Rochester’s blueprint for belonging

On a Tuesday morning at Ugly Duck Coffee in the East End, the room is abuzz with activity. Two people at a corner table are deep in conversation. A regular is telling a barista about a weekend trip. Someone else is reading. The space is barely 900 square feet, which means all of it is happening more or less together, whether anyone planned it that way or not. There is no Wi-Fi. That’s not an oversight—it’s intentional. Owner Rory Van Grol wants people to look up.

“The fascinating part of operating any type of space,” he says, “is that you can have a vision, but once you let people into it, they will use it as it works for them and it becomes its own living environment.”

What Van Grol has built, more or less by instinct, is what urban planners and city of Rochester officials are now trying to build by design. The city, downtown in particular, is in the middle of a deliberate push to create more places where people can gather, linger, and run into each other—not just pass through. The question the city hasn’t fully answered yet is who those places are actually for.

Every city has places where people used to just run into each other. Dive bars, Wegmans, barbershops, union halls, kid-friendly parks. You didn’t plan to be there with anyone in particular—you just showed up, and other people did too, and over time that repetition bred familiarity.

Whether Rochester’s version of those places was ever as open or welcoming as memory suggests is worth questioning. The city’s residential neighborhoods were shaped by segregation and redlining—but downtown, in many ways, was the exception. For decades, it was one of the few parts of the city where a genuine cross-section of residents could live affordably and gather freely. What’s changed is the pressure now working in the other direction: As upscale housing and higher-end bars and restaurants take root in the center city, the real challenge is making sure the spaces that emerge don’t quietly narrow who belongs there.

Mayor Malik Evans put it plainly in his 2026 State of the City address. “Gen Z has their own term for spaces like this,” he said. “They call it a ‘third place,’ with their home being first place, school or work being the second place, and places to gather and socialize being the third place.” A generation whose lives were upended by the pandemic has claimed the idea as their own. “That just tells you how much they crave connection and community,” he added.

Evans tied that directly to quality of life and safety—more gathering places means more reasons for people, especially young people, to stay engaged rather than isolated. He also tied it to businesses.

The term “third place” gets thrown around a lot, and not always accurately, experts caution. Project for Public Spaces, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that has worked on placemaking projects across the country for 50 years, draws the distinction simply: a big downtown park might draw thousands of people on weekends, but does it foster the habitual, repeated use that builds real relationships? An expensive cocktail bar is technically somewhere you can linger, but not for long if you’re watching your budget.

Emily Putnam, a project manager at PPS, cuts to it directly. “Third spaces are so important because they foster social connection,” she says. “What makes a good one is that it is really accessible and has low barriers to entry. That’s what’s so great about true public spaces—they give people not just community but people to turn to when they’re in need, and a place that can really foster civic engagement.”

PPS points to what public space researcher William H. Whyte called “triangulation”—the idea that a dog, a piece of public art, a game, or even a round table can serve as a third point between two strangers, giving them something to react to together and making conversation easier. Once the ice is broken, and once a space gives people a reason to return regularly, those casual encounters start building into something more durable.

“Third spaces create the binding fabric of our community,” says Galin Brooks, president and CEO of Rochester Downtown Development Corp. “They are places that everyone can access and enjoy, whether they want to buy a cup of coffee or enjoy a local artist’s work or experience everything the Museum of Play offers.”

The RTS Transit Center qualifies, she adds. The point is that third places are wherever a cross-section of the city shows up and recognizes itself.

That last part is where Rochester’s ambitions and its reality start to pull apart.

Washington Square Park sits just west of the Genesee River, tucked between South Clinton Avenue, Woodbury Boulevard, St. Mary’s Place, and Court Street. The land was donated to the public by Elisha Johnson in 1817. Frederick Douglass spoke there. In 1827, Austin Steward recorded that Black Rochesterians celebrated the end of slavery in New York on those very grounds. A 42-foot monument topped by Abraham Lincoln has stood there since 1892, when President Benjamin Harrison came to Rochester for the dedication.

For a park with that kind of past, it had long failed to hold people on a daily basis. That’s what PPS and RDDC set out to change. Their partnership began in 2023 with a Community Placemaking Grant, building on a detailed community report the Washington Square Community Association had already produced. PPS then conducted its own rounds of surveys and engagement with neighbors, residents, college students, and local stakeholders before a single thing changed.

What they landed on was deliberately modest. New seating replaced standard park benches, a different design, more inviting and better suited to conversation. Seasonally, round tables went in, and colorful umbrellas and games were added; they will return around Memorial Day. Historical markers went up, explaining the monuments already in the space.

The distinction between a standard bench and a round table might sound trivial. Putnam says it isn’t.

“Regular park benches aren’t always the most comfortable and aren’t great for encouraging discussion or just meeting your neighbor,” she explains. “With a bench, you might not sit on it if someone is already seated there. With a table, it increases the chances you’ll join a stranger and strike up a conversation.”

The logic is triangulation made physical. The changes debuted in early 2025. Brooks says attendance has increased for gatherings like food truck Friday (about 300 per event) and yoga in the park (about 50 per event). She looks to continue those events in the future. 

Washington Square’s history is a reminder of how complicated the work of building belonging really is. A space where Douglass once spoke, where Black Rochesterians once marked their freedom, now sits at the center of a city asking whether its newest gathering places will be as open as its oldest ones. The benches are just one small answer.

Downtown Rochester—roughly 0.8 square miles running from the Inner Loop west toward the Genesee, north to High Falls, and east toward Alexander Street—has changed substantially in recent years. Brooks notes that the corridor now counts more than 100 places to eat and drink, a number that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago.

Evans ticked through the newcomers in his address: Farmhouse Table on South Clinton, Patron Saint on Broad Street, Shell on Liberty Pole Way, the Cocktail Lab on Pleasant Street. There are also a number of marijuana dispensaries that have sprouted up, including Good Life Collective on Monroe Avenue and 6 Points Cannabis on Division Street. Evans pointed to the Lucky Flea, a pop-up Sunday market drawing 60 to 100 vendors and hundreds of shoppers to the base of Tower 280 every week in the summer. The Wadsworth Square corridor along Monroe Avenue, he said, has become one of the city’s fastest-growing commercial strips.

It’s a response to something Rochester already lost once. Midtown Plaza, when it opened in 1962, was a bold experiment. It stood as one of the nation’s first indoor, enclosed malls. When it finally went dark in July 2008, it took a piece of everyday downtown life with it.

Evans sees the current moment as a chance to get that back. He framed the Inner Loop East and Midtown redevelopment projects—covering roughly 15 acres between them—as the stones that sent ripples outward across the city. ROC the Riverway and the Inner Loop North removal and revitalization extend that logic further, replacing physical barriers with accessible gathering spots. The proposed High Falls State Park and new green space along the Genesee River are meant to become destinations rather than drive-bys.

Nowhere is that potential—and that gap—more visible than at Parcel 5. The 1.1-acre green space on East Main Street occupies the footprint of Midtown Plaza, and carries some of its history’s weight. For decades, Midtown was a place where the community converged—diverse in age, race, income. Parcel 5 is its most direct heir, and it has shown what’s possible: the Rochester Jazz Festival, the Fringe Festival, Movies with a Downtown View, and the Puerto Rican Festival all draw the kind of broad, mixed crowd that downtown’s newer bars and restaurants rarely manage on their own. Well-designed and actively managed public squares like Columbus Commons in Columbus, Ohio, and Bryant Park in Manhattan have shown what’s possible when a city commits to a space as a true gathering place. But on a given Tuesday afternoon—outside of the festival calendar—Parcel 5 is mostly empty.

RDDC helps drive foot traffic through programming: mid-day concerts, movies at Parcel 5, the return of Rochester restaurant week, yoga and other activities at Austin Steward Plaza and spots along the riverfront. The organization also runs a neighborhood grants program aimed at nudging small businesses into vacant Main Street storefronts.

“We celebrate downtown, we activate downtown, and we enhance vitality and livability,” Brooks says.

But Brooks and others are clear-eyed about the gaps. Evans himself describes the Lucky Flea’s shoppers as “mostly 20- and 30-something,” and most of the new bars and restaurants opening downtown are priced accordingly. The Public Market on Saturday mornings draws from all corners of the city. So does the Transit Center. Whether the newer spots can do the same over time is an open question.

Van Grol’s read on the vacancy problem is blunt: “Downtown needs a grocery store and/or an evening farmers market. We have a lot of vacant street-level storefronts that could be filled creatively. It would be nice to see the city put pressure on those property owners.”

It’s a reminder that belonging isn’t just social; it’s also logistical. For many, a neighborhood without a grocery store is a neighborhood you pass through, not one you live in. Daily life has to have somewhere ordinary to happen before the extraordinary stuff can follow.

At Ugly Duck, Van Grol has watched that process unfold in a room barely big enough for it.

“It starts off simply and grows,” he says. “Conversations turn into relationships of caring. Myself and our team have been invited into regulars’ homes for celebrations, or to help them out with things like pet sitting. Our guests truly care about our well-being, checking up on us, and we feel the same about them.”

Scale matters. The places that tend to work best are small enough that you can’t disappear inside them. You notice who’s there, who comes back, who becomes familiar by repetition alone. The Mercantile on Main, carved out of a piece of the old Sibley’s department store, hums with people crossing paths for food, retail, and art. What those spaces share with Washington Square, and with a Saturday morning at the Public Market, is the accumulation of repeated presence—the same faces in the same spots, long enough that showing up starts to feel like being somewhere you belong.

Rochester’s version of this isn’t happening in one place. The appetite for connection and the infrastructure for it are not arriving at the same pace, and they’re not arriving for everyone at the same time. The new restaurants are real. So are the empty storefronts. The benches at Washington Square are an improvement. So is the fact that it took this long to get there.

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.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified President Benjamin Harrison.

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