnecessary for two cities so richly endowed with history, culture, and unparalleled urban vibrancy.

Certainly Toronto is a great city. Rochester is one as well, but it's a place that is misunderstood, under-appreciated, and often overlooked, especially in the shadow of Canada's revered megalopolis.

Rochester is an urban center that is, admittedly, better known for Kodak—and at least in 2003, for its 57 killings—than it is for its sprawling museums and lush parklands.

But those of us who know the real Rochester, who appreciate its gracious neighborhoods, who have dined in its fine restaurants—and who have, at one time or another, also experienced the city's precarious, sometimes debilitating extremes but still love the place—fret at the region's ongoing image crisis and the Rochester-Toronto feud being played out on Op-Ed pages throughout the region.

My feelings toward Rochester have not always been so warm. In fact, it wasn't long ago that I considered this place the very antithesis of civilization, a genuine backwater devoid of any real excitement or value.

But when my visiting parents came to Rochester last May for my college graduation, I dropped a bombshell. I told them I'm in love with the place. You'd think, based solely on the shocked look on their faces, that I'd announced a permanent move to the Yukon or even worse, a switch to the Republican Party. But no, my news was merely that I had fallen for the Flower City and my ambivalence about leaving and starting a job elsewhere was growing by the day.

Before I moved to Rochester for college five years ago from a sliver of a town straddling the New Brunswick-Maine border, I had never visited the Genesee Valley, didn't know much about the place, nor was I particularly believing of civic cheerleaders' pronouncements about how this small city on Lake Ontario is the kindest, most civilized place I could possibly find.

I had resigned myself to four years in a post-industrial wasteland, but consoled myself with the thought of being near that most civilized of cities across Lake Ontario—Toronto.

Things don't always work out the way we expect.

Despite its image as dangerous, derelict, and downtrodden, as well as my best efforts to keep up a down-in-the-mouth attitude about the place, I grew to love Rochester during the years I lived there. The exhausting weekends I spent battling traffic en route to Toronto convinced me that there had to be an easier way to find entertainment and good food—somewhere in the maze of Rochester, I figured, there had to be something to do and somewhere, there had to be good Vietnamese food.

My routine of frequent sojourning north of the border quickly ceased. After a bit of exploring, I discovered that everything I could want from a city, a college town, and an adopted home, could be found in Rochester. Like a lot of students, I spent four years largely failing to recognize the greatness of this city, a place with a fascinating history, a dazzling array of architecture, scores of good restaurants, and culture galore.

In my last days before moving away, I scurried to take in all the simple pleasures I had spitefully missed out on for so long: lazy afternoons spent reading underneath the spectacular lilacs at Highland Park, twilight walks around the East End, evenings at my favorite Park Avenue sidewalk cafe. Four years late, I finally began to appreciate Rochester for all its beauty and idiosyncrasy.

Although I live in Boston now, where I love my life, something in me still gets excited when I visit Rochester. As I turn off I-490 into the heart of the East End, the gracious neighborhood developed by Rochester's early industrialists, I feel a deep yearning to be back in the place where I grew intellectually and matured personally.

I long for the Rochester that seems so foreign to certain Torontonians, the intimate and welcoming place that made me stop to appreciate the vibrancy and complexity of urban living and taught me to understand the full range of emotion that Rochester so powerfully seems to impart on its residents.