The little city that could ( maybe )

The Grey Lady pays ROCHESTER a visit.
above the fold, front page!

Despite Long Slide by Kodak, Company Town Avoids Decay

Its very rare to hear people talking about the past here, not like Atlanta at all.( or maybe that is not like the South at all ). Where as my real hometown exploded up and out, my adopted one turned very much inward, seeming at times to be almost in mourning for something- just out of the corner of your eye, something they just cant talk about, Miss Havisham of a town. This area must have just been freaking Shang-ra-la in the 40's, 50's and 60's. Generations of full employment to a MOST benevolent of companies. A chicken in every pot and a pony ride for all the kiddies.

ROCHESTER — In what was once the ultimate company town, virtually everyone has a trove of bright Kodak moments.They were plucked from the personal memories immortalized on the film made here, the bountiful jobs that allowed children to follow their parents into Kodak’s secure embrace, the seemingly endless largess that once allowed the company’s founder, George Eastman, to provide dental care at little or no cost to every child in town.Now, with Eastman Kodak’s stock price below $1 and talk of bankruptcy inescapable, people here are pondering a thought as unimaginable as New Orleans without the French Quarter or New York without the Yankees — Rochester after the calamitous fall of the company Eastman founded in 1880. It feels like the wrenching culmination of a slide over decades, during which Kodak’s employment in Rochester plummeted from 62,000 in the 1980s to less than 7,000 now. Still, for this city in western New York, the picture that emerges, like a predigital photograph coming to life in a darkroom, is not a simple tale of Rust Belt decay.
Rochester has been a job-growth leader in the state in recent years. In 1980, total employment in the Rochester metropolitan area was 414,400. In 2010, it was 503,200. New businesses have been seeded by Kodak’s skilled work force, a reminder that a corporation’s fall can leave behind not just scars but also things to build upon. ( THE REST )

One just jaw dropping fact from the story : "Rochester’s troubles go beyond Kodak. Xerox and Bausch & Lomb have shed thousands of jobs as well. Twenty-five years ago, the three companies employed 60 percent of Rochester’s work force. Today, it is 6 percent." Other American cities/areas have lost industries... South Carolina's fabric industry, or steel in the mid west, but I can't think of anything this localized, at all.

But the point of the article is that Rochester is NOT Detroit or any of the hard core rust belt towns, its done the best with what it has... a very ROCHESTAIRAN sort of world view.