State Takes Rochester Rail Station Project From City

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 October 26, 2012 and can be found here.

   First, a little bit of history. The building shown above was one of Rochester's earliest rail stations. Make sure you click to see all the great detail in the photo. It was located on Central Avenue between St. Paul & Clinton near the site of the current Amtrak Station. This view is looking west from Clinton Avenue, sometime between 1905-1914. In 1914 this station was replaced by the great Bragdon station in 1914, which was demolished in 1965...

   Fast forward to 2012. After scraping by for the past 40 years with our current "     Amshack    ," the City of Rochester has finally lined up some $22.5 Million to build a new Bragdon-like station     currently being designed

by     Bergmann Associates

, a local architecture and planning firm. $15 Million of that is coming from a USDOT grant which requires the project be ready for construction by the summer/fall of 2013.

   This week I learned that NYSDOT wants to take the project over from the City - to expedite the project, and possibly control costs.

NYSDOT has sent out a "Request For Qualifications" (RFQ) for the architectural design of the new station. The RFQ lists as a contact Michael O'Neill (212-465-5307) from     Parsons Brinckerhoff

a NYC planning & engineering firm.

So what does this mean for Rochester and customers of Amtrak/Greyhound/Trailways? Not sure yet. But in my opinion, for the State to be hijacking this project from local control so suddenly makes me very nervous. The City and the people of Rochester have already put in A LOT of work on this project. Hopefully the state is respectful of that.

Stay tuned...