10 posts tagged “rochester”

Attending a recognition event for local educators last night, I was seated with a principal from one of Rochester's city elementary schools.

I work in community relations, and earlier in the day, I was informed we had a quantity of surplus three-ring binders. So, I asked this principal: "What's your greatest need at your school?"

The answer stunned me: "good psychiatric care."

What?

Apparently, more than a few students come to school each day with severe emotional problems. They arrive over-medicated -- which, she explained, worsens their bi-polar behavior -- or completely off their meds, which is just as bad. The principal told me that, earlier in the day, they'd been forced to place a child under "mental health arrest."

Another factoid: the principal told me that, when doctors do prescribe a strong psycho-tropic drug, pharmacists sometimes refuse to fill the prescription. Another quote: "The pharmacist said he wouldn't fill that prescription for an adult, let along a 10-year-old child."

Yikes.

I don't know how widespread this issue is. And my employer hasn't the resources to enlist doctors and psychiatrists for the Rochester city schools. 

But the real tragedy: I've never seen this reported in our daily newspaper or on local TV newscasts. And in a city where the largest employer is the University of Rochester -- which runs a couple of hospitals and has many, many medical professionals on its payroll -- neglect of this issue is borderline criminal.

 

One of my photos published in "Capture Rochester" book: http://tinyurl.com/5kschb . Another fleeting brush with success...!

This is a slightly different perspective on the winning photo. I guess this one's a touch more dramatic. Maybe I ought to think about a brilliant career move.

When I was a kid, they auctioned off cool stuff from Yankee Stadium before the first $104 million renovation. I got a sign and a folding chair from, I suspect, the DiMaggio era. I hung onto them for years before mildew took 'em.

This week, they're auctioning off remnants of Midtown Plaza, the 1960's-era urban shopping mall that became a ghost town. Paetec Corp. says they're gong to build a world headquarters on the property, but they announced a $14.7 million loss today. So I wouldn't fire up the demolition cranes just yet.

And, unbelievably, there's almost nothing in this collection of chairs and shelves that speaks to the memories supposedly generated by Midtown Plaza. No monorail bits. No vintage signs. And let's be honest -- Santa's chair looks like it was purloined from some second-rate Christmas pageant, doesn't it? (Believe me: it looked worse when they had two fake Santa beards dangling off the frilly edges of the chair back.)

Check out the remnants on the Midtown website. Aside from the missile-armory stand of gleaming trash cans, it looks about as pedestrian as you'll ever find.

Meanwhile, the Clock of Nations has reappeared at the airport. I'll admit, it does look a little better in the daylight. The tourist at left thinks it's worth a snapshot, although she'd better be using a flash or she'll get naught but a silhouette.

Here's the rub: unless you're a ticketed airline passenger -- and you've made it through Gendarme Hell Security Screening -- you won't ever see this clock. It's beyond the security gate. Nice planning, Monroe County! (My original post about the timeless timepiece appears here.)

I hope Paetec overcomes its struggles and builds that big new headquarters. Otherwise, we're looking at an enormous crater smack in the middle of downtown Rochester.

And in economic development terms, those kinds of holes are very hard to hide.

You have to wonder why some people are great leaders, and others think leadership merely means okaying someone's vacation time.  (And harassing them afterward for work that didn't get done while I was on vacation.)

As near as I can figure, the best leaders are those that demand hard work, yet coach the employee, while expressing an interest in the people they lead. I knew one former manager's kids' and wife's names, although I'm certain the manager didn't know the names of my family members. And the coaching? Non-existent.

I got to see two sides of great leadership. Antonio Perez, the Kodak CEO, has spent the last four years transforming Kodak from an arrogant, somnolent film company to a digital imaging company that's working to listen to its customers. Lots of jobs went away. Buildings went away. Those weren't easy decisions.

Last Friday, Mr. Perez did something remarkable. He announced that Kodak would step up, after years of cutbacks, and provide $10 million to expand and renovate the Eastman Theatre, a great classic music hall that's home to the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.

The orchestra, the theatre, the University of Rochester, and its Eastman School of Music all exist because of Kodak's founder, George Eastman. Realizing that his company needed to attract talent to a pseudo-Arctic mill town, Eastman gave incredible amounts of resources to make this town a cultural oasis (even in the dead of winter).

Perez isn't a Rochester native. He's lived all over the world, and spent many years in California.

But he took an interest in this community, and drove the company to re-invest in Rochester after many years of cutbacks. Some former Kodak employees will likely vilify him for it. But committing resources back into this community was long overdue. He did the right thing.

That's leadership. Anyone in Washington listening?

Random Observations:

Time Marches On: You know you're not in a major metropolitan city when the big local news of the day is: our Government Leaders have found a home for Rochester's "Clock of the Nations." I blogged about it in October, when the city first unveiled plans to flatten dowdy old Midtown Plaza to put up a new office building. Now, before the wrecking ball turns the metro mall into a masonry memory, they're going to dismantle ye olde Clock of Nations and reassemble

it at the Greater Rochester International Airport and People Herding Facility. Read all about it here. Then the clock will go to a local children's hospital.

It's nice to see them preserving this anachronistic attempt to replicate early-'60s Disneyana. I just hope it gets a thorough cleaning. Nothing like seeing Latvian puppet goatherds swirl about in a tiny cloud of dust.

Have Gun, Will Unravel: at the office yesterday, the College Student called to tell me that her college, Alfred University, was under lockdown. Someone had spotted a student wandering the campus with a weapon. She lives off-campus now, but wanted to keep us from worrying.

The lockdown was lifted a few hours later, when someone realized the firearm in question was a Nerf gun. Yep, it's easy to mistake a neon orange and lime green sponge launcher for a Glock-9. Happens all the time.

Turns out the "gunman" in question was a participant in Alfred's favorite pastime, "Zombies vs. Humans." A game in which our very same College Student is a frequent zombie. Or human. Hard to tell, sometimes. Nonetheless, the dean has halted this campus-wide game. Which I guess is a perfect excuse to drag out the old "Dungeons & Dragons" paraphernalia. BANG!

My Town's Other Name: If your city was the setting for a popular TV series, what would it's name be?

This came up today when a colleague kept referring to Rochester -- a high-tech, university-laden community with several Fortune 500 companies (and a big honking clock, don't forget!) -- as "Mayberry."

What? I could've been getting my haircuts at Floyd's? Why didn't anyone tell me?

Okay, I get it. Rochester is not Chicago, New York, or Bradford, PA. (Where someone once shot at me. Another story for another night.) But it's not exactly a one squad car hamlet, either.

So, what TV city could your town double as? The Simpsons' Springfield? Gotham City, where the Batman parks his cowl? The nameless southern California town where "Scrubs" is set? I want to know.

Says me: The best female pop singer on the planet did not win a Juno award this week. But Anne Murray got a little revenge, after the Juno Awards people first "accidentally" left her off the list of nominees this year. She got a trio going at the Juno telecast. I haven't been able to get this sucker to play correctly on my computer, but visit this Juno website, click under "Performances," and see if you can get the Anne Murray/Sarah Brightman/Jann Arden cut to play correctly.

Attended a screening of July '64, a powerful documentary retelling the civil unrest that exploded in Rochester, NY, over four decades ago. You can see an interview with the film's director, Carvin Eison, here.

What's amazing about revisiting this experience -- which took place about 20 years before I even knew Rochester existed -- is something Mr. Eison said at the Saturday night screening. The "insurrection" he describes between the city's black community and the police focused on two neighborhoods of Rochester: the Third and Seventh Wards.

The residents of these wards, living in poverty and poor housing, were at odds with the city. Mr. Eison said: "Today, it's the same situation between the city and the county."

He's right.

Each morning, I drive through urban Rochester, down a semi-desolate Joseph Avenue, where Rochester's Jewish community once thrived. After the '64 riots, the Jewish shop-owners abandoned the ravaged Joseph and Clinton avenues for the suburbs. Now the communities surrounding the city are overwhelmingly white -- and self-segregated.

Meanwhile, the northeast sections of Rochester still have run-down housing and boarded-up storefronts. It's as if the riots were four months ago, not four decades.

I wonder what we've learned.

In my ad agency life, I worked in an office tower attached to the world's first indoor urban shopping mall, Midtown Plaza. As malls go, the place was pretty pedestrian: a food court, a bookstore, a Hallmark card shop, a couple of department stores hawking Alfred Dunner women's wear, and a Rite-Aid. A "clock of nations" that resembled a Disneyland exhibit after a couple of martinis. But it served its purpose: a place to grab a hot lunch without getting slush in your shoes.

Retailers, over time, fled to the suburbs. My kids rode the monorail once and said, "We're through." And Midtown went to seed.

Today, New York's Boy Governor, Eliot Spitzer, dropped by to announce that the state will spend $50 million to knock down the all-but-vacant Midtown Plaza. And replace it with a new corporate headquarters for Paetec Corp., a company that creates high-tech telecommunications services. It should surprise no one that it will cost $50 million in public money to dismantle a mall that cost $25 million to put up in 1963. Six-hundred jobs will move downtown. That's asbestos we can do in Rochester.

I don't wander down to Midtown anymore. The place has de-evolved into a oversized bus station. What once looked fairly innovative in 1963 now feels like an eerie, abandoned World's Fair pavilion. Without Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.

The video I've snatched from YouTube here shows a glimpse of the way things were at Midtown when the paint hadn't quite dried. (Except for the geekly school-children, whom I never saw pointing at those arthritic marionettes.) The clip is an edit from a promotional film produced by the local electric company in the '60s. Possibly as a way to encourage increased lighting in the mall, which was always kind of dim.

Recently, the lone reason I've stopped by Midtown Plaza is to visit the jeweler who restored my grandfather's Waltham watch. Now Bob Colombo will have to find a new place to install watch batteries. Half the food court is empty. One of the two department stores is vacant. Even Record Theatre -- the local branch of the Buffalo music store chain -- is shuttered.

The only thing left to wonder is: what are they going to do with the post-Jurassic, pre-Disney animatronic clock of nations? It's too garish to relocate. It won't look good on my front lawn. The wrinkled marionettes will scare the neighborhood's dogs.

Hmmm ... maybe it belongs in that International Arrivals Hall in Rochester's aluminum airport. One more reason to stop by and admire the flags on the walls.

Flying below the radar the last few days. Once you've dynamited a couple of buildings, you need down time to recalibrate what's meaningful. So, in the interim, here are a few random updates and related photos:

Delkin Shade Update: A few posts ago, I mentioned those Delkin eFilm shades that affix to the back of your camera. My one lament was that, once they're on your camera, you can't really see the LCD screen when you hold the camera below eye-level. Well, as it turns out, you can close the shade part, jog it slightly to the left, and it pops right off the camera.  It snaps back in  just as easily. So they're fine, and I still recommend them.

Sometimes Older is Better: The fireworks photos in this post were captured July 4th in downtown Rochester, NY. Between raindrops. I used a Kodak EasyShare DX7630 camera, a 6-megapixel model that's no longer in production. The secret to fireworks photography isn't the "fireworks" mode you can choose; it's timing and stability. I placed the camera on a tripod, set the self-timer, and used a four-second, flash-off burst. As for timing, I wasted a few frames figuring out how high the fireworks guys were shooting for. Once you hear the launch, count off two seconds, and then trip the shutter; that's usually when the charge detonates.

You can find the DX7630 online, used. For not a lot of money, either. It's a pretty good camera. Built like a rock. Reminds me of a Canon Canonet QL17 GIII film rangefinder camera, back in the rockin' 1970s.

Sights and Sounds of an Implosion: the podcast in which I interviewed a bunch of people at the June 30 Building 9 implosion is now available for viewing on iTunes or here. (Scroll down to "Marketing Insights," and hit "play.") We PR heroes valiantly linked the dropping of these immense structures to Kodak's "inkjet revolution," but a few people still thought we should have paid a bit more respect to the hundreds of former occupants who worked in the buildings. And one old Kodak retiree -- now a "photographic consultant" -- talked himself onto a live TV interview, where he called the implosions "shameful." Proving again: Rick Nelson was right; you can't please everyone.

If you want to see a short video of the Bldg. 23 implosion from July 1, here's the Democrat and Chronicle's clip. I don't know how long they'll keep the link active, but give it a try.

Yes, that was an elephant holding up rush hour traffic in downtown Rochester this morning.

Once a year, Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus brings its show to town. Most of the circus paraphernalia comes in by truck. But the bigger animals (and the human performers, I hope) travel by train. The rail siding is nowhere near the hockey barn/auditorium where the circus performs, so they parade the elephants and a few horses across town to the venue.

Rochester is a "family town," where diners are called "family restaurants," and parents cheerfully send their kids to school late to see a few elephants. And even the motorcycle cops get into the act.

A few years ago, I spent a week in Sarasota, Fla., the original home of Ringling Brothers, interviewing the descendants and families of circus performers who remained there after Ringling relocated to Virginia. You have to look hard, but there are a few remaining artifacts of circus life. Some backyards still have trapezes set up where you'd otherwise see a swing set. And the high school has its Sailor Circus, where the kids rehearse all year after school in a covered circus ring, and perform a Ringling-calibre show in the spring.