Rochester is the Flour City and the Flower City, a boomtown on the Genesee that keeps lilacs on one hill and its drinking water on another.
Rochester is the seat of Monroe County and the fourth-most populous city in the state, with 206,108 people as of the 2025 estimate. It grew up as one of the country's first boomtowns, on the flour mills of the Genesee River valley, which is where Flour City comes from. Flower City is for the floriculture. World's Image Center is for film, optics and photography. It was also a hub of the abolitionist and women's rights movements. On the ground the city sorts itself into neighbourhoods, 35 of them recognized by the Celebrate City Living program, and around here the neighbourhood usually comes up before the street does.
Highland Park is 150 acres of arboretum on a glacial moraine, begun in 1888 with 20 acres from two nurserymen; its lilacs, planted from 1892, now run to more than 1,200 shrubs of over 500 varieties, and they are what the Lilac Festival every May is for. The city bought the top of Cobbs Hill in 1904 for a reservoir, finished in 1908, that still holds drinking water drawn from Hemlock Lake about thirty miles south. Inside that park is Washington Grove, 26 acres of oak and hickory that has never been logged, bought by a group of citizens in 1912 so it would not become a gravel pit.
Park Avenue runs a mile and a quarter from Alexander Street to Culver Road through early-twentieth-century houses, a historic district since 2020, with a street festival dating to 1976. Monroe Avenue runs from the Inner Loop out past Cobbs Hill into Brighton, where its stretch from 590 to Clover Street was, as of 2009, the busiest on the 208-mile route. East Avenue is the grand one, 362 acres of big houses, a historic district since 1979. And South Clinton is where Swillburg eats: Indian, Chinese, Somali, Vietnamese and Japanese. The neighbourhood's cinema opened in 1914, got its Art Deco front in 1949, and has a 1930s diner across the street.
The Park Ave crewneck in Dusting, for the festival weekend and every other one. The Highland Park crewneck in Lavender Fields, which is the obvious choice in May and the right one anyway. And the Cobbs Hill tee in Erie Blue for the reservoir loop, because that is where you will run into everyone you know.
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