A toxic legacy and a chance for renewal

For generations, the western bank of the Genesee River has been a kind of open wound in the heart of the Plymouth Exchange neighborhood—40 acres of oil-soaked soil, hidden from the rest of the city by overgrown vegetation and plagued by decades of legal stalemate. This spring, something is actually happening there.

Heavy equipment has moved onto the former Vacuum Oil refinery site. Trees have been cleared. A haul road is being built. Crews are trying to pump enough water out of the low-lying land to start large-scale work. Rochester is finally attempting to reckon with one of the most complex brownfield challenges in its history—and whether it can pull it off on time, on budget, and in a way that benefits the community that has lived in its shadow the longest remains an open question.

A legacy of industry (and contamination)

The story begins in 1866, when Matthew Ewing and Hiram Everest founded the Vacuum Oil Co., patenting a revolutionary vacuum distillation method to produce kerosene and high-quality lubricants. Their success caught the eye of John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil trust acquired a controlling interest in 1879.

At its peak, the refinery stretched from Violetta Street to Cottage Street. But it drew complaints almost from the start. In 1887, a series of catastrophic explosions ripped through Rochester’s sewer lines and flour mills, traced back to Vacuum Oil’s naphtha pipelines. Civic leaders accused the company of emitting “noxious gases,” dumping waste into the Genesee, and blanketing the surrounding neighborhood in greasy soot—problems that foreshadowed the environmental challenges still being confronted today.

By the time operations ceased in 1935, decades of refining, bulk storage, and oil blending had saturated the soil and groundwater with a toxic cocktail of petroleum byproducts, heavy metals, PCBs, and volatile organic compounds. The site became a textbook brownfield—the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s term for former industrial properties where hazardous contamination prevents redevelopment without costly intervention. The problem is not unique to Rochester. The EPA estimates there are over 450,000 such sites nationally, and as of 2023, New York alone had 669 brownfields under active redevelopment. Rochester, with its deep industrial history, has more than its share. (Public records on the cleanup sites are available through the DEC Environmental Site Remediation Database.)

A site in limbo

For residents of the PLEX neighborhood, the Vacuum Oil property has been a fact of life for as long as anyone can remember—and not a welcome one. The site sits on valuable riverfront land, yet for decades it has amounted to a magnet for illegal dumping, a canvas for graffiti, and a sprawl of crumbling structures slowly being reclaimed by weeds.

The frustration runs deeper than aesthetics. PLEX is a historically disinvested, majority-Black neighborhood on Rochester’s southwest side, the kind of community that has long found itself on the wrong end of decisions about where to locate industrial facilities and, later, how urgently to clean them up. Residents have questioned for years why this site was allowed to fester while brownfield projects in more commercially attractive parts of Rochester moved forward with greater urgency.

That pattern has a name:environmental justice—in which low-income communities and communities of color disproportionately bear the costs of industrial pollution while waiting longest for relief. New York’s Brownfield Cleanup Program, under which both the city and ExxonMobil are now operating, includes environmental justice provisions intended to prioritize community engagement in exactly these situations. Whether those provisions translate into real benefit for current PLEX residents—rather than a cleaned-up site that attracts development serving an entirely different population—is one of the central tensions hanging over this project.

Dorian Hall, president of the PLEX Neighborhood Association, says many nearby residents are frustrated with how cleanup is unfolding at the former Vacuum Oil site and feel the city hasn’t adequately listened to their concerns. He says neighbors see the current approach as containment rather than full remediation.

“The cleanup,” Hall says, “they’re just capping the contamination. So, that’s not removing. At the end of the day we want the best cleanup. That means they should be removing the contaminated soil.”

Hall used a blunt analogy to make his point, comparing the contamination to waste on a lawn.

“Would you rather have that No. 2 scooped up and removed?” he says. “Or would you rather them put a box over that … and let it decompose on its own?” For residents, the expectation is simple: remove the contaminated material. “We know that everything back there is cancer-causing agents,” he says, adding that the city’s vision “is not the vision of the neighborhood.”

He encourages residents to get involved through the neighborhood association, which meets monthly.

Hall also says the city’s plan for funding and redevelopment should better reflect community priorities. The neighborhood has proposed a legally binding community benefits agreement to ensure residents receive tangible returns, such as affordable housing or other investments.

The breakthrough: who pays?

At the center of the cleanup stalemate was a fundamental question: Who pays for the mess?

Legal battles between local developers and ExxonMobil—the corporate successor to Vacuum Oil—stretched on for years. While courts affirmed ExxonMobil’s liability, the scope and cost-sharing of remediation remained contested. A private developer, DHD Ventures, owned key parcels at 5 and 15 Flint St., but fell into foreclosure without advancing cleanup. The city moved to seize the properties via eminent domain, then backed off after ExxonMobil pledged to enroll the sites in the state’s Brownfield Cleanup Program.

In late 2025, ExxonMobil reached an order on consent with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, committing to study the contamination and reimbursing the state $250,000 for previous investigative costs. That agreement placed the financial burden back on the party responsible for the pollution and broke a long-standing deadlock. The current work is not the first remediation attempt—environmental investigation dates back decades—but it is by far the most ambitious, tackling the parcels locked in legal limbo the longest.

The cleanup project

The plan that emerged is more pragmatic than a previously proposed full-scale excavation, combining targeted removal, engineering controls, and long-term management across 12 parcels—10 owned by the city, two (5 and 15 Flint St., totaling about 7.2 acres) owned by ExxonMobil. Separately, the city is seeking $35 million in state funding to transform a portion of the site into a public park with trails and amenities, and to restore the flood protection wall serving the surrounding neighborhood.

The work has involved taking down a crumbling, heavily graffitied three-story warehouse at 5 Flint St.; it was demolished late last year. It also involves attacking the soil in two ways, depending on severity. In the most heavily contaminated areas, crews are excavating and hauling approximately 32,500 cubic yards—roughly 55,300 tons—of soil off-site for disposal as non-hazardous regulated waste. Protection from exposure to these soils is ensured by installing a two-foot clean cover cap across the entire site.

In less severe areas, approximately 12.6 acres will be capped with at least two feet of clean soil or asphalt over a demarcation layer—an engineered barrier separating clean fill from impacted soil below, and a permanent signal to any future excavation crews that they’ve reached contaminated ground.

An environmental easement will restrict future land use to “restricted-residential” and prohibit the use of groundwater as a drinking source.

But the work is running into the site’s stubborn realities. Jane Forbes, the city’s manager of the Division of Environmental Quality, says chronic flooding has been a major obstacle.

“This is such a low-lying area, and they haven’t been able to get the water out of it,” she says. “Until they can dry out the site enough, actual boots on the ground is going to be delayed. These washout Saturdays are not helping.”

The city’s parcels are slightly further along in the state approval and cleanup processes than ExxonMobil’s, but Forbes says both are being coordinated toward the same readiness timeline.

“We’re still trying to remain on target for an actual physical completion of the cleanup by the end of this calendar year,” Forbes says. “Then there is also the final reporting and all of the things that have to go through the administrative approval process with the state—and that can take a while.”

One cost that’s harder to quantify is the closure of the Genesee Riverway Trail through the area; Forbes called it one of the hardest things for the community to stomach. Large excavations and constant truck traffic make the closure a safety necessity through most of the summer.

“If people can just be patient with us, the results are going to be so spectacular once it’s done,” she says.

ROC the Riverway: a larger vision

The Vacuum Oil site sits in one of the most strategically significant corridors in the city—the Genesee riverfront, adjacent to the University of Rochester and just south of downtown. The cleanup is one piece of ROC the Riverway, a sprawling, multiphase initiative that has been reshaping Rochester’s relationship with the Genesee.

Launched in early 2018 with a $50 million state commitment, the initiative encompasses more than two dozen projects aimed at improving river access, building parks and trails, and stimulating economic development along both banks of the river downtown. Major projects include the Aqueduct Reimagined, High Falls State Park, and Inner Loop North.

The Vacuum Oil remediation fits into this mosaic as the initiative’s southwestern anchor—the piece that would finally extend ROC the Riverway’s reach into PLEX, creating for the first time a continuous waterfront corridor linking the neighborhood to downtown.

For the site itself, the city’s long-term plan envisions the northern portion of the city-owned 15.4 acres available for mixed-use redevelopment, while the southern portion becomes protected greenspace with a restored river wall and rebuilt trail. Erik Frisch, the city’s commissioner of neighborhood and business development, says it’s too early to specify what development will land there—the city is undertaking a zoning update and expects the area to be rezoned—but laid out the rough timeline. (Frisch was appointed to his position in April, after veteran Dana Miller’s retirement.)

“I think it’s realistic to say that we’ll be looking at a wide variety of potential uses—institutional, commercial, residential, or a mix thereof,” he says.

If public infrastructure construction begins in spring 2027 as hoped, Frisch estimates the city could be issuing requests for proposals for development sites around 2028. As for ExxonMobil’s parcels, Forbes says the company has signaled it has no interest in the real estate business.

“It’s my understanding that once it’s cleaned up, they’ll either hand it over or get into some sort of purchase agreement with a developer,” she says. “At which point, the city will probably have to establish a new relationship with whoever those developers are going to be.”

State-mandated environmental easements will constrain what any future owner can do with the land regardless of who holds the deed—a built-in protection, though not a guarantee that current residents benefit from what gets built.

An anchor for the city’s future

Frisch didn’t understate what’s at stake.

“It’s one of the anchor projects for the future of the city,” he says. “This has been 70-plus years in the making, maybe more. I think there are some people who thought we’d never get to this point.”

He situates the Vacuum Oil site within a broader arc of transformation—alongside Bull’s Head, Inner Loop North, and High Falls State Park—as formerly industrial or hidden land gets repositioned for public life along the river.

“We have a beautiful natural asset in the river,” Frisch notes. “And the more we can do to engage with it and activate it, that’s the future, right?”

Whether that future arrives on schedule may be the defining test of the city’s ability to keep promises that the PLEX neighborhood has been waiting on for a very long time.

Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack. Beacon contributing writer and data journalist Jacob Schermerhorn created the data visualization for this article.

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