Return to Sykes

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 March 12, 2015 and can be found here.

     By       Mike Governale

About a year and a half ago we shared some photos from     inside the abandoned Sykes Datatronics    building on Orchard Street (south of Lyell Ave). That building was part of a complex that was home to many different companies from 1915 until Sykes Datatronics (a computer company) left in 1992. Demolition crews have been slowly deconstructing the property since the fall...

A few weeks ago RocSubway started receiving additional photos from the same anonymous photographer who brought us that first series of images. These from inside an active demolition site, and taken just a few days before part of the building     collapsed

early yesterday morning...

The following images, video and text were submitted by our anonymous urban explorer:

"After driving around one day, I noticed the progress of the demolition of Sykes Datatronics. Knowing it wouldn't be around much longer; I came up with the idea of taking a few more photographs of it while it was still with us.

   It ended up being a snowy morning. One of the warmer of the days we had in February. Trudging through the snow was the hardest part.

   Once inside, the snowdrifts and outside weather made it seem like any sign of life had long since left the walls of this place. It was vastly different than my previous trip.

   No longer were the floors adorned with warping wood slats. The left over computers and manuals were cleared and hauled away. All that remained now was an empty cold warehouse waiting to be knocked down.

   The old roof access door was now a window, stairs and glass removed with snow blowing through on both sides.

   At the time I went, half of the building was already gone. The far stairwell at the other end of the building was now an isolated pillar jutting into the snowy sky. Luckily, there was a stairwell on this side of the building that allowed me to begin my climb.

   The floors weren't much different than each other aside from the inches of snow piled into their corners. The new edges of the floors were like a topographical map, layers peeled back to various degrees from the wrecking crews.

   An elevator sat empty, delivering passengers to a floor that no longer existed. The roof was formerly the seventh floor.

   I had been waiting for a clear day to get back over to Sykes at night. It took about a week but finally the conditions were perfect. A clear and sunny evening turned into a clear and starry night. I parked and headed into the structure.

   The lights from the streets are something you see daily, but the way these lights reflected off the decommissioned concrete was something else.

   Immediately I was struck with the way the large and half demolished room was lit. I noticed changes. A crane had been brought in and the tops of the stairwell island and a former elevator shaft had been smashed.

   I headed up the stairs; floor-by-floor as I had done the week prior. Making sure to step carefully as the snow and ice was getting slipperier with the passing workdays of construction workers prepping areas for demolition. I held onto the wooden rails closely as I climbed through the ever-growing snowdrifts.

   Once I reached the roof, my mind could finally start working through the ideas I had been pondering over all week.

   Fresh rubble was strewn across the expanse of concrete with bricks mixed into the snow piles.

   To my delight, I found that the area was a popular spot for planes to fly over as they made their final descent into the airport. Some photographers try to minimize planes and their light trails. I thought they were awesome! I ended up spending almost two hours up there before my hands went completely numb in the single digit temperatures.

   The part of the building that     crumbled early Thursday morning

was mainly the stairwell exterior wall. This wall can be seen in multiple photographs and the     video

. The top of the stairwell crumbled completely.

   At the time of my visit there were no indications anything that had not been touched by the wrecking crew was close to collapsing. I even remember having to hug a window in the stairwell to scoot around a very inconvenient snowdrift. Although I noticed nothing out of the ordinary I was still extremely cautious, leading me to capture some great photographs and document one of the last few weeks of part of Rochester's history.    * * *