Written by Georgia Pressley and Terrell Brooks

In its third year, the fellowship digs into local history and shows how racial inequality in Greater Rochester didn't happen by accident.

What happens to a community when you build a highway over it?  

What once filled Rochester neighborhoods in places like the Third Ward were the sounds of neighbors gathering, music and family. The Inner Loop highway, touted during its debut as a national model of revitalization, replaced those sounds with the noise of rushing cars.  

Some see a road as merely a road. But those who were affected by the construction of the Inner Loop have personal stories about how the highway impacted their lives.  

We — Terrell Brooks and Georgia Pressley — are this summer’s Revisiting Rochester Narrative fellows at the Democrat and Chronicle. The fellowship is designed to look at preconceived ideas about specific Rochester communities and create a deeper understanding about them.

Over the years opinions about highways shifted. In 2017, Rochester celebrated the removal of the Inner Loop’s eastern section. Then, in 2021, the Inner Loop’s northern section was ranked by the Congress for the New Urbanism as one of the worst highways in America.  

This summer we will look at how the construction and deconstruction of the Inner Loop impacted the city of Rochester. We want to understand how we got here and use that knowledge to help inform our city’s future.  

How can we prevent the heartbreak of losing a community, whether it be to highways or what gets built in their places? 

What is the Inner Loop? 

The Inner Loop is a highway that encircled downtown Rochester. 

In 1945, after the end of World War II, Rochester’s population jumped to just over 300,000 people. This caused an influx of traffic downtown. The city's way to combat this was a proposal to build an Inner Loop to connect Rochester’s northern and eastern ends to downtown.  

To connect suburban communities to businesses downtown, the city planned a highway.  Beginning in the 1950s, the building of Rochester’s Inner Loop happened right through the center of the urban, redlined communities. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the Inner Loop’s construction caused about 1,300 homes and businesses to be demolished.  

Prior to this proposal, certain laws and practices made it more difficult for people from disadvantaged communities to get property mortgages. In the 1930s, for example, the Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps highlighted the "mortgage security" of all neighborhoods in Rochester. Lenders used this map to determine where to invest.  

Many predominantly immigrant, Black and brown communities were highlighted in red and labeled “hazardous.” Meanwhile, the white suburban neighborhoods were in green and classified as “best.” This, known now as “redlining,” perpetuated the idea that some areas in Rochester were not as valuable as others. 

And the Inner Loop highway cut off some of those same, redlined city neighborhoods from downtown. 

Why did we choose this project? 

Rochester is having a larger conversation on how to center racial and economic equity in its planning of the city's growth and future. The D&C aims to help move the discussion forward, in part, by elevating the voices of people who can show how these decisions to build or tear down impact their daily lives.   

So, we figured we would start with the Inner Loop because the city is breaking up with it. The eastern portion of the Inner Loop was demolished, and a neighborhood street was put in its place. It’s been a few years since that change debuted in 2017, and the city is considering doing something similar on the highway’s north side. 

With the city of Rochester putting together plans for what to do with the Inner Loop North, knowledge of the highway’s full history and present is of great relevance. 

And Rochester once again is becoming a national model, but this time not for highway construction but highway deconstruction. Other cities, such as Syracuse, have looked to Rochester as an example of what can be done.