The Grandest Playground (1400–1860) Before the arrival of European
colonists, the
Onödowáʼga built a village in what is now Edgerton. The residents erected a number of large
burial mounds made of sand and clay on the site. Two trails ran north-south through the village, granting people easy access to launching sites for
canoes bound for Lake Ontario. that once dominated Edgerton's landscape.|leftIn the late 1700s, the first European colonists built cabins and homes near the village. Over the next five decades, these buildings evolved into a settlement known as McCrackenville, which eventually consisted of a
paper mill, a
flour mill, a furniture factory, a
tannery, and a brewery. Rochester began to slowly creep north until it fully incorporated the industries and land of McCrackenville in the 1850s, placing what is now Edgerton in what was then the last of the City's nine wards; shortly thereafter, the northern half of the neighborhood was placed into a new Tenth Ward. Edgerton acquired two of its most important geographic and social features during this pre-annexation era. The first was the
Erie Canal, the completion of which in 1825 gave Edgerton both its western border and easy access to "The Nation's First Superhighway." The second feature was the
Western House of Refuge, built on the east side of the canal in the late 1840s. This first state-run
prison for children in the United States, which used a method of
juvenile reform built on
corporal punishment and
penal labor, would become the center of the area's architectural and social landscape. The hydropower on the neighborhood's east side, the shipping lanes of the Erie Canal on the neighborhood's west, and the open space throughout Edgerton attracted new distilleries, mills, and factories. As businesspeople in the pre-automobile era looked to live near their businesses, Edgerton quickly became filled with the city's
new money elite, as the leaders of
Kodak,
Bausch & Lomb,
Hickey Freeman, and the
Chamber of commerce all came to call Edgerton home.
A Stronghold of Good Government (1860–1915) By the 1860s, the geographic concentration (and relatively even distribution) of economic power in Edgerton translated into a distinct, neighborhood-based social and political culture. This was largely thanks to Rochester's highly decentralized government structure, which operated as something close to a
ward republic. In Rochester, all wards were neighborhoods, and there were no neighborhoods outside of wards. Neighbors joined through drill corps, parade teams, and other ward-based social organizations to rally for and elect ward-based school commissioners,
aldermen, and county
supervisors. . In Rochester, poor wards scrapped for basic improvements to their neighborhoods, while the few built-out, "old money" wards focused on cementing their economic advantages while occasionally working to "rescue" the poor from themselves. Edgertonians in both wards fought hard for improvements to their own neighborhood, but did so in ways that ensured these beyond-the-basics advantages – like accessible
Urban parks, extensive
public transit, antimachine politics, and cutting-edge educational reforms – were distributed across the city. As a result, residents like
feminist polymath Helen Barrett Montgomery,
progressive preacher
Clarence Augustus Barbour, and
pacifist teetotaler Clinton Norman Howard became "the most active civic reformers" not just in Edgerton, but in Rochester as a whole. The power of these "Good Government" reformers, channeled and magnified through institutions like the ward structure and the neighborhood's religious and business organizations, not only brought a "new vitality to Rochester," but "enriched the lives of a whole generation." It drew
Frederick Law Olmsted in to redesign Jones Square Park while create Lower Falls Park. The prison was replaced physically by what would be known as Edgerton Park, named for the mayor who purchased the land on which it was built. By the 1910s, the 40-acre park contained Rochester's premiere exhibition grounds, first public library, and first
municipal museum. On an institutional level, the House was replaced by
Vocational schools that were "the first of [their] kind in the country" and a local branch of the
YMCA. These advances, as one resident wrote, proved Edgerton was a "stronghold of good government."
The Heart of the City (1915–1960) The post-war building boom on the east side of Rochester and in suburbs like
Gates,
Greece, and
Irondequoit caused an exodus of middle- and upper-class families from the Ninth and Tenth wards. The pricier nature of these newer homes and builders' use of racially restrictive covenants meant that the suburban frontier was inaccessible to the growing Italian lower middle-class in Rochester. Unwilling or unable to enter the existing Italian neighborhoods of the city's east side, these families streamed into Edgerton, leading it to be called one of Rochester's "Italian
ghettos." By the 1930s, Edgerton was almost exclusively Italian-American (with one in four residents being foreign-born, typically from
Southern Italy), making the neighborhood "Rochester's claim to a Little Italy." Unlike their forebears who were forced to move into resource-deprived slums, newcomers in Edgerton benefited immensely from the institutional frameworks earlier Ninth and Tenth Warders had left behind. This included the Republican ward establishment, which elected the first Italian-American in Rochester's history in 1915, sent the first Italian-American to the city legislature in 1925, and made Edgerton the "foothold" for Italian-American politics. And unlike the Black and Asian immigrants who would come after them, the Italians of Edgerton were supported by a wealthy institution that poured resources and power into the neighborhood: the Roman Catholic Church. After bringing to Edgerton the first Italian Catholic church in Rochester, St. Anthony of Padua, the Holy See brought established institutions like the
Holy Rosary church, rectory, school, and convent, a
Carmelite monastery, a
Sisters of St. Joseph convent, and a
Knights of Malta temple. Edgerton Park was home to the
Rochester Cardinals of the
International Hockey League, the
Rochester Jeffersons of the
National Football League, and the
Rochester Royals of the
National Basketball Association, who won the
1951 NBA Finals at the 4,000 seat
Edgerton Park Arena. Unsurprisingly, when Rochester built its light rail system in the 1930s, seven of the nine main stops west of the Genesee River were in Edgerton. Despite its status as a "cradle of culture" in the early-to-mid 20th century, it was during this time that Rochesterians began to develop stereotypes about the neighborhood that have persisted into the present. Unlike the outmigrants before them, who left behind a durable, growing infrastructure, Edgertonians who moved out in the mid-20th century pulled up the ladder behind them. With white suburbanites embracing the automobile over metropolitan public transit, the city removed streetcars from Edgerton in the 1940s and the subway at the end of the 1950s. The crowds that once sustained the vast cultural infrastructure of Edgerton Park dried up, as Ninth and Tenth Warders on their own never made up the majority of attendees at the park's events. In 1961, a group of neighbors in the Ninth and Tenth wards organized a "community" that they called "Lake Avenue-Edgerton." This, "one of the city's oldest neighborhood groups," was led by a "community council," whose mission was "to meddle into everybody's business insofar as it affects his neighbors and the good of the neighborhood." The council was quickly recognized by the city government and upheld as a model of the voluntary, neighborhood-based alternative to the "bulldoze[r]" approach of government-directed
urban renewal. What became the Edgerton Area Neighborhood Association did its best to mirror the old Republican ward officials in combating the "declining neighborhood" narrative and spurring government investment. In the Association's early days, residents effectively bound together by their old ward identities had real success, obtaining over $11 million (roughly $30 million in 2022 dollars) in local and state investment for better housing and streets. And in the late 1970s, those same neighbors launched a community-driven nonprofit called Neighborhood Housing Services to combat
redlining and slumlords by educating homeowners, financing home repairs, enforcing code violations, and opening a
tool library. Soon, however, the cost of losing the ward system became clear. Seeing the successes of revitalization in Edgerton, city politicians largely unaccountable to Edgertonians chose to redirect the resources invested in the neighborhood to "more worthy" locations. Neighborhood Housing Services, an agency Edgertonians believed was theirs, followed the money and moved out. By the end of the decade. local newspapers marked the end of the Edgerton "renaissance," declaring the neighborhood "rundown and unpopular." Unable to wield power over elected politicians, Edgertonians appealed to officials who responded even to the most disorganized of property owners: police officers. Edgerton leaders, believing their problems could "only be solved by police protection," called to focus their neighborhood association's efforts on the "eradication" of crime in Edgerton. Rather than seeing the "villains" of the neighborhood as the institutions that had abandoned them, Edgertonians came to believe the roots of their problems were unemployed people, the mentally ill, and sex workers. The Edgerton Area Neighborhood Association, lacking the political power to do much more, worked almost exclusively through partnerships with the Rochester Police Department to take a "[c]ivil rights be damned" approach to addressing social problems in Edgerton. As social disinvestment continued, working class Black and Brown people came to find Edgerton's combination of low rents and parks attractive. Just as white Rochesterians used racial stereotypes to blame Ninth and Tenth Ward crime on lower class Italians, Edgerton's Italian-Americans explicitly blamed the neighborhood's woes on the "disconcerting" phenomenon of "more black families [m]oving onto her street." "We've seen changes of all our foreigners," one resident told a local newspaper. "Colored, Puerto Rican, German – too many of them at one time." To justify their change of heart, Edgertonians began embracing revisionist history; they claimed that, when the neighborhood was "tru[ly] Italian," it was "without a whisper of filth and crime."
A Colony, Isolated and Invisible (1990–present) By the 1990s, most white Edgertonians had left or were too old to do so. Just as their forebears had brought a diverse, international character to Edgerton in the early 1900s, the new Edgertonians did the same. Black and Latino intracity migrants were followed by a wave of Asian immigrants from Bhutan, Myanmar, and Nepal. And like the Italian-Americans before them, these new Edgertonians reimbued the neighborhood with vitality through distinct economic and social institutions like
Black churches, Asian markets, Dominican
hair salons, and
soul food restaurants. Most importantly, in place of a powerful ward system that gives the area social and political cohesiveness, there is a city government that has no Edgertonian as an elected official. Edgerton's neighborhood association, unlike those of most Rochester neighborhoods, lacks enough structure to maintain a website; it continues to focus on police-based neighborhood revitalization. The strongest institution in modern day Edgerton is not city government, religious institutions, or community organizations. Instead, it is a network of landlords who dominate a local
property base that is almost exclusively residential. A 2021 study revealed that the overwhelming majority of these landlords were either
slumlords or "amateurs" who "barely maintain and do not invest in their properties." The same study found that half of all rental properties in neighborhoods like Edgerton had one or more outstanding code violations, suggesting that landlords inflict extensive
property degradation on the neighborhood. A 2018 study found that the majority of homes in Edgerton were purchased with cash, indicating a low rate of
occupant-owned properties. In a representative subsection of the neighborhood east of Edgerton Park, at least 85% of housing units were owned by individuals or companies from outside of Rochester. Many rental properties in Edgerton are owned by out-of-state landlords, including property management companies located in places like Canada and Mexico. Few of the facts about Edgerton's remarkable diversity, unique socio-political groundwork, or the roots of its problems are reported on by Rochester's local media system. If Rochesterians hear about Edgerton, it is typically through a story about a shooting, home invasion, or other crimes occurring in the neighborhood. What "positive" stories exist either focus on combatting neighborhood violence, reminiscing about the neighborhood's past, or are written by one of Rochester's few Black-owned media outlets. This silence is echoed by Rochester's government, which rarely mentions Edgerton or targets its streets for the innovative social programs that often are generated by local politicians. A colony is, by definition, a territory subject to a form of foreign rule. In Edgerton, extractive, out-of-state landlords, corporate business establishments, and unaccountable, non-native politicians govern the neighborhood. Like many other colonies that have defined the Americas, the governing institutions are predominantly white, while the resident population is predominantly Black and Brown. But unlike many of these colonies, which were recognized as such during their existences, Edgerton is not. Indeed, Edgerton is, as one resident put it, so invisible it is called, "The Bermuda Triangle of Rochester." == People ==