Update: On Friday morning, the city of Rochester released details of its plan for temporary street closures on Saturday nights in the East End. This story has been updated to reflect details of that plan.
The city of Rochester plans to restrict who can go to the East and Alexander entertainment district after a series of shootings there.
Officials announced details of the plan Friday morning. The city will be closing a portion of East Avenue and Alexander Street, as well as four other streets within the boundaries. People under 21 will not be allowed within the district. The boundaries will be in effect from 10 p.m. Saturday to 3 a.m. Sunday, beginning Sept. 28.
There will be four entryways where security will check photo identification, at the intersections of East Avenue and Alexander Street, Chapman Alley and Alexander Street, East Avenue and South Union Street, and Lawrence and Charlotte streets.
The effort was first announced during a news conference Thursday, in which Mayor Malik Evans also touted a decrease in gun violence reduction he attributed to the city’s Gun Violence State of Emergency. The decline also mirrors a nationwide drop in murders and violent crime.
During that news conference, Evans and Police Chief David Smith offered few details on how it would be implemented.
“We will have an increase in officers and security personnel, and access to the area will be restricted to those 21 and over only,” Smith said.
Several shootings have been reported in the East End in the past year, the most recent being a 23-year-old man shot early Sunday morning in the area around Alexander Street.
That tactic is enabled through the state of emergency, which grants the mayor unique powers to address areas and properties which have repeatedly attracted gun violence. But in the past, enforcement has largely been focused on specific locations cited by the city as hot spots for gun crime, not entire districts. For example, the mayor has in the past used the state of emergency to shut down a makeshift nightclub on Hollenbeck Street known as Da Garage, and several bars linked to shootings in the city.
Despite that, Evans emphasized shootings are overall down from a pandemic era spike. Between Sept. 23, 2023, and this past Sept. 23, there have been 212 shootings in Rochester. That is less than half the peak number of 429, which occurred between March 15, 2021 and March 15, 2022 during the pandemic.
“One key milestone we've had since we've initiated the state of emergency has been to bring gun violence back to pre-pandemic levels,” Evans said.
While sharing this progress, Evans also stressed the need for improvement, stating he was “not satisfied by these numbers.”
Evans and his team stated previously announced efforts they have implemented to reduce violence on the streets such as the shuttering of nuisance nightlife venues and providing services for the community’s youth population.
