Nature abhors a vacuum - as illustrated by the Inner Loop

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 June 30, 2015 and can be found here.

     The following is a guest post submitted by       Matthew Ehlers      .
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I noticed grass growing on the piles of dirt in the Inner Loop construction project today. It's as if nature can't wait for the filling in of the Inner Loop to complete before reclaiming the land...

   The dirt is filling in the holes Rochester created for itself in 1947 when it decided to build a giant concrete race track around the center of the city, no matter who was uprooted in the process. The future was booming and the city fathers at the time felt they needed to prepare for the mega-city Rochester would become by bowing down to the power of the     mighty automobile

. Much like the fabled     streetcar destruction

in Los Angeles in the 1930's to 1950's the Inner Loop confirmed Rochester's commitment to the car over the     subway    .

   Here's an aerial view from the film,     Rochester: A City of Quality

(1963).

   Cut to today, where they are     filling in the Inner Loop

in a bold initiative to free the land from a useless strip of road. Perhaps Rochester is proving Mark Twain wrong when he said, "Buy land, they are not making it anymore."

   I took a quick bike ride down into the Inner Loop today to see what I could see.

   So long Inner Loop.    * * *