Next year could be a big year for the city’s long talked-about redevelopment of Bull's Head on the city’s west side.
This is the former commercial district near where West Main Street splits into Chili and West avenues. Today it totals about 12 acres of vacant land.
On the list of what’s to come:
- A significant realignment of some side streets should be under construction come spring and be complete by fall 2027.
- Building of a Bull's Head Empowerment Center, something of a workforce development hub, also should get underway next year. USC Builds, a local development partner that has been working on the Bull's Head project the past four years, is among the construction firms planning to have their offices there, along with a job training program and childcare center.
- Plans are being solidified with Rochester Cornerstone Group to develop 16 for-sale, single-family houses.
“We're also in conversation on a substantial affordable, multifamily development,” said Melissa Suchodolski, president of USC Builds.
The apartments could total more than 100 mixed-income and affordable units, she said, and could be fast-tracked to get under construction at the same time as the houses.
Other commercial buildings and cleanup of an old dry cleaner property also are in the works, unlocking another development parcel. City Council could vote later this month to approve $78,000 in additional funding for environmental investigation and cleanup of 42 York St. and 845-855 West Main St., bringing the total authorization to $838,000.
A new ESL Federal Credit Union branch recently opened.
Bull's Head has been called “the western gateway” to the city. It is also a neighborhood, strained by years of disinvestment.
Getting to this point of redevelopment has taken decades. And after so many starts and stops, there was a healthy amount of skepticism that this time would carry through to becoming reality.
“There were community meetings at the St Mary's campus in the ’90s about Bull's Head, and trying to make development happen,” Suchodolski said.
She grew up in the neighborhood, and could often be found as a kid at her father’s ice cream shop on Thurston Road. That connection, she thinks, has mattered. So has being active in the community, building in the community.
“For me, it's returning home,” she said, “and I think that level of concern and care has translated, and we've been working on building trust, and we and I take that very seriously. ... I will not make a promise I cannot keep. I may not give you all the answers, because I'm working on it, because I really want to hold that integrity to heart and make sure that I'm not misleading or, you know, being incorrect in a way that would break trust.”
That can be tricky given the fluid nature of real estate.
Escalating construction prices forced developers to scale back the Bull's Head Empowerment Center building from four stories to two, and possibly just one story to ensure affordability for a largely nonprofit tenant base.
"What we're trying to do is create a construction workforce development ecosystem that (is) industry driven, and has job outcomes as the priority,” Suchodolski said.
Housing, too.
Cornerstone only got involved in the partnership about four or five months ago. The company is currently preparing to break ground on 14 single-family and attached townhouses in the JOSANA neighborhood on the other side of Interstate 490. That would be its largest homeownership project to date – until Bull's Head, if things come together.
Where JOSANA is an in-fill, or scattered-site project, Bull's Head would be clustered along one of the newly re-aligned streets on the north side of West Main.
“There’s still some key decisions we have to make over there,” Brandt said during a recent appearance on WXXI’s Connections with Evan Dawson. But he described Bull's Head as “a little bit more of a clean palette, where you're kind of creating a neighborhood center right in the middle of a traditional neighborhood.”
