Brighton sits on Rochester's southeastern edge with no village of its own since 1905, the Erie Canal running through, and Twelve Corners for a downtown.
The name came over from Brighton, England. English colonists put up the first permanent buildings here around 1790, and the town was formally established in 1814, which makes it one of the oldest in Monroe County. For the rest of that century it stayed a place of farms and brickyards. The bricks left marks you can still find. Roselawn was laid out in 1919 on 135 acres of former brickyards near Cobbs Hill, the same year the brick and tile works closed up and moved to Fishers. And the Brickyard Trail is exactly what it sounds like: old clay-mining ground, now a wetland, made a park in 2017.
Brighton has no village of its own. The old one, around East Avenue and Winton Road, was annexed by Rochester in 1905, and the town has done without ever since. What it has instead is Twelve Corners, where Winton Road, Monroe Avenue and Elmwood Avenue meet and make twelve corners: the commercial hub, with the town hall campus and the library on Elmwood. The rest is neighbourhoods. Home Acres was advertised in 1911 as fifteen minutes from downtown by streetcar. Bel-Air went up in the 1920s, 437 homes, many of them Tudor or colonial, on streets with mature trees, sidewalks and street lights.
The Erie Canal runs through town with the Erie Canal Heritage Trail beside it, and Lynch Woods, out on the west side, connects to the Lehigh Valley Trail. Corbett's Glen is the one to start with: 52 acres you enter through a stone tunnel from the top of Glen Road, then two miles of trail along a cascading stretch of Allens Creek, past Postcard Falls, around a meadow and a cattail marsh under slopes of big oaks. There is a boardwalk and a viewing deck. There are no restrooms, so plan for that. All told the town keeps more than 350 acres of parkland across six sites.
The Brighton crewneck in Erie Blue is the everyday one, the one that ends up on the canal path most weekends. Then you pick your neighbourhood: the Roselawn tee in Açai Berry, or Home Acres in Faded Predawn, depending on your street. And a Corbetts Glen tee in Crème Fraîche, because the tunnel walk is the thing you take visitors to.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org · historicbrighton.org · homeacres.org · web.archive.org · brightonny.gov · corbettsglen.org · brightonny.gov