I thought that Rochester went to $hit because of Kodak.
Kodak was the only thing holding the city together. I left there around 1972. My brother worked at Kodak from the time he got discharged from the Army in 1968, until he died in 1995. He and his wife had bought a house a couple of blocks from where we grew up. The house is right across the street from the grammar school we all went to. That was turned into senior citizen apartments sometime after my brother moved to Colvin Street. By the time my brother died, that whole section of the city had turned bad. It only continued to extend into the other parts of Rochester, and eventually spread out to the suburbs.
After my brother died, my sister-in-law had the opportunity to move into her family home in Ontario, NY after her mother had passed. She asked me if she should go, and I told her to go while she was still able to make the move. If she waited too long, she'd be stuck there the rest of her life. She did make the move, and when my niece got married, and had kids, she and her husband moved into the house across from my sister-in-law. They both work in Rochester, and have to make the drive every day, and the areas they work in are bad. My niece runs one of the labs at Rochester General, and her husband works for City Rec Department, and he's supervises a rec center in a bad area from 12-8 p.m. every day. The only redeeming factor for him, is that he will be able to retire in a few more years.
Irondequoit and Greece were two of the better, and pricier suburbs. Pittsford has always been a ritzy suburb too. There was a beautiful two story shopping mall in Irondequoit. It opened in 1990 with 103 original stores. One of my sisters was living in Irondequoit at the time, and I went to the mall whenever I went to visit her. I can't remember the last year I went there, but I was only one of just a few white people in the mall. Lots of black teens in groups hanging out, inside and in the front of the mall. By 2000, the mall was barely profitable. It was sold in 2001 to an insurance company. By 2009, it had closed completely.
The same sister who had lived in Irondequoit, had gone to Bath, NY for a while before returning to the Rochester area. When she came back, she took an apartment in Greece, in the same complex she had lived in probably 40 years before. She based her decision on the way the place had been all those years later. She stayed the year, until her lease was up, and moved, because the complex had turned into a welfare haven.