NEWS
IN THE LOOP
Can Biden’s infrastructure vision bury the Inner Loop for good? City Hall hopes so.
The Inner Loop was completed in 1965 and was intended to move motorists in and out of the city quickly, but it has since been compared to a “concrete moat.” PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE
City officials have three words for the Inner Loop: Fill. It. In. But some neighbors are wary they’ll be left out of the process. BY JAMES BROWN
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@JAMESBROWNTV
orman Jones is old enough to remember the Inner Loop being built more than half a century ago. “I have a clear memory of that machinery,” Jones said. “When you’re 4, 5, 6 years old, and you see big trucks and the excavators, you go, ‘Wow.’ When you see it all moved around, you just thought it was the coolest thing, and probably everyone else thought it was the coolest thing.” 12 CITY JUNE 2021
JBROWN@WXXI.ORG
The 63-year-old commissioner of the city Department of Environmental Services keeps two outsized frames hanging on the wall of the agency’s conference room at City Hall that act as his guides when he considers the future of the sunken expressway. One frame holds a collage of photos detailing the housing and retail developments that have shot up on the eastern edge of downtown on the filled-in portion of the Inner Loop. In the other
is an annexation map of Rochester from 1950, before the expressway cut a circular path around downtown that separated neighborhoods from the city core like a concrete moat. The latter reflects the Rochester that Jones knew only briefly as a young boy — and the one he wants back. Now, he and other city officials hope they can get it back, with President Biden looking to spend an unprecedented $2.3 trillion on infrastructure that emphasizes
not only moving people and goods around more quickly, but correcting what have come to be seen as transportation mistakes of yesteryear. “Too often, past transportation investments divided communities . . . or it left out the people most in need of affordable transportation options,” read a White House fact sheet outlining the Biden administration’s intentions, dubbed the American Jobs Plan. “The president’s plan,” the fact
