Founding
county seat of Monroe County, New York, United States
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Rochester is a city in and the county seat of Monroe County, New York, United States. It is the fourth-most populous city in New York, with a population of 211,328 at the 2020 census (estimated at 206,108 as of 2025). The Rochester metropolitan area in Western New York has an estimated 1.05 million residents and is the 54th-largest metropolitan area in the U.S. Throughout its history, Rochester has acquired several nicknames based on local industries; it has been known as "the Flour City" and "the Flower City" for its dual role in flour production and floriculture, and as the "World's Image Center" for its association with film, optics, and photography.
The city was one of the United States' first boomtowns, initially due to the fertile Genesee River valley which gave rise to numerous flour mills, and then as a manufacturing center, which spurred further rapid population growth. Rochester has also played a key part in US history as a hub for social and political movements, especially abolitionism, and the women's rights movement.
Rochester is the birthplace or home of many notable companies including Eastman Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, Wegmans, Constellation Brands, Gannett, Paychex, Western Union and Ray-Ban. In part due to their influence, the region became a global center for science, technology, and research and development. This has been aided by the presence of several internationally renowned universities, notably the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and their research programs; these schools, along with many other smaller colleges, have played an increasingly large role in its economy. The city experienced significant population decline due to deindustrialization in the late 20th century, although less severely than its Rust Belt peers. The Rochester metropolitan area is the fourth-largest regional economy in New York, after New York City, Buffalo–Niagara Falls and the Capital District.
Rochester is also known for its culture; in particular, the Eastman School of Music, one of the most prestigious conservatories in the world, and the Rochester International Jazz Festival anchor a vibrant music industry. It is the site of several museums such as The Strong National Museum of Play and the George Eastman Museum, which houses the oldest photography collection in the world.
The Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy lived around Rochester prior to the American Revolution, and used the area as a hunting ground. Allied with the British, the Seneca were forced to cede or sell most of their land in New York after the war. The area now occupied by Rochester was ceded in the Phelps and Gorham Purchase of 1788. As a reward for their loyalty to the British crown, the Iroquois were given a large land grant on the Grand River in Canada.
Rochester was founded shortly after by a wave of English-Puritan-descended immigrants from New England, who were looking for new agricultural land. They were the dominant cultural group in Rochester for over a century. On November 8, 1803, three men from Hagerstown, Maryland, purchased a 100-acre (40-ha) tract from the Pulteney Estate along the Genesee River: Major Charles Carroll, Colonel William Fitzhugh Jr, and Colonel Nathaniel Rochester, the namesake of the city. They chose the site because its three cataracts on the Genesee offered great potential for water power. Beginning in 1811, and with a population of 15, the three founders surveyed the land and laid out streets and tracts. In 1817, the Brown brothers and other landowners joined their lands with the Hundred Acre Tract to form the village of Rochesterville. This name was unpopular, and in 1822 it was shortened to Rochester.
By 1821, Rochesterville became the seat of Monroe County. In 1823, the Erie Canal aqueduct over the Genesee River was completed, connecting the city to the Hudson River to the east. New commerce from the canal turned the village into America's first boomtown. By 1830, Rochester's population had grown to 9,200, and in 1834, it was rechartered as a city. Rochester was first known as "the Young Lion of the West", and then as the "Flour City". By 1838, it was the largest flour-producing city in the United States. A series of religious revivals occurred as part of the Second Great Awakening, including a particularly notable revival led by Charles Grandison Finney which inspired local social reform movements.
During the mid-19th century, as the center of the wheat-processing industry moved west with population and agriculture, the city became home to an expanding nursery business, giving rise to the city's second nickname, the Flower City. Nurseries ringed the city, the most famous of which was started in 1840 by immigrants George Ellwanger from Germany and Patrick Barry from Ireland. Shoemaking also became a major local industry as the city began to industrialize.
In 1847, Frederick Douglass founded The North Star, an abolitionist newspaper, in Rochester. A former slave and an antislavery speaker and writer, he gained a circulation of over 4,000 subscribers in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. Douglass lived in Rochester until his home was destroyed in a fire in 1872, and a historical marker was erected at the site on South Avenue. Many other prominent abolitionists operated in the area and operated on the Underground Railroad, such as Thomas James and Austin Steward.
Around the same time, the nearby Finger Lakes region was the birthplace of the women's suffrage movement. A critical suffragettes' convention was held in 1848 in nearby Seneca Falls, and Rochester was the home of Susan B. Anthony along with other notable Suffragettes such as Abigail Bush and Amy Post. The city itself played host to the Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848. The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, in 1920, which guaranteed the right of women to vote, was known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment because of her work toward its passage, which she did not live to see. Anthony's home is a National Historic Landmark known as the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House.
Rochester saw an expansion of new industries in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Irish immigrant James Cunningham founded the carriagemaker James Cunningham, Son and Company. James Cunningham and Sons later founded the Cunningham Car Company, a pioneer automobile maker. German immigrants John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb launched Bausch & Lomb in 1861 and inventor and entrepreneur George Eastman founded Eastman Kodak in 1892. In 1895, trucking executive George F. Roth and others founded the Rochester Cash Register Company, and obtained a patent for an "improvement in cash registers". Their company failed, however, in 1899, and its patents were sold to the National Cash Register Company.
Xerox was founded in Rochester in 1906 as the Haloid Company. In the early 20th century, Rochester became a center of the garment industry, particularly men's fashions. It was the base of Bond Clothing Stores, Fashion Park Clothes, Hickey Freeman, and Stein-Bloch and Co. The Erie Canal was rerouted south of Rochester by 1918 to allow widening as part of the Barge Canal's construction. The short-lived Rochester subway was constructed in the abandoned canal bed and operated from 1927 to 1956.
The dawn of the 20th century in Rochester saw rapid growth, driven by waves of immigrants arriving from Germany, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. The city also grew in area, annexing suburban neighborhoods from the surrounding towns to arrive at its present borders. The population reached 62,386 in 1870, 162,608 in 1900, and 295,750 in 1920. By 1950, the population had reached a high of 332,488. The surge in new arrivals, along with increased industrialization, resulted in the city becoming a hotbed of labor activism. From the 1920s and continuing into the post-war era Rochester grew into a power center for newly formed industrial unions. It was one of the very few American cities where the labor movement was powerful enough to mount a successful general strike when in 1946 an estimated 50,000 workers across multiple sectors walked off in support of hundreds of city employees who had been fired for attempting to unionize.
During World War II, Rochester factories produced a variety of goods for the war effort, including fuel tanker ships, optical equipment, and radio proximity fuses, amounting to US$1,200,000,000 of military orders. Following the war, the city began engaging in urban renewal projects to revitalize downtown, including the construction of Midtown Plaza and freeways like the Inner Loop, and the demolition of the Front Street neighborhood. By the 1970s, the city experienced highway revolts against new projects, and in the 2010s, the city began filling in the Inner Loop to restore older neighborhoods.
In 1950, the Census Bureau reported Rochester's population as 97.6% White and 2.3% Black. Rochester's black population tripled to more than 25,000 during the 1950s. Casually employed by the city's major industries, most African Americans in the city held low-pay and low-skill jobs, and lived in substandard housing. Discontent exploded in the three-day 1964 Rochester race riot, which resulted in five deaths, 350 injuries, nearly a thousand arrests, and 204 stores looted or damaged. In the wake of the riot, the Rochester Area Churches, together with black civil rights leaders, invited Saul Alinsky of the Industrial Areas Foundation to help the community organize. With the Reverend Franklin Florence, they established FIGHT (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today), which successfully brought pressure to bear on Eastman Kodak to help open up employment and city governance.
In 1992, Rochester tried to help the closing factories by turning the historic High Falls industrial area into a tourist "Entertainment District". They built a laser light show over the waterfall, as well as a "Center at High Falls Museum" and brought in restaurants and nightclubs. While it was a hit in the 1990s, the district struggled to stay profitable by the early-2000s as businesses continued to move out.
In 1997, Kodak announced it would be laying off 10,000 employees globally, with a huge portion of those in Rochester. This was a largest job cut announcement in U.S. history at the time. It signaled to the city that the era of Kodak's dominance in the area was officially over.
With industrial restructuring in the later 20th century, Rochester's manufacturing workforce shrank. Kodak, long the city's largest employer, conducted massive layoffs prior to a 2012 bankruptcy. Demographic changes also occurred, including thousands of Puerto Ricans moving to the city after World War II.
By 2022, the city's population had declined to 209,352 (although the metropolitan area was considerably larger) with 45.1% recorded as White and 38.4% as Black or African American. Although the total population declined, new arrivals continued to move to the city and change its demographic profile. The city became a major destination for refugees in the 21st century. In 2017, Rochester affirmed its status as a sanctuary city.
In April 2025, the Trump administration sued the city for its sanctuary city rules. A judge dismissed the case in November of the same year, but the government immediately refiled it. As of early 2026, Rochester asked the court to throw out the case again, arguing that the city has a Tenth Amendment right to choose which federal laws it helps enforce. Mayor Evans has led this charge against Trump.
Also in early 2026, New York State committed $75 million to give Rochester its first-ever state park. The state park will cover over 40 acres around the 80-foot High Falls waterfall and is part of a plan to bring more tourists and businesses back to the downtown area.
Rochester is located in Upstate New York, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. The Genesee River bisects the city. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 37.1 square miles (96 km2), of which 35.8 square miles (93 km2) are land and 1.3 square miles (3.4 km2) are covered by water (3.42%). Rochester borders the towns of Irondequoit to the north and northeast, Brighton to the southeast and south, Chili to the southwest, Gates to the west, and Greece to the northwest.
Rochester's landscape was formed by the ice sheets during the Pleistocene epoch. The retreating ice sheets reached a standstill at what is now the southern border of the city, melting at the same rate as they were advancing, depositing sediment along the southern edge of the ice mass. This created a line of hills, including (from west to east) Mt. Hope, the hills of Highland Park, Pinnacle Hill, and Cobb's Hill. Because the sediment of these hills was deposited into a proglacial lake, they are stratified and classified as a "kame delta". A brief retreat and readvance of the ice sheet onto the delta deposited unstratified material there, creating a rare hybrid structure called "kame moraine". The ice sheets also created Lake Ontario, the Genesee River with its waterfalls and gorges, Irondequoit Bay, Sodus Bay, Braddock Bay, Mendon Ponds, numerous local streams and ponds, the Ridge, and the nearby Finger Lakes.
Water to the city is sourced from Hemlock Lake, Canadice Lake, and Lake Ontario.
Celebrate City Living, a partnership program between the city government and Rochester Coalition for Neighborhood Living, defines 35 neighborhoods in Rochester. Among these are the 14621 Community, 19th Ward, Beechwood, Browncroft, Charlotte, Cobbs Hill, Corn Hill, downtown Rochester, Dutchtown, Edgerton, EMMA (East Main, Mustard & Atlantic Avenue), High Falls, Highland Park, Homestead Heights, JOSANA (Jay-Orchard Street Area), Lincoln Park, Lyell-Otis, Maplewood, Marketview Heights, Mayor's Heights, Monroe Village, NOTA (Neighborhood of the Arts), North Winton Village, Northland-Lyceum, Park Avenue, Plymouth-Exchange, South Wedge, Susan B. Anthony, Swillburg, Upper Falls, Upper Monroe, and Upper Mount Hope.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Rochester, New York”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.