Tag Archives: Fast Ferry

Why I live in Rachacha

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Barnie Fife, speaking from the Great Beyond (or on a breather between reruns?) left a comment on my next to the last post. Apparently my living in Rochester, New York fills him with wonder.

I never planned to move here. I moved here originally to attend a nearby college. Long story short, I fell in fascination with yet another complex but self-destructive individual (a tendency I’ve curbed at last now by adhering to a policy of social isolation, *sob*). Ended up married because I once again failed to acknowledge the taint of doom tickling my nostrils. (I guess that makes it mutually assured self-destruction? LOL) Now I have a wonderful kid. We’re in a great school district, her dad is here, and yeah, I chafe sometimes in the reins but I’m a big girl now.

That said, Rochester is also a great city in a lot of ways. The traffic is manageable — for example you can live in a rural bedroom community, the sort of place where you can keep horses if you want, and your commute into downtown will still be only a half hour or so. My neighborhood in particular is a little corner of paradise, aesthetically and small-c culturally — and I don’t have to be a zillionaire to live here, in a spacious circa 1920s home with hardwood floors and a fireplace. While our museums and sports teams are officially second tier, because we don’t have the demographics to support first tier, they’re high enough caliber to give kids a taste of what’s out there — i.e., the city is a suitable jumping-off spot for a kid with aspirations to make the world his home, if he has the inclination & chops.

And if you hanker for big city culture, the plane ride to NYC is only 45 minutes and thanks to JetBlue tickets can be had for under $100. Toronto is a three-hour drive.

We have great public parks. Mendon Ponds Park, for instance, has 30 miles of self-guided nature trails. You can be there from just about any place in the greater Rochester area within minutes. We’ve got the Erie Canal, great place to bike, jog, walk your dog. Since we’re in a temperate climate, you can mix up your outdoor activities seasonally (if you can’t fight it, have fun with it!)

We’ve got great healthcare, including a first-rate research hospital.

Our crime rates are well above the national average but not out of line with other Upstate New York cities.

We don’t have to worry about hurricanes or earthquakes, just snow and the occasional ice storm, but it’s like anywhere in that regard. Be smart and prepare yourself for self-dependence for a few days. At least your house won’t be smushed into a pile of sticks when it’s over.

The biggest downside is that because this is New York State, our taxes are ridiculous and our politicians are worse. At the local level, their moribund thinking has cost us the embarrassment of the so-called Fast Ferry; shamelessly, they’ve put that behind them (despite the fact that the damn thing is still in dry dock here, apparently unsaleable) to push the so-called Renaissance Square down our throats (new post coming up on that shortly).

I’m sure there’s more that’s good about this city but this gives a taste. Despite its flaws, if I were a young married couple planning a family, Rochester would top my list of places to live.

That said, me personally? I don’t know where I’ll end up once my kid has flown the nest. I can work from anywhere, so I’m not tied to any location for income. I’d like to be in a relationship again someday, that will probably influence my choice. I’d like to be able to golf year-round. I ache sometimes to smell the ocean. But I also love the flora/fauna of the Northeast — the hardwood forest, and the geography, the hills. I’d like to stay close enough to a world-class city to jump in regularly for a visit but I also need a base somewhere with space and trees & a bit of privacy.

So who knows? But I guess not knowing is part of the fun of it . . .

Rochester Fast Ferry tale now in print

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Larry Dickens, “novelist and mariner,” has published a memoir about Rochester’s fast ferry.

Dickens served as first mate on the ferry, which former Rochester mayor Bill Johnson claimed would stimulate our economy somehow — I guess by luring rich Canadians across Lake Ontario. And what does the city have to show for it, now? An extra $20 million debt.

But never fear, our politicians have a new plan: a $230 million performing arts center cum underground bus terminal. Think of it as the fast ferry, only lots more expensive and we can’t sell it if it doesn’t work out. Also no rich Canadian angle.

I’ve blogged about my distaste for the Renaissance Square idea several times since I started doing this in February; here’s my most recent post on the subject.

Buh Bye, Ferry, Buh Bye

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Rochester’s fast ferry has been sold to a company that will use it on the English Channel.

Once the sale closes next week, the city will take the money and repay $7.5 million borrowed from city insurance reserves for shut-down expenses. The remainder, less a brokerage fee, will be applied to a $40 million debt owed to Australian lender Export Finance and Insurance Corp. The city borrowed from EFIC to buy the ship for $32 million in February 2005 and restart the Rochester-to-Toronto service last June.

Thomas Richards, the city’s corporation counsel who negotiated the sale, said the remaining debt of slightly less than $20 million will become a taxpayer obligation.

Twenty million. That’s what we’re stuck with. Oh, and the public embarrassment.

Giving up on the ferry was a retreat. But it was a retreat from a position that was untenable. The people of Rochester deserve better.

So how about, for starters, applying the lessons we’ve learned on the ferry to our thinking on the so-called Renaissance Square.

Just because our politicians want to strike heroic poses and direct taxpayer money to a project doesn’t mean it’s right for our city. Pork spending is not good governance.

Here’s a post I wrote on Renaissance Square that compares it to a Miami art fair that has led to measurable economic growth. Check out the difference in the price tags. Renaissance Square: “estimated” cost $230 million. Art Basel: less than $5 million the first year. Current budget (three years later): $14.4 million.

Note also that the growth of the budget came after the fair had started proving itself out.

No, we’re not Miami. But there’s no reason we can’t learn from what Miami has done. Ya know, it’s that best practices thing. It’s also the kind of governance that can navigate a city to greatness instead of crashing it into a dock.

Turning our city around

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Today’s Democrat & Chronicle reports that this year’s economic forecast by Sandy Parker, chief executive of the Rochester Business Alliance, is “sobering.”

“Where the state as a whole is faltering, upstate — to be frank — is sinking,” Parker said. “Job growth is anemic, incomes are nearly stagnant, and people, particularly young people, are leaving for more promising locales.”

What bothers me most about this is that, as a lifelong resident of Upstate New York, I’ve been hearing essentially the same words for at least 30 years — since people first realized that the manufacturing sector that once supported the Great Lakes economies had begun to falter.

Nor has the dialectic changed much over time. On the one hand, there is the handwringing and the cynicism. We don’t get enough sun. We’re overburdened by taxes and a moribund state government. “There goes Kodak. There goes Sibley’s. There goes Midtown Plaza. There goes the fast ferry.”

Then you have the responses, which IMO tend to be narrow and to have a certain hot-house quality about them. The proposed performing arts center idea is an example. I am sure the people who support it are very well-meaning. But it’s not enough to support an idea because it’s a cultural amenity that I, a native, would patronize. The key question is: would it excite people from Philadelphia, or Seattle, or (gulp) LA? Even more to the point: would it excite them enough that they would fly in for a weekend? Spend a little money? Check out local real estate prices?

And how many of them can we expect?

I’m not saying a performing arts center wouldn’t accomplish this, btw. What I’m saying is that we need to be careful which questions we’re asking — and of whom we’re asking them. Moving money from the pockets of someone in Pittsford to the pockets of someone in Chili is all very nice, but it doesn’t do a thing for the overall economic health of the Greater Rochester Area.

Another example is this recurring assertion that we need to attract young people. We do attract young people. They are here right now, walking to classes at the University of Rochester, at RIT, at the Eastman School of Music. The question is not how we attract them, but how we keep them. “Create jobs,” people will say, and then our leaders will rush off to brainstorm on how to incentivize :-D businesses into settling here. That’s well and good — and heaven bless every start-up in this town — but I’m not convinced that a handful of fledgling companies is enough to re-define the climate — the milieu — of a community.

What we really need is to figure out how to make Rochester a “happening place.” Until we do that, people outside of Rochester are going not to take the trouble to come here for a visit, let alone to stay. Not in significant numbers, anyway.

So how do you make a community a “happening place?”

On December 1st, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece titled “The Fair That Made Miami Hot All Year Round” (subscription required). Here are the opening two paragraphs:

The story of Frank Gehry’s design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is by now familiar. Cities world-wide have begun to aim for the “Bilbao effect”: the construction of a spectacular museum building that attracts international visitors and boosts the economy. The story of the “Art Basel effect” is less widely known. It is the tale of the leading art fair for contemporary art, which has been presented in Basel, Switzerland, every June for the past 36 years, also coming to Miami Beach for the past three Decembers and becoming America’s premiere art fair; the fourth edition of Art Basel Miami Beach opens today.

Although it is a once-yearly, four-day event, Art Basel has profoundly altered the shape and scope of Miami’s cultural landscape, affecting real estate and tourism rates and enhancing government support for the arts.

Art Basel is “happening.” It brings 30,000 art lovers into Miami and (last year) 640 journalists. Moreover, locating it in Miami was enough to shift peoples’ perception of that city.

Art Basel’s effects on Wynwood are not limited to a burgeoning gallery district. Four high-rise residential buildings are currently under construction there, as is Midtown Miami, a 56-acre shopping area and residential complex in a former railroad yard adjoining the neighborhood. If Wynwood, which is still decidedly seedy, is soon to be gentrified, the evolutionary process was undoubtedly “supercharged” by Art Basel Miami Beach.

Now for the real kicker. The fair’s current budget is $14.4 million — and that’s triple what it was the first year.

Miami got this all going with an initial budget outlay of less than $5 million.

The current estimated price tag for our Renaissance Square project — of which the arts center is one piece — is $230 million.

Obviously, I’m not going to propose that we try to woo Art Basel away from Miami. But I’d dearly love our leaders to look to successes like Art Basel for ideas. We need need to find our own wild card — the thing that will make well-heeled, educated people spend a week here, and then maybe start to think how nice it might be to own an Ontario Lake-front summer home.

Because that’s the demographic shift that raises our tax base. And widens the pool of start-up capital for local businesses. And injects cash into our service economy.

One idea that comes to mind is an indie film festival — but one that is modeled after Miami’s Art Basel template. More from the WSJ piece:

In accord with the Swiss model, the fair is not a self-contained entity. A public art program, performances, video and sound lounges, discussion forums and “crossover” events involving fashion, books, music, film, architecture and design are all variously sponsored and promoted by Art Basel Miami Beach. Then there are “partners” in the greater Miami area, ranging from art venues to nightclubs, that feature events officially sanctioned by the fair.

In other words, don’t show a few films at the Eastman House and expect to attract scads of jet-setters packing wads of cash. Make it a real Event, with community-wide tie-ins that involve Rochester and our neighbors.

Whatever you do, though, make sure that you craft it — whatever “it” is — not so that it polls well in Rochester, but so that it pulls well from the rest of the world.

And get away from a focus on infrastructure alone. Yes, we need infrastructure — I’m referring to the arts center and projects of its ilk again, here — but infrastructure isn’t enough, as the fast ferry debacle has demonstrated. We all know, after all, that you can attract 250,000 to a field outside a little town in the middle of nowhere, if people get the idea that the field is going to be a happening place. No infrastructure required.

Let’s figure out how to make Rochester a happening place.

Ferry sunk, 0 lives lost

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In local news, Rochester, NY’s newly elected mayor stuck a fork in our “fast ferry” yesterday. It’s done.

For anyone not familiar with this, the original idea was a ferry service connecting Rochester and Toronto. Here’s some background and comments, courtesy of Rochester bloggers (with one Canadian thrown in for good measure):

Blogger Matty B writes:

I for one am not surprised. Granted, Americans would be more than willing to take the boat across the lake to Toronto. It’s a huge city. But what Canadian would want to leave a city of 4 million people and come to Rochester, a city with about 240,000 people?

Matty adds that ferry fare [ed. — that one’s mine, ha ha ha] was around $80/round trip, almost twice what it costs him in gas to make the trip by car.

Sheepguardingllama posts:

It has been losing $1,000,000 a month all year in 2005. The first company that ran the ferry lost a fortune. Everyone involved with the ferry in any way has lost a fortune. There was no business plan for the thing at all. The new mayor said that if they raised the prices by twenty percent (which are all ready so high that no one can afford to ride the ferry compared to driving or taking the Amtrak route – both of which are faster and more convenient as well) and managed to back the boat to seventy-five percent capacity on every single run that the city would manage to lose only two million dollars a year!! But that is only the beginning of the story. Because the entire ferry infrastructure is only designed to transport Americans to Canada it also means a high level of lost revenue as Rochesterians begin to do more and more shopping in Toronto instead of at home.

From Canada, The Green Knight has this to add:

. . . there was never any involvement of Canadian governments, businesses, or media; hardly any advertisement in Canada, and no sense that the Rochesterians were ever actually trying to involve Canada or Canadians in the project.

Commorato posts:

It was perhaps the dumbest decision we ever made and the damn thing has been in ruins ever since. It crashed on its first trip out, the motor froze, the company that ran it before we had to buy it shutdown and stopped paying people. God this thing sucked.

In his comments, his readers note that the port in Rochester lacked both vending machines, and even more absurd, a currency exchange.

And at A Moment’s Tale:

I can’t think of a single projection at this point that came true, a single premise of the ferry that ended up reality. It was supposed to get tons of truck traffic. Nope. It was supposed to get tons of tourist traffic from Toronto. Nope. It was supposed to turn a profit. Nope. Instead, it bankrupted one company and drove an authority into massive debt.

A friend of mine (who is hopefully a reader — are you there?) once made the rather elegant comment that the ferry might work if marketed to Canadians as a “gateway to the Finger Lakes.” That idea had merit, IMO, for two reasons. First, it got around the awkward question of why anyone would choose a weekend in Rochester (which is a lovely place to live, but still!) to one in Toronto. The other plus is implicit: make the ferry “belong” to all of Western and Central New York, not just our city’s. More necks to support the albatross, maybe we could have kept it alive long enough to work.

But that’s all moot, now.

Here’s the Democrat & Chronicle piece, which calls Mayor Duffy’s announcement “stunning.” Huh?

Update: If you haven’t been to the Finger Lakes, here’s a tiny taste. View of Cayuga Lake, looking northward from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell.

Cayuga Lake from Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell

Update 2: another Rochester take from Zinnian Democracy:

This is a shame really. I wish they had let it go for another season to see what it would do, but too many people here are negative and they felt from the beginning that “Why would anyone want to come to Rochester?” You’ve gotten your wish.