Midtown poised to become Rochester memory

There is little inside Midtown Plaza that looks like a shopping mall anymore. Exposed steel beams and metal decking. Broken concrete and strands of rebate. Work lights strung by heavy cord.

Midtown, one of the nation's first downtown enclosed shopping malls, is about to come crashing down.

Crews will begin digging up and disconnecting utilities next month. In mid-August or early September, the excavators arrive with grapples and shears to start tearing into the downtown landmark along South Clinton Avenue. A crane will roll in shortly thereafter.

"The contractor is going to work his way into the site, basically, and expose areas to give him room to work," said Bob Kreuzer, project manager with LiRo Engineers. "You're not going to see the wrecking ball. They won't implode a building. It's all by heavy equipment."

Back in October 2007, then-Gov. Eliot Spritzer stood in the Midtown atrium and announced that the state would commit $55 million to pay for asbestos abatement and demolition of the 8.6-acre site, saying, "This to me is the beginning of a renaissance downtown." Midtown was 85 percent vacant at the time.

Asbestos work began in July 2009, but has been largely out of public view. Project officials provided updates Tuesday in separate briefings for the public, stakeholders and the media, which also was given a final look inside.

"Downtown is going to be very different," city Corporation Counsel Thomas Richards said, explaining how, one day, people will stand in the middle of the Midtown block and see Manhattan Square Park, the Sibley Building, the East End and Xerox Tower. "You will have another vision of what downtown is like."

Most of the demolition should be completed in nine months; all of it by December 2011.


Motorists can expect lane restrictions but no long-term closures. They also may encounter more on-street service and delivery vehicles, as access to a tunnel stretching beneath the site to Riverside Convention Center will be limited. Fencing and sidewalk closures will be extended. The bus stop in front of Midtown at South Clinton Avenue and East Main Street will be relocated to North Clinton Avenue and Mortimer Street.

Skywalks linking to the site will be dismantled beginning as soon as late August. That work will be done on evenings and weekends to avoid traffic tie-ups, officials said, and connections to Chase Tower and the Sibley Building will be permanently sealed over.

Throughout the demolition, contractors will use misting machines — "as much water as possible" — to control dust, Kreuzer said. They also will monitor air quality and vibrations to protect surrounding buildings.

When the crane arrives, it will tear the top floors off the Seneca Building along South Clinton Avenue. The lower three floors will be stripped down to the steel frame but preserved and incorporated into PAETEC Holding Corp.'s new headquarters.

The company's plan has received city site plan approval, with conditions that PAETEC shift or expand its building 13 to 18 feet northward to eliminate setback from East Main Street. Ground-floor retail space also should be reconfigured to fill the East Main Street frontage and wrap around the building's east side.

A PAETEC spokesman said neither request is problematic. By this time next year, construction should be under way, not just on PAETEC's headquarters but on renovation of Midtown Tower into apartments and condominiums, possible redevelopment of the former Wegmans building and site work.

The city must decide by this fall whether there is sufficient developer interest to retain the steel framework of the old Wegmans building. If kept, Richards said, the city first must be certain it has the money to still raze the structure if that developer's interest falls through.

In all, the city estimates spending $90 million on demolition and infrastructure, repairing the service tunnel, re-opening the three-level parking garage beneath the site and putting back streets that Midtown absorbed almost 50 years ago.

For now, though, the hollowed-out shell of Midtown still holds its place in downtown. And, in tough economic times, its dismantling is providing steady work for local laborers, for whom unemployment is estimated at 15 percent to 20 percent.

At the height of the asbestos removal, which is ongoing, Midtown bustled with more than 200 workers. When the project fully shifts to demolition, the work force will drop to between 30 and 40.

Keith Kellogg, 53, of Henrietta has worked here since last summer as a foreman with Cambria Contracting Inc. He remembers coming to Midtown as a boy, riding the monorail or throwing pennies in the fountain. Today, there is some nostalgia, he said, with workers swapping stories as they tore out that fountain.

"I'm just glad to be working, to tell you the truth," said Kellogg, who had been out of work for a year before the Midtown job. "This has been quite the project, that's for sure. Quite the project."