RocLinks 7/23/16

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 July 23, 2016 and can be found here.

     By       Matthew Denker

From local development to just plain news of the weird, here are your RocLinks for this past week...

Craven Self Interest Department

You may have heard me mention around that Parcel 5 at Midtown is no place at all for a park. Well someone else     agrees with me.

Score! But seriously, there are already a number of parks downtown. There are already a number of large, vacant areas that could be turned into temporary play-places, and downtown needs more pressure on all of this, not more open space. That's the sort of suburban mentality (having large, unused open spaces for show), that got us in this mess in the first place.

Yeah, sure.

Have you ever wondered about people's different definitions of walkable? I have. But this isn't about that, per say, it's about varying definitions of mixed use. For example     here is

a 'mixed use' development opening this weekend in Perinton. And I'll be 'that guy' for you. Really?

Photons!

How's that Photonics Institute thing coming along, you ask?     Slowly.

That shouldn't be a huge surprise, but it's unfortunate that everyone needs to make everything sound so simple going in to get people on board, just to let them down later when things turn out to be not so simple. Oh well.

Wait Wait, Don't Tell me

And finally, Evan Dawson     tackles

the (potential) downtown performing arts center. I could get behind it if the project was programmed more like the Symphony House in Philadelphia and less like the Disney Opera House with a casino in the basement. Just putting that out there.

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RocLinks is on vacation next week, but as always, use the comments below as open discussion for anything in these links - or let us know if there's a topic you'd like to see us hit more aggressively in future RocLinks. Have a great weekend!