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Dutchtown was Built From Immigrant Determination By Mark Hare - 02/08/2005 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle More Info on This Book: Rochester's Dutchtown The caption below a 19th-century photo of the Rochester City Hospital notes that the "Dutchtown folk made good use" of it, because "with so many industries, there were endless injuries. Devastating outbreaks of cholera, scarlet fever, smallpox and other diseases" kept the beds full. The photo is one of 200 in Michael and Glenn Leavy's pictorial history of a west-side neighborhood, Rochester's Dutchtown (available in local bookstores for $19.99).The book is Michael's fourth picture book; all are from Arcadia Publishing. Dutchtown is one of several Arcadia books by different local authors, each with the same photo and caption format. The Brown brothers from Rome bought 200 acres, most of it dense woods, in 1810. The tract stretched from what are now High Falls and Brown's Race, west and north along a wedge that is now flanked by West Avenue on the south and Lyell to the north. As the tract developed, German and then later Italian and Irish immigrants went to work in the mills and breweries powered by the falls. For the Leavys, whose maternal grandparents, Matteo and Mary Angela Lombardo, lived for decades in a small house in Dutchtown, the book was a labor of love. "I was worried about finding photos," Michael Leavy told me, "because unlike some of the wealthier neighborhoods, hardly anyone in Dutchtown had a camera." But as word got around that he was looking for photos, families, churches and organizations came forward. From the images emerges a portrait of a hard and brutal life, of ethnic clashes and intense devotion to family and church. There is a shot of Depression-era men "down on their luck," laboring to load snow into horse-drawn wagons to clear the streets. Others show men at work at the city rock pile, using hand tools to crush stone that would be used for road beds. A photograph from 1897 shows "destitute Italian immigrants" laying paving stones to rebuild Lyell Avenue. It was back-breaking work, but it was all they could get. The long-gone St. Patrick's Cathedral, just to the west of Kodak Tower, built a nearby Girls Orphan Asylum because, as one Dutchtown resident told the Leavys, "There were so many orphaned children; young women who had babies by mistake would bring them to the church." Young boys faced a different fate — The Western House of Refuse, later renamed the State Industrial School, at the corner of Backus Street and Phelps Avenue. One photo shows boys posing in the foundry where they are learning how to cast hot metal. Neighborhood baseball teams would play on the grounds of the Western House. In the caption to a scene from an 1880s game, an older Dutchtown resident remarked: "Forget this Melting Pot baloney. ... It was baseball that got us together." Still, Dutchtown was as charming as it was gritty. The streets pulsated with neighborhood groceries, barbershops and saloons. Children frolicked in the wading pool at Brown's Square, also the site of the city's first playground. Jones Square was the "garden center" of Rochester by the 1920s, with a beehive fountain surrounded by thousands of flowering bulbs. "My uncle remembers the boys sleeping outside at Jones Park to watch the stars and smell the flowers," says Michael Leavy. Look carefully at these pictures and you will see the tenacity that turned thick forests into a bustling city: You will see reason to hope — that these industrious people have passed on to their children and grandchildren the genes that move mountains. Buy It Now: Rochester's Dutchtown $21.99 |
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