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mostly-dreary Rochester real estate
Saturday, July 6 2024
location: Mulberry Street, Rochester, NY
This morning Gretchen and Maryann went to a huge Rochester farmers' market that, Gretchen later explained, was unlike the ones we're more familiar with. It didn't cater to upper middleclass white people concerned about food miles, ethical land use, and organics. The prices were low and people from all economic strata were there. Gretchen and Maryann later returned with lots of cherries, raspberries, and (for Maryann) a beautiful head of butter lettuce that had only cost $2. Gretchen also brought home bagels, though I'm not sure where they were from. The one I ate with some of Maryann's hummus was the only food I had until dinnertime (with the exception of some cherries).
Part of the reason for our going to Rochester was to look at real estate, and for today Gretchen had lined up a few houses for us to look at. The first of these was an open house in a nearby neighborhood west of the Genesee River. So Gretchen drove us over there, though we parked a quarter mile away when the road in front of us was blocked by a truck equipped with a huge claw loading trash off the side of the street (the trash included a mattress). Unlike Maryann's neighborhood, which is unusually stunning with its big trees and quiet streets crammed with houses from the early 1900s, the neighborhood we'd come to see (Kingsboro, which runs along a canal), felt more like an aging suburb, with houses of wildly different architecture forming a mish-mash of visual clutter, one that the relatively small trees couldn't cloak. The house we'd come to see was microcosm of that same jarring mish-mash, with no coherent architectural style. The kitchen had been recently renovated in a clear effort to charm possible buyers, but the upstairs rooms were dreary low-ceilinged carpeted boxes with visible stains on those carpets. The agent greeted us in the kitchen with the news that the house came with water access to the canal, where one could go fishing, apparently not noticing the feminist vegan statement on the teeshirt Gretchen happened to be wearing. We looked around the house in a mild state of horror and then went in the back to see the canal, because why not? But there was no way in hell we'd be buying a house like that, especially in the neighborhood it was in. Also, the price (somewhere around $200) seemed expensive given what we knew of the Rochester real estate market.
Next we drove back across the Genesee to a neighborhood closer to Maryann's house to have a realtor named Danielle show us a couple houses. As close as we were to Maryann's house, the neighborhood still wasn't as nice, with a lot of shabby houses on the street. The first house had a weird smell and a strangely overlong kitchen. The basement smelled even worse and had a ceiling so low that I couldn't stand up straight unless my head was between two joists. It was a definite no. Jasmin joined us as we looked at the last house of the day, which was the best so far. It was a 1400 square foot house on Benton Street clad in white asbestos siding. It had been built in 1899, and with its Victorian details lost beneath many layers of lead paint, it was actually nice. Its inside was in great shape, though the kitchen definitely needed a renovation. Unfortunately, the entire backyard had been paved, which was definite minus. And the neighborhood was kind of suspect, though it was on the nicer end of an otherwise shabby street of astoundingly small houses. Perhaps because Jasmin is so psyched about the idea of us buying real estate in Rochester, she seemed very excited about this house, though it might make more sense for one of her other friends than it does for us.
Gretchen and Jasmin went off to have a few adventures of their own this afternoon (including getting their hair cut), leaving me to drive myself back to Maryann's house. I ended up taking a very nice late afternoon nap.
Jasmin and Moore have a sick cat named Stella who wasn't swallowing, and they decided to take her to an emergency vet in Buffalo, meaning they wouldn't be participating in our dinner plans. So Gretchen and I ended up driving Maryann over to Squatcho's, the vegan pizzeria in downtown Rochester were we unsuccessfully attempted to get pizza a year ago. This evening they had plenty of pizza dough, so Gretchen ordered me a mid-sized pizza with mushrooms and banana peppers and got a larger pizza for herself and Maryann featuring vegan ricotta, spinach, and other things that are more appropriate for Gretchen than they are for me. Squatcho's is a fairly typical pizza place in that the cooks are young men who like to blast hardcore (something pizza cooks have been doing for going on thirty five years now) and the dining room is pretty no-frills. We found a table up near the front (it was far too hot to eat outside and the sidewalk dining was bleak in the way that it typically is in downtowns) and, when the pizza came out, we dug in. (Though Gretchen was also very excited about the buffalo cæsar salad, whose bluecheese dressing was, she said, the best she'd ever had.) Having eaten nothing much but that bagel earlier, I was very hungry, and I ate my entire pizza. It was good, but not better than, say, Ollie's in High Falls.
I don't remember much of what we talked about, though at some point the discussion of "buffalo sauce" had me looking up the etymology for "bison," which I thought might come from some native American language. But no, it's ultimately a Germanic word coined to refer to the extinct European bison (as well as the somehow-avoided-being-rendered-extinct American variety).
Back at Maryann's house, Gretchen and Maryann had another marathon of watching British detective shows. But Maryann had also mentioned liking to watch travel shows, particularly those hosted by Romesh Ranganathan (a British comedian who, it inevitably needed to be said, is vegan) who visits countries that are a little too sketchy to get many tourists. So when she and Gretchen began watching the Romesh Ranganathan episode where he visits Zimbabwe, I came down to join them. It was both hilarious and informative, helped in no small part by the always-mirthful local Zimbabwean woman who gives him a complete tour. I'd eaten some cannabis I'd grown last year (something weird had happened with it, rendering it unusually bitter), and it never really kicked in.
A sense of what we didn't like about the Kingsboro neighborhood on the west bank of the Genesee in Rochester: little lollypop trees not doing much to make the mix of architectural styles coherent.
Click to enlarge.
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