Rochester Postcard 19 Aughts

Most of have that misnomer called a phone in our pockets. One of its many uses is photography and includes a setting called “pano.” I suspect the technology involved in this four-fold postcard in the CSNY collection is a camera with which several shots are taken along a horizontal plane and and then the images…

will van dorp

May 19, 2025

1–2 minutes

Canal Society of New York, Collection highlights, Court Street bridge, Rochester NY

Train cars, impressive buildings,

towers all long demolished maybe, and the Court

Street Bridge. I grew up near Rochester, but I’ve always had blinders on and know almost nothing about either that city when I was growing up in the 1960s or that city today.

Some of you can write volumes about the structures here, including the Court Street Bridge, and I invite you to do so.

Eriecanal.org has a lot of Rochester postcards from the same era here, but I’ve not found an identical match.

Many thanks to Bill Hecht for using his digital tools to clean up the image.

2 responses to “Rochester Postcard 19 Aughts”

Lee Rust

May 20, 2025 at 3:33 am

This photo was quite likely made with a Kodak No. 1 Panoram, an innovative camera design that was first introduced around 1900. It used a swinging lens to produce a continuous 112 degree panoramic image on roll film, which in this case covers an arc from west to north and contains a considerable wealth of detail.

The picture was definitely taken before 1905, since the Lehigh Valley Railroad terminal has not yet been built on the east side of the Genesee River, although the masonry piers that will eventually support the tracks and passenger station are already in place. The river level is very high, but over to the extreme right the Erie Canal is still drained for the winter, so the month is most likely March or April.

In Rochester, quite a few structures in this panorama have survived to the present day. Mostly hidden behind the Court Street Bridge is the Erie Canal aqueduct that now carries Broad Street over the Genesee River. On the eastern side of the river, the upper floors of the Granite Building can be seen just to the left of that row of telephone poles by the Canal towpath.

Over on the west side of the river, the towers of the old Rochester City Hall and Powers Building are visible in the distance, while the massive Aqueduct and Wilder buildings are still standing just north of the old Canal route. The former National Casket Company factory has been repurposed into legal offices and is situated directly behind the site where the Erie Railroad terminal building, passenger concourse and several tracks once occupied the riverbank.

Reply
1. tugster
  
  May 20, 2025 at 5:46 am
  
  Lee- Mea culpa for not considering that Rochester was the home of photography. I conclude it’s time for me to visit any museum in Rochester related to the innovations of Eastman Kodak. Thanks for pointing me in this direction and mentioning a specific camera–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Panoram–that might even have been promoted using the 4-fold postcard.
  
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