Moving to Rochester in 2013

Nellie Eldridge Dossenbach
(Photo courtesy Lynn Charles)

My great-grandmother, Nellie Eldridge Dossenbach, takes credit for bringing me to Rochester.  As well she should.

It was five and a half years ago, on a hot summer day, in July of 2013.  I was 55 years old, the age when one is ready for a change, a new lease in life, as they say, a fresh start.   I had been teaching English at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, for nearly twenty years, and now I wanted to write something, something that others will want to read.  And then it hit me.  The Big Idea.  It hit me.  And I said out loud, “You dope!  You need to go to Rochester!”

It was an instant realization.  How right this was.  I would move to Rochester, New York, where I would research and eventually write a book about my relatives, the Dossenbachs, who had lived there, who had been locally famous, but whose names had fallen out of current memory.

I wanted to walk where they walked, see what they saw.

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Two weeks later, I was off, once more driving the 6-hour stretch of Massachusetts Turnpike and New York Thruway that I’d driven twice-yearly, for 35 years, to visit my parents (in Waterloo, New York, 45 minutes from Rochester), and that I’d thought was behind me, both parents having passed away.  But this time I sped past the Waterloo exit, which felt strange and exciting.

Approaching the city of Rochester, on 490, just passing the Goodman Street Exit, suddenly the skies grew dark, the rain poured heavily, and lightning flashed directly ahead.  It was magnificent and other-worldly.  

Everything felt Big.  And Significant.

And then, almost as soon as the storm began, it ended, and the late afternoon revealed itself as sunny and vibrant, with shiny roads and sidewalks and signs.

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The next day, and it was time to find an apartment.  I had five addresses to look at — three potential apartments and two historical addresses where my great-grandparents had once lived.

I looked at the first two apartments, wasn’t sure, they weren’t quite right.  But the third one, well, this one had sounded the best, but I couldn’t find it.  Annoyed.  I had the number wrong, or perhaps the street.  What to do?  

9 Rowley Street -- the photo I took on that
July 2013 day

Move on.  So I looked for the two historical addresses.  First was 28 Upton Park, the Theodore and Nellie Dossenbach homestead for the first two decades of the 20th century.  Theodore, Nellie’s husband, my great-grandfather, had founded the Rochester Park Band in 1904, but had died in 1924, at the prime of his career, leaving Nellie widowed. 

And then the second address — 9 Rowley Street, where Nellie Dossenbach had gone to live in the late 1930s and early 1940s, after she quarreled with her daughter, my grandmother, Adeline, and moved out of Adeline’s home.  9 Rowley Street was still there, an unaltered, pretty, bright yellow house, with a wide front porch on a tree-lined street.  

I gazed at these places.  Took photos.   Ooh’ed and aah’ed, imagined the Dossenbachs there, walking out the front door and up the sidewalk.  And then, not knowing what else to do, I went back to the hotel room to find the correct address on Craigslist for that third apartment.  

Pulling out the printed listing, looking closely to get it right, it said, 9 Rowley Street.

What?  It can’t be.  I peered more closely.  It couldn’t be.  That was Nellie’s house, the house I had just looked at.  I verified the printed City Directory from 1942, which showed that 9 Rowley Street was where Nellie had lived.  This couldn’t be!  

1942 Rochester City Directory

But it was.  I called the landlord.  And then I remember the next scene as if in slow motion — he and I walking up the driveway to see the back apartment, he talking about the private back porch and my two parking spots, me wide-eyed and mumbling something about this being my great-grandmother’s house.

Slow motion.  We stand on the back steps.  He inserts the key into the lock and opens the door which enters into the kitchen, with a view into the living room.  And it was exactly — exactly! — as how I’d already pictured my new place.  Golden hardwood floors, white walls with architectural details, windows with lace curtains.

9 Rowley Street -- The view from the back door,
(of course, after I'd moved in)

In a daze, I took the apartment.  And this is how I came to live where Nellie had once lived, over 70 years earlier.

Of course, Nellie takes credit for bringing me here.  As well she should.  She, who had more to fear than the others from how the story would be told.  

9 Rowley Street - Lace curtains in the living room