Residents respond to project plans
With much anticipation for this long overdue project, residents are excited about potential investment but still unsure if the city will follow through with these plans. Here’s what they had to say about the plans. (Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.)
Josie McClary, President of the 19th Ward Community Association, says, “I’ve been on Chili Avenue for 19 years, but I lived in the 19th ward for about 24, 25 years now. I drive past there to go to work and to come home, and it’s been...truly an eyesore. So to know that they are planning and developing, I would like to say, something that you would typically see in the suburbs right here in the city of Rochester, I think it’s wonderful. Once [there are] more meetings, the public is more informed and they get comfortable on hearing and seeing the plans that’s going to take place, I think they will warm up to the idea.”
Mary Venturelli, a delegate of the 19th Ward’s District 8 and nurse navigator at Lipson Cancer Institute on the corner of Genesee Street and Chili Avenue, shares similar sentiments as McClary. “I’ve been on Chili Avenue now for 20 years, but I grew up in the 19th ward. It kind of sounded like people were feeling that we’re segregating them again, but I think the way the roadways are, it’s actually connecting the three close neighborhoods-probably four, including Plymouth Avenue, to each other by opening up that space as opposed to creating those barriers that were once there and structural barriers, hopefully not personal barriers.”