Goin’ Downtown!

It will become obvious in this blog that my grandmother was a very special lady. She was one of 11 girls (that’s right, eleven girls!) who grew up in the city of Rochester, New York. Her parents were born in Holland and emigrated from there to the United States in the late 1800s. Her father was in San Francisco for several years rebuilding after the Great Earthquake of 1906 when she was born, so she came into the world with essentially a single mother at the time.

In my post about 1963, I mentioned that my grandmother was a champion bus rider. I know that sounds a little ridiculous, but since they only had one car and my grandfather drove it to work, she took the bus everywhere. This required an expert knowledge of lines, fees, tokens, and transfers, which puzzled me and my brother when she took us along. No matter, Gammy was firmly in charge. She was tough, too. I saw her more than once stand up to punks trying to give one of us trouble. No one messed with Gammy.

In the summer there was plenty to do on Greenfield Road as you can tell by reading this blog. Every so often she would tell us kids, meaning all the kids in the neighborhood, to save their money for a trip downtown. That was something everyone looked forward to.

Rochester, New York in the mid1960s was very typical of cities across America at the time: Burgeoning suburbs surrounding a thriving central business district. Malls hadn’t quite popped into the mainstream of suburbia yet. So if you wanted to do any department store or boutique/specialty store shopping, downtown was still the place to be. And it was an exciting place!

So on the day of the big city trip, all the kids gathered at our house on Greenfield Road around 10:00 a.m. This usually included my brother and I, and up to 5 of our friends. Maybe it would be correct to call them suburban kids but unlike my brother and I who spent most of our lives within the city limits till then, they had grown up in a town full of cornfields. In other words, they were bumkins. Going downtown was as foreign to them as going to a different country.

The bus ride downtown was a big deal. As I’ve described in other posts, Ridge Road was a main highway running east and west across New York State on the ridge that formed as the shoreline of the ancient Glacial Lake Iroquois (now Lake Ontario) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridge_Road_(Western_New_York). It serves as the hub of commercial activity in the Town of Greece. Greenfield Road, along with a dozen other roads in the area runs north down off the ridge perpendicular to it, several terminating at West Ridge School. To catch the bus on Ridge Road, we would have to hike up the slightly steep incline that was the top of Greenfield Road, to get there. So on those days, my grandmother led the neighborhood kids up the hill to the bus stop. When the bus came, my grandmother got on first to say hello to the bus driver, Clarence. They were first-name friends because she rode the line so often. First, when she traveled to Greenfield Road when my parents first moved there, and later traveling downtown from Greenfield Road, after my parents divorced, my mother had her first mental breakdown (more on that in a future post), and she and my grandfather moved in. All the boys stepped up the stairs and deposited their nickel. Yes. That’s right. All it cost to ride down Ridge Road on the bus was 5 cents in the mid-1960s. One by one we said, “Transfer please.” We would need the transfer ticket to ride a second bus the rest of the way Downtown.

Clarence dropped us off at the stop on the corner of Ridge Road and Lake Avenue. Right on the corner, there was Lee’s Coffee Shop. My mom was friends with Lee, whom she got to know taking the bus downtown every weekday to her job at a law firm in the Times Square Building. My grandmother piled us into Lee’s at sat us at the counter for a steaming cup of hot chocolate. We were really feeling big-time now.

Soon the Lake Avenue/State Street bus arrived and on we went handing the driver our transfer slips. That bus ride up Lake Avenue made us feel different. We felt important somehow. It was a transformational experience for the countrified boys from Greece.

When we pulled up to the corner of Main Street and Clinton Avenue, we truly had arrived. In our minds, might as well be arriving at a Hollywood premiere. Our hearts were pounding.

In the area around Main and Clinton, there were a number of small shops next to the flagship store of Sibley, Lindsay, and Curr, or just Sibley’s. We hit them all then walked through Sibley’s, mainly for my grandmother, who loved the store. It was a gorgeous old-time department store, complete with a beautiful ornately painted and decorated ceiling in their stately sixth-floor restaurant. It was the epitome of downtown elegance in those days. My grandmother had taken us there for lunch before but today she had a different plan. So after she toured the various departments with us following respectfully. She rewarded us with a stop at their in-store bakery department where we each got one of their famous chocolate chip cookies. It was big, not too thick, not too thin, just right, and crispy, and in all my years, the best chocolate chip cookie I’ve ever had.

After Sibley’s, we crossed Main Street and went into the main entrance of Midtown Plaza. Midtown was the first downtown mall constructed in America, opening in 1962. To us kids, it was a wonderland. There were anchor department stores of course, but also plenty of boutiques and sports stores for us to spend our nickels, dimes, and quarters. There was the famous clock of the world that went off on the hour representing countries of the world. My grandmother was always proud to see the Holland entry. After they tore down the mall in 2007, the clock lived on at the Rochester International Airport, where it remains on display today.

Then came the cherry on the top: Lunch at Club 25. It was over on State Street and my grandmother knew one of the longtime waitresses there. We might as well have been the Rat Pack at the Sands. Club 25 was swanky cool and most likely a place where local mobsters went after hours. Red leather booths and a dark atmosphere, it was the ultimate of cool for us suburban kids. Nothing beat a barbecue beef open-faced sandwich with fries and a cherry Coke. We were badass. My grandmother was the queen of the pack. After lunch and after our hot fudge sundaes, she led us to the bus stop to catch the bus north to Ridge Road, where we would transfer onto Clarence’s bus heading west out Ridge Road, to our stop at the top of Greenfield Road.