So one block west of the house-to-be is Clarissa St. Once the nexus for Black culture in Rochester, it was ‘urban-renewaled’ out of existence not long after the rather famous riot in 1964. One of the saddest parts of this is not just that a once great commercial street was removed (as you’ll see), but also that the only readily-available archival photos of the street come from the riots themselves. This paints a dark picture of a street that was lively and urbane before hand. In any event, the change is stark, as you can see from the few before and after pictures I was able to line up below. More about the neighborhood, and the wide-scale destruction that was wrought on it over the course of building the highway, civic center, and reducing Black culture in Rochester to rubble can be found in the excellent book (Amazon link) about the neighborhood published by Images of America.

Clarissa St. 1
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Clarissa St. 2
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Clarissa St. 3

Clarissa St. 4

So no news is good news, right? Unfortunately, I don’t have any real updates today. That said, I am thinking about, once construction starts, anthropomorphically tweeting as the house. Thoughts?

We’re waiting on a little bit of news later this week, so I’m holding off on any real updates until then. I hope to have all kinds of news on Thursday, though. See you then.

Welcome. Welcome to a little experiment on the internet. Welcome to the biggest adventure of my and my wife’s lives. A little bit of background, since most of this is public record anyway: I’m Matthew Denker. My wife is Laura Beth Lincoln. She’s from Rochester, and I fell in love with it while I attended RIT and then UofR. On January 6th, 2010, we closed on the 100’x41′ piece of land known legally as 37 Eagle Street. Ever since we’ve been slowly but surely working towards building ourselves a house there. I intend for this blog to chronicle that process. Over the next few weeks, most of the posts will be catch-up for the past 5 years (we actually put the offer in on the property on 9/29/09). After that, I’ll update the blog with day-to-day progress. We expect to have selected an architect by then, so stay tuned. Over the course of the project, I will also be writing long-form columns at key milestones over on www.rochestersubway.com. I’ll be sure to link to those pieces here when they are written. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the ride.