Inside 65-67 Chestnut St. - Old Hotel Richford

This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published May 15, 2016 and can be found here.

Old Richford hotel building at 65-67 S. Chestnut Street, Rochester. [IMAGE: Anonymous]

The following story was submitted by ThisApparatusMustBeUnearthed.com

Since I've lived downtown I've had my eyes on this building. Not for much good reason except that it was there, and waiting. But despite being so close, it always stayed locked up and out of reach. In fact, over the years it seemed to defy everyone's best efforts to occupy it - including those of its many owners...

Hotel Richford at Chestnut & Elm Street, Rochester. [IMAGE: Rochester Public Library Local History Division]

The history of 65-67 Chestnut Street

begins in 1915 when it opened as Hotel Richford for Men, a fireproof hotel with 400 rooms starting at $1.00 a day. Room prices hadn't changed much by 1929 when it was renamed Ford Hotel and reopened for both men and women.

Founded by Richard T. Ford, his R.T. Ford & Company would also operate hotels in Buffalo, Erie, Toronto

, and Montreal.

The name eventually changed back to Richford in 1944 and with the midtown bus station established next to it, it would become a reasonably popular budget hotel along with the Cadillac, which at that time was still truly a hotel. Both establishments declined rapidly however in the 1960s as highway travelers opted for motels located along the expressways - and buses and trains became less fashionable modes of travel.

Suburban sprawl, economic pressure, and Rich Ford's 1959 death led to the hotel's closure in 1961, leaving only the Cadillac still open (which itself served to prevent much of anything else being able to succeed on the block to the present day). Since the hotel closed for good in 1968 the property has been the ruin of one developer after another - probably bankrupting more people than any other in the city of Rochester.

In the early 70s the building became the Richmond Office Building and the home of First Federal Bank. Its original neo-classical facade was also "modernized" and covered in the lovely metal cladding we see today.

There were other attempts to renovate it in 1981 (offices), 1987 (offices, briefly successful with a branch of First Federal bank re-established in the basement), 1993, 1997 (the last one with any work to be done on it, responsible for the drop ceilings and Ethernet cable), 2004 (offices), and 2008 (condos). Each of these ended in the developer losing their investment and the property falling into foreclosure.

Since the building's sale this past January the current owner has obtained approval for conversion from an office building to 96 apartments, though work on the building itself has yet to begin.

UPDATE: This article previously stated that 65-67 Chestnut had approval to be converted into "96 apartments." This information was sourced from Emporis.com

and may be outdated or inaccurate information. Although additional sources we checked confirm that plans are in the works for something here, we'll have to wait a bit longer for details to surface.

Recently, gaining access into the building has been trivially easy. The front door (facing the former bus station) was, and probably still is, open. One look at me and you'd realize I'm not a ninja like some of the other local urban explorers.

The space inside was much more thoroughly destroyed than I would have expected. Contrary to just about every other abandoned building I've seen, the uppermost floors are actually the closest to intact, with the damage getting worse and worse going from top to bottom.

There was a little bit of actual trash in there (food wrappers, etc) that looked like it was about 20 years old, but no signs of current or former occupants except pigeons and crows fluttering around the upper levels.

Between the 90s renovation attempt, the office features (phone jacks, exit signs, cubicle walls, etc) scattered all over, and the combination of colors from the paint and mold, I thought it had a totally different aesthetic than anywhere else I've been - much less post-industrial or post-apocalyptic, much more vaporware (an ironic movement that reclaims 90s corporate style).

Needless to say the building is a total wreck - possibly scrapped, more probably the result of the series of botched renovations and various upgrades and abatement projects that evaded completion.

Complicating the situation, some of the windows have probably been open since the 90s, and pigeons have made the top floor a winter shelter.

Anyway, yeah, it's a fixer upper. I guess there's a perfectly good reason this 10-story office building was on the market for less than your average south side apartment.