Edgerton is a neighborhood in the Northwest Quadrant of Rochester, New York that sits between the Genesee River on the east and the Erie Canal bed on the west. One of the city's oldest and largest residential areas, Edgerton is among the most ethnically, linguistically, and racially diverse communities in Western New York. The neighborhood has been called "the Bermuda Triangle of Rochester" because of its "nearly invisible" status in local politics. Edgerton is currently the poorest neighborhood in Rochester, with an unemployment rate higher than that of the United States during the Great Depression.
Edgerton has been one of the largest contributors to Rochester's physical, political, and social landscapes, especially during the neighborhood's time as the "heart of the city" in the 20th century. The home of radicals like Helen Barrett Montgomery and innovators like George Eastman, Edgerton is the birthplace of the first commercially successful flexible film and the modern vocational school. Today, the neighborhood contains the largest urban farm in Western New York, an abundance of public art and innovative architecture, and some of Rochester's most famous parks, such as Edgerton Park and the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Lower Falls Park and Jones Square Park.
History
The Grandest Playground (1400–1860)
Before the arrival of European colonists, the Onödowáʼga built a village in what is now Edgerton. The residents erected a number of large burial mounds made of sand and clay on the site. Two trails ran north-south through the village, granting people easy access to launching sites for canoes bound for Lake Ontario.In the late 1700s, the first European colonists built cabins and homes near the village. Over the next five decades, these buildings evolved into a settlement known as McCrackenville, which eventually consisted of a paper mill, a flour mill, a furniture factory, a tannery, and a brewery. Rochester began to slowly creep north until it fully incorporated the industries and land of McCrackenville in the 1850s, placing what is now Edgerton in what was then the last of the City's nine wards; shortly thereafter, the northern half of the neighborhood was placed into a new Tenth Ward.
Edgerton acquired two of its most important geographic and social features during this pre-annexation era. The first was the Erie Canal, the completion of which in 1825 gave Edgerton both its western border and easy access to "The Nation's First Superhighway." The second feature was the Western House of Refuge, built on the east side of the canal in the late 1840s. This first state-run prison for children in the United States, which used a method of juvenile reform built on corporal punishment and penal labor, would become the center of the area's architectural and social landscape.
The hydropower on the neighborhood's east side, the shipping lanes of the Erie Canal on the neighborhood's west, and the open space throughout Edgerton attracted new distilleries, mills, and factories. As businesspeople in the pre-automobile era looked to live near their businesses, Edgerton quickly became filled with the city's new money elite, as the leaders of Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Hickey Freeman, and the Chamber of commerce all came to call Edgerton home. By the time of the Gilded Age, the neighborhood had become a veritable playground for the antebellum white upper-middle class, thanks to its Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, Masonic Temple, literary societies, and a private hospital that provided high-tech (and costly) treatments.
A Stronghold of Good Government (1860–1915)
By the 1860s, the geographic concentration (and relatively even distribution) of economic power in Edgerton translated into a distinct, neighborhood-based social and political culture. This was largely thanks to Rochester's highly decentralized government structure, which operated as something close to a ward republic. In Rochester, all wards were neighborhoods, and there were no neighborhoods outside of wards. Neighbors joined through drill corps, parade teams, and other ward-based social organizations to rally for and elect ward-based school commissioners, aldermen, and county supervisors. These officials were distinctly neighborhood politicians, who advocated for "the wards which had elected them, rather than for other sections or groups of the city."
In Rochester, poor wards scrapped for basic improvements to their neighborhoods, while the few built-out, "old money" wards focused on cementing their economic advantages while occasionally working to "rescue" the poor from themselves. The Ninth and Tenth wards, where young business tycoons lived next to physicians, plumbers, shoemakers, and janitors, took a middle path. Edgertonians in both wards fought hard for improvements to their own neighborhood, but did so in ways that ensured these beyond-the-basics advantages – like accessible Urban parks, extensive public transit, antimachine politics, and cutting-edge educational reforms – were distributed across the city. As a result, residents like feminist polymath Helen Barrett Montgomery, progressive preacher Clarence Augustus Barbour, and pacifist teetotaler Clinton Norman Howard became "the most active civic reformers" not just in Edgerton, but in Rochester as a whole.McKelvey, Blake (1956). Rochester: The Quest for Quality, 1890 – 1925. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 110 – 122
The power of these "Good Government" reformers, channeled and magnified through institutions like the ward structure and the neighborhood's religious and business organizations, not only brought a "new vitality to Rochester," but "enriched the lives of a whole generation." These reformers built a new "progressive wing of the Republican party in Rochester," whose anti-machine stance influenced local, state, and national policies through politician-entrepreneurs like James Johnston, Charles S. Baker, John Van Voorhis, and Lewis Selye. It crossed the Genesee by erecting the steel arch Driving Park Bridge, brought Rochester's first streetcars to Edgerton, and expanded those rail lines into one of the best public transit systems in the city. It drew Frederick Law Olmsted in to redesign Jones Square Park while create Lower Falls Park. And it created feminist organizations like Woman's Educational and Industrial Union, "one of the most significant developments" in Rochester's labor history.
Perhaps the greatest social progress came through neighborhood's approach to the Western House of Refuge, which was relocated out of Edgerton after a state investigation found the purported "school" was a "money-making" operation that was "exceedingly repulsive" in its punishment and torture of children."Refuge Verdict; The Report of the Investigating Committee". The Democrat & Chronicle (Rochester, NY). April 16, 1884. p. 3. The prison was replaced physically by what would be known as Edgerton Park, named for the mayor who purchased the land on which it was built. By the 1910s, the 40-acre park contained Rochester's premiere exhibition grounds, first public library, and first municipal museum.See the "Parks" subsection below. On an institutional level, the House was replaced by Vocational schools that were "the first of [their] kind in the country" and a local branch of the YMCA. These advances, as one resident wrote, proved Edgerton was a "stronghold of good government."
The Heart of the City (1915–1960)
The post-war building boom on the east side of Rochester and in suburbs like Gates, Greece, and Irondequoit caused an exodus of middle- and upper-class families from the Ninth and Tenth wards. The pricier nature of these newer homes and builders' use of racially restrictive covenants meant that the suburban frontier was inaccessible to the growing Italian lower middle-class in Rochester. Unwilling or unable to enter the existing Italian neighborhoods of the city's east side, these families streamed into Edgerton, leading it to be called one of Rochester's "Italian ghettos."McKelvey, Blake (1956). Rochester: The Quest for Quality, 1890 – 1925. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 330–332. By the 1930s, Edgerton was almost exclusively Italian-American (with one in four residents being foreign-born, typically from Southern Italy), making the neighborhood "Rochester's claim to a Little Italy." This was largely thanks to the federal government, which built a branch of the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the neighborhood and made the Ninth and Tenth wards the centerpiece of its homeownership-subsidy program in Rochester.Homeowners Loan Corporation, Security Map for the City of Rochester, Area Description C13 (1939) available HERE.
Unlike their forebears who were forced to move into resource-deprived slums, newcomers in Edgerton benefited immensely from the institutional frameworks earlier Ninth and Tenth Warders had left behind. This included the Republican ward establishment, which elected the first Italian-American in Rochester's history in 1915, sent the first Italian-American to the city legislature in 1925, and made Edgerton the "foothold" for Italian-American politics.Lanni, Clement G. "The History of the Italians of Rochester from 1876 to 1926," pp. 183–199, Vol. VI (1927). And unlike the Black and Asian immigrants who would come after them, the Italians of Edgerton were supported by a wealthy institution that poured resources and power into the neighborhood: the Roman Catholic Church. After bringing to Edgerton the first Italian Catholic church in Rochester, St. Anthony of Padua, the Holy See brought established institutions like the Holy Rosary church, rectory, school, and convent, a Carmelite monastery, a Sisters of St. Joseph convent, and a Knights of Malta temple. With these new residents and resources, Edgerton became filled with bakeries, theaters, a Christadelphian church, the headquarters of Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, Chevrolet and Ford dealerships, grocery stores, funeral homes, gas stations, auto repair shops, florists, financial institutions, and other entities that defined a thriving urban neighborhood in the 20th century – including, notably, The Tenth Ward Courier, a community paper that covered local historical, political, and social goings-on into the 1990s.
Edgerton thrived not only for its new residents, but for the city as a whole. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Edgerton Park's arena, library, museum, swimming pool, bandstand, sports fields, playground, and zoo were the center of entertainment and recreation for lower- and middle-class Rochesterians. The park hosted trade shows, auto shows, art exhibitions, firework shows, animal shows, rodeos, parades, military demonstrations, annual horse shows that were called the "opening event in Rochester's social season," the massive annual Industrial Expositions, and concerts like an all-Black review led by Duke Ellington. Edgerton Park was home to the Rochester Cardinals of the International Hockey League, the Rochester Jeffersons of the National Football League, and the Rochester Royals of the National Basketball Association, who won the 1951 NBA Finals at the 4,000 seat Edgerton Park Arena. Unsurprisingly, when Rochester built its light rail system in the 1930s, seven of the nine main stops west of the Genesee River were in Edgerton.