While I was in Rochester, New York, I kept busy in The Commission Project’s official Swing ‘n Jazz schedule of concerts and workshops, and the unofficial one of eating and drinking well and hanging out. Still, I managed to absorb a bit of the atmosphere of a city with remarkable historical and cultural depth. Some of the culture is the kind promoted by arts and historical preservation organizations. Some is simply in the fabric of daily life.
Kodak declined as the result of its failure to properly guage the speed of the digital revolution in photography. But George Eastman and his Eastman Kodak company influenced Rochester’s economic and cultural life for much of the twentieth century. The Eastman imprint on the city is pervasive. He founded the Eastman School of Music, an enduring institution that brought Rochester fame and has given us Howard Hanson, Renée Fleming, William Warfield, Ron Carter, Maria Schneider, the Mangione brothers, Steve Gadd and Mitch Miller, among other leaders in several areas of music.
Alec Wilder attended Eastman for a time and although his name is often connected to the school, for the most part he taught himself. Wilder gave us Wilder. A part of the University of Rochester, the Eastman School is a big physical presence and an even bigger civic one.
By 1900, George Eastman’s photographic inventions had made him one of the wealthiest men in the nation. A bachelor all of his life, he bought his mother a thirty-seven room mansion on East Avenue, which is to Rochester as St. Charles Avenue is to New Orleans or California Street was to San Francisco in its heyday. The house and grounds had a staff of forty. Eastman lived there until failing health restricted his active life. He found immobility unacceptable and shot himself to death in 1932. “My work is finished,” he wrote in his suicide note. “Why wait?” The living quarters and gardens of the George Eastman House are maintained as they appeared while he was alive. But its greater importance lies in its existence as an independent nonprofit museum devoted to photography and motion pictures.
I set aside an hour to tour the museum, spent two hours and wished that I had scheduled a day. I expected glass cases full of cameras and walls hung with pictures glorifying Eastman and his inventions, and I found them. I did not expect the stunning exhibition of modern–even avant garde–photography called Picturing Eden, which presents the ways in which thirty-eight bold photographers picture the world after the fall, mankind’s struggle to regain paradise and its despair in losing it. The overall mood is as bleak and beautiful as our times. Nor was I ready for “Project Space,” which currently allows photographer Bill Finger to experiment with ways of displaying his digital inkjet prints evocative of childhood secrets and fears. Finger’s exhibit is a work in progress, but its component pictures are finished compositions loaded with mysteries.
Seeing Ourselves: American Faces is from another region of the photographic spectrum. Mostly straightforward black and white portrayals, forty prints show us Babe Ruth, Maryilyn Monroe, Abe Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, Igor Stravinsky, Sioux chiefs in suits and ties assembled to sign a land treaty, and ordinary people. The photographers include Edward Steichen, Matthew Brady, Gordon Parks, Richard Avedon and Alfred Stieglitz. Most of us have seen the pictures often over the years. To see them all in one room, in high-qualilty prints, is to see them as if for the first time.
I missed last year’s Gershwin to Gillespie: Portraits in American Music and I’ll miss September’s Why Look at Animals? photo exhibitions at the George Eastman House. If I lived in Rochester, I’d be there weekly.
As we drove through Highland Park, I regretted that I hadn’t been in Rochester three weeks earlier, when the Park’s acres of lilac bushes were in bloom and the city’s Lilac Festival was in full swing. Now, there were just a few faded blooms hanging on; I’m partial to lilacs. Most of this beautiful hillside park was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscaping genius who created New York’s Central Park.
The Erie Canal has been a part of Rochester’s history since the canal aqueduct over the Genesee River was completed in 1823. Its commercial traffic mde New York City the nation’s busiest port and helped Rochester thrive in the nineteenth century, but by the second half of the twentieth, the canal’s economic glory days were past. Today, it’s a tourist and recreational attraction. Runners, walkers and cyclists use its miles of towpaths. Towns along the canal celebrate its history–and drum up tourist business–with festivals like Fairport Canal Days. On Sunday, 200,000 people crowded into the little town east of Rochester. The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra piled onto a boat and serenaded them.
Now we come to the non-historical, non-preservationist part of the local culture. I hadn’t been in Rochester more than a half hour when I was asked, “Have you been to Wegmans?” By the end of the second day, I had been asked a half-dozen times. Wegmans is a huge chain of supermarkets in the northeast. Its flagship and showplace is a gigantic store on Monroe Avenue near the town of Pittsford. It is the only supermarket I have patronized that includes a first-class restaurant and a cinema. Fortified by a bowl of clam chowder at the restaurant, I toured the market.
“I have mixed feelings about the place,” a woman had told me the night before. “I love the selection and the displays and the sort-of medieval-festival atmosphere, but, you know, when a monster like that goes in, it drives out six or seven little pharmacies and a lot of mom-and-pop stores. It’s the Wal-Mart effect.”
Not everyone has misgivings. I Googled Wegmans and came up with this on a website called Yelp! from a woman who had moved away from Rochester.
…it’s own french patisserie, beautiful produce, a candy section with bonbons piled sky high (along with a little choo-choo candy train). Just dreaming about wegmans makes my mind reel into a blissful coma. Truly one of the most extraordinary and wonderful places on the planet.
Along with Tahiti and Paris, perhaps. She was right about the displays. In the produce department–or wing–fruits and vegetables lay in perfectly organized ranks and rows, hundreds of them receding into the distance. They were lighted as enticingly as rings and bracelets at Cartier. Sumptuous meats and fishes, regiments of cheeses and squadrons of teas got the same artistic treatment. When I selected apples, it was like removing a couple of pieces from a mosaic. Shoppers cruised the aisles full of determination and intensity, piling their carts high, and they seemed to come from the full width of the social landscape.
I was wracking my brain trying to summon up what this reminded me of. Finally, it came to me: not a medieval market, but the grocery section of Harrod’s in London. The same courteous, friendly attitude of clerks, butchers and greengrocers; the same profusion of goods; the meticulous organization and display; the canny creation of an atmosphere conducive to buying. A supermarket as a tourist destination? That’s marketing.
Our penultimate stop in this scattershot tour of the Rochester area is several miles west on Ridge Road. Ned Corman, the head of The Commission Project, detecting that we shared his interest in wine, arranged for trumpeter Marvin Stamm, pianist Mike Holober and me to visit Century Wines and Liquor and have a chat with one of its owners, Michael Minsch, the son-in-law of the founder, Sherwood Deutsch. The chat quickly disclosed that Minsch has forgotten more about the intricacies and satisfactions of wine than I’ll ever learn. It came after we toured the large store, marveling at its extensive collection from every imaginable wine-producing part of the world. We were allowed into the temperature- and humidity-controlled back room where Deutsch and Minsch keep the really good stuff. We wandered along aisles between stacks of cases of wines, most of them choice Bordeaux. It is both fascinating and unnerving to see a stack of cases of vintage Petrus, Margaux or Lafitte when you know that acquiring a single case of, say, a 1955 Margaux would necessitate a second mortgage. I bought a non-mortgage-inducing Bordeaux, we had a good talk with the amiable and knowledgeable Mr. Minsch and departed for the next event of Swing ‘n Jazz.
But first, I had to find a book. I finished one on the flight east and did not want to be caught headed west in the ultimate travel horror short of a hijacking or a crash–nothing to read. As I strolled the streets around the Eastman School, I nearly walked past the solution, but something induced me to turn around and scan the stores on the far side of East Avenue. “Used, Rare & Out of Print Books,” said the sign on one. I sauntered into Greenwood books and asked the woman at the desk if she had anything by Jorge Amado. “I believe we do,” she said. She made a beeline for the back room, climbed a ladder and brought down two Amados. For fifteen bucks, I had a fine copy of the first American edition of The War of The Saints and walked out relieved. The woman, it turned out, was Franlee Frank, the owner of what City, the Rochester alternative newspaper, proclaimed the best bookstore in town.
Next posting, we’ll wrap up the Rochester visit with an account of some of the music of Swing ‘n Jazz. Coming soon to a blog near you.