YMCA, Rochester, New York
In the spring of 1981, I had an appointment with Owen Butler, who taught photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I was a broke student at the time, and so stayed in the YMCA—probably at my father's suggestion, an old-school approach to modest living.
It was located on Gibbs Street near the city center, which was not a nice part of town at the time. Here’s a detail from a USGS map from 1978; the YMCA is near the center of the frame…
Being a photography student at the time (I'd completed two years of undergraduate school at Indiana University), I schlepped a view camera with me on this journey. Using this cumbersome camera, I made this view from my window (which I've posted on Tumblr several times)...
As I recall, this is the day Bob Marley died, which would make it the 11th of May, 1981. The building would not persist much longer either. After poking around a bit on line, I found out that the brick and steel structure would not see the end of that Reagan-era decade.
Looking at Rochester via Street View now (forty-five years later, as I write this) it’s very difficult to find anything one sees in the image above still standing—though I think I found a couple of buildings in the center of the frame. The church one sees in the distance toward the right hand side is St. Michael’s Church at Sullivan and North Clinton.
Currently, the Eastman Student Living Center stands at the site of the old “Y” (see below). The Eastman Theatre stands half a block away across East Main Street. If you’re interested in the history of the old YMCA, you can go to here for more information.
I'm taking this swing eastward to visit some other places in which I've lived, decades ago. Not sure it's possible, but I want to figure out a disconcerting present by pondering the past.
Black and White image above by Richard Koenig; taken May 11th 1981. The color image of the dormitory that replaced the YMCA was made on May 30th 2026.
