Lost Time Capsule Beneath Rochester's Lost Front Street

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 February 13, 2015 and can be found here.

     By       Mike Governale

This week's Fun Foto Friday is a snapshot from 1893. That's Nick Brayer, an engineering contractor working on a new sewer beneath Front Street in downtown Rochester. In his hands is a tin box. It's not a sewer pipe. It's actually a time capsule and he's preparing to lay it at the project site to be buried. Looks like quite the event; a crowd of neighborhood kids have formed behind him to get in on the photo op.

Fast forward to 2015 and the burning question for readers of this blog will undoubtedly be: Where is this capsule now? And what's inside...

   Uh... well... we have no idea. Not a clue. As far as we can find, this capsule was never retrieved. And as you know, most of     Front Street

is now itself history - entombed beneath Genesee Crossroads Parking Garage (and park). I guess that's what we get for hiding our valuables in the sewer.

   While we may never know what was in that particular box,     a similar capsule from 1873

was removed from old City Hall and opened in 1999.

That 1'x1'x1' copper box was filled with a treasure trove of books, pamphlets, newspapers, maps, handwritten documents, photos, coins and other forms of currency.

   Oh yes, and a hundred year-old     condom

. That's right. A sheep intestine condom, left in an envelope and tucked into one of the books as a prank. The envelope was addressed to "The person who opens the box." Score!