565

The eye adjusts; the landscape, after all, is only that which is there to be seen.

The day after the whole of 565 Monroe had gone save a hole in the earth and some rubble of brick and stone, I looked up Monroe and saw - only the Avenue, only that morning's Monroe waiting to be walked, talked and lived upon.

The landscape was what it was - and seeing all of Blockbuster and the Rite Aid at the rear of the lot north of Goodman seemed natural enough though it hadn't been possible only days before.

The Past is found in photo files or conjured with an effort in the mind's eye of the imagination but the landscape of today is what the eye really does see.

A building had been there, I had to remind myself. The north end of the block between Amherst and Goodman still occupied at its southern end by the remnant Monroe Theatre had, formerly, been anchored by a three story sprawl of dark brown, fudge brown brick. Its bulk hid all but the front quarter of Blockbuster and, from some angles, all of Rite Aid. 565 Monroe, the south-west corner of the Avenue and Goodman St., a principal Rochester intersection; one of those points like Twelve Corners or Clinton and Goodman around which people can orient themselves.

"Ah, yah! Now I know where yeh talkin' 'bout!"

As its unoccupied space is, today, ignored by the street traffic and joggers that pass it by, 565 standing had ever been a largely unremarked Monroe landmark. Another one-shade-or-other-of-brown brick structure of two or three stories; another of that odd assortment of low, ugly buidlings channeling traffic from the high-rise, skyscraping Magic Mountain of midtown, downtown Rochester out toward green Cobb's Hill, flat, tree obscured Brighton and on to canal town Pittsford.

As 565 was in process of going down, the after-midnight counter clerk at Rite Aid bagged my purchases and expressed her pleasure, grinning near giddiness,

"Now they jus' godda gid'on and do that Show World next, that Theater - that eye sore!"

A Caterpillar shovel had earlier that day begun the demolition, the third floor, southwest corner of 565 stood clawed away. Still discernible 'rooms' were exposed to moonlight, displayed by their missing outer walls and with roof beams shattered and left hanging out in mid-air shoved slightly out of line.

On the street, a slightly swaying and bleary if steady eyed local woman expressed her sour pleasure when she caught me contemplating the ruin.

"Nuthin' but bad drugs," she recalled 565. "Good they're gittin' rid of it!"

At one time, too, I had heard it rumored that the phone bank on the corner in front of 565 was a stand or stroll for young male prostitutes. 565 had long been in bad repute. But, of late and for the most part, tghe repute had been less raffish or evil than simply seedy and, finally, pathetic. It had been a place, at the end, that had gathered the halt and the hazy, injured and directionless folk with few other places to go.

With the wreckers about to move in, a Monroe bum took up residence in the abandoned building's recessed entry sleeping soundly amid the trash that had drifted in there even as the Avenue reveled and rioted through weekend afterhours and cop overheads flashed endlessly over his boot soles.

No one exactly was going to miss 565 Monroe as it waited to be further demolished and it went down attended by few mourners. Some stood along the streets opposite its corner on the Monday morning the Caterpillars crawled about and groped and grappled its walls down to the ground - but even some of those who watched were only waiting for buses, after all.

No one was going to miss 565 and, when it ws gone, the eye adjusted to the its absence.

Nevertheless.

Two blocks further along Goodman, just this side of the Expressway overpass, there is, on the south side of the street, a space along the top of the off ramp up from 490. It is a shady spot that is neither sidewalk, though there is pavement, nor someone's lawn, thought here is grass and embedded flowers. Monroe bums, overcome with a rare case of ambition, will go there to lounge between importuning drivrs caught up on the ramp by the red light for change. The space is unnamed, undedicated and undefinable but in it there is a sign board that does explain some things. On its street side it bares the logo of the Lock 66 neighborhood - a canal barge and Jenny of the Towpath Era for when the 490 expressway was the old Erie Canal and a lock here abouts lifted barges on their way downtown. The logo is surrounded by the names of the streets and places that are the Lock 66. For any one who bothers to stop and walk around to view the other side of the board, the local association has written a legend there defining the neighborhood and giving something of its history and with it something of the history of Monroe Avenue.

"Though still resembling the Monroe Avenue of 50 or 75 years ago, it has passed through several incarnations, from a street of small mom and pop shops - tailors, shoe stores, groceries (including the first Wegmans) - toan eclectic and lively mix of boutiques, bookstores, antique shops, hair salons, craft shops, ethnic restaurants, and bistros."

The heart of that bourgeois, Mom and Pop Monroe may well have been the block between Amherst and Goodman when Show World was the bijou Monroe Threater with its marquee of colored lights glittering beneath of towering leaves of the summer trees down at the end of Cornell Street and inviting people to gather out of their living rooms and off their porches to indulge themselves in Hollywood and air conditioning. 565, then, had been a good address with its high stoop and second and third floor hall ending balcony porches. Urban living had other tempos and tastes then than it has now and has had since.

Today's Monroe may in some way resemble the avenue of five or, perhaps, it was, ten years ago but already it has passed through still mre incarnations than the legend would have it. The book stores are all but gone and our bistros, with exceptions, are more kid bars than they are that. Here and there, more than in the past, too, the 'modern' stamp of chain enfranchisement in a sleekness and neon of familiar corporate logos becomes more and more the character of the neighborhood. Rite Aid, they say, will move to the Avenue in 565's place - one more building of a banal business world modernity purposely bland and preternaturally facelifted and botoxed to be forever ageless before its has begun.

So, perhaps, it is worth noting the passing of 565 - now nothing more than a hole in the ground and some piled up rubble waiting to be removed.

There may, after all, come a tipping point when the eye will no longer adjust so easily and the landscape one sees will no longer be Monroe.

Posted August 13, 2008.