Listen to narration by a local historian

Emily Morry

Historical Researcher, City of Rochester

This article on the 7th Ward is the first of four Retrofitting Rochester articles discussing the Rochester riots of 1964.The second installment, detailing the riot’s outbreak, will appear next week. 

Joseph Avenue, the heart of the 7th Ward, was originally called St. Joseph Street when it was laid out in the 1830s.  Since then, the thoroughfare and its surrounding neighborhood have witnessed a series of demographic transformations that attest to the area’s dynamism. 

Irish and German immigrants initially populated this northeast district.  Over the course of the nineteenth century, these pioneering groups were succeeded by Italians, southern and eastern Europeans, and Jews.  The latter group’s petitioning efforts resulted in the street’s name change in 1900. 

The southeast corner of Joseph Avenue and Vienna Street, pictured here, now houses the parking lot of the Antioch Baptist Church, but in the first half of the twentieth century, the block, much like the rest of Joseph Avenue, featured an array of mom and pop shops catering to the diverse needs of the local multiethnic community. 

Seen here in the 1950s, the block contained a pharmacy, a variety store and a bakery.  Nearby businesses peddled shoes, furniture, clothing and dairy products. 

But if the popular thoroughfare was bustling and lively, it was also somewhat congested.  Because the 7th Ward had historically received the city’s most recent, and often poorest, immigrants, multiple families habitually took up residence in single-family homes or apartments on Joseph Avenue and its surrounding streets. 

The frequent turnover and overuse of these cramped residential spaces accelerated their deterioration.  Consequently, a considerable amount of the vibrant neighborhood’s housing was already dilapidated by the time African-American migrants arrived in the postwar era. 

Part of the Second Great Migration that saw 5 million black southerners relocating to northern and western cities between 1940 and 1970, over 16,000 African Americans came to Rochester in the 1950s alone.  The majority of these migrants found themselves overwhelmingly concentrated in the 7th Ward and Corn Hill because the de facto segregation then in place prohibited them from living elsewhere. 

Seeking to capitalize on these migrants’ lack of alternative options, many landlords in the 7th Ward further subdivided houses and apartments to accommodate more tenants while neglecting building repairs and safety codes in order to maximize profits. 

Newly arrived African Americans ended up paying higher rents than had their immigrant predecessors for smaller living spaces with minimal amenities and often unsanitary conditions. 

Compounding these difficulties, 7th Ward blacks at mid-century, unlike their white neighbors, were either shut out from, or ineligible for, most jobs at many of Rochester’s biggest employers. 

Despite the racial injustices they faced in their new city, African Americans in the near northeast neighborhood had mainly positive relations with the inhabitants of their multiethnic community in the 1950s and early 1960s. 

As New York State Assemblyman David Gantt recalled in 2006, “there were Jews in the neighborhood, there were blacks in the neighborhood, there were Italians in the neighborhood, there were Irish in the neighborhood.  But you know what?  None of us looked at color as such.” 

Pianist Gap Mangione concurred, adding, “there was really an idea of taking care of each other, you know, we looked out for each other.” 

It thus proved a surprise to many in the community when, in July 1964, a confrontation with police three blocks below this stretch of Joseph Avenue launched a chain of events that would once again alter the face of their neighborhood.