A new summer festival known as Flower Fest will help mark the 50th anniversary of an iconic symbol of Rochester.
The one-day event is planned for June 6 on the Pont de Rennes bridge in the High Falls District. The festival will boast a market for artists selling city mark-adorned wares, a continuous airing of a documentary on the origin and history of the mark, and a city mark-themed drone show. The festival will be organized by Bella Events Group through a $100,000 contract with the city, to be voted on this month by the Rochester City Council. Bella is also the organizer for the Roc Holiday Village and the city’s Pride Festival and parade.
Editor’s Note: The documentary produced on the city mark is a collaboration between the city of Rochester and WXXI Public Media.
The Rochester Contemporary Arts Center also will host a special section of its annual 6x6 exhibition focused exclusively on the mark. And a new mural featuring the mark is planned to be painted near the ice-skating rink at Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park.
“People use that word ‘unique’ flippantly all the time, but the mark is truly unique,” said Joe Alessi, special events manager for the city. “No other city, and I mean, no other city that we're aware of has something that people are tattooing on their body.”
The mark is a five-petaled symbol meant to represent both a waterwheel and a flower, a homage to Rochester’s dual homonyms: its past life as the Flour City, and its current as the Flower City. The symbol was designed by the city’s first graphic designer Lee Green in 1976 under the Nixon-era Federal Design Improvement Program.
That program sought to create new iconography around the country’s agencies and departments. Likely most well-known of the symbols created in that era is NASA’s “worm” logo, a minimalist red text of the agency’s acronym featuring its two middle letters interconnected.
But cities across the country also engaged in the program, designing new modernist logos to represent their city. Most have fallen into antiquity, with Rochester being one of the few whose mark has taken a life of its own, if not the only city. It can be found on everything from T-shirts to graffiti art, flags to ink tattooed into skin.
The Flower Fest plans to feature tattoo artists on the bridge among its artisans.
“I want to know, when we started seeing tattoos, when people really began to associate themselves with it, and not just as a city mark,” said Barbara Pierce, communications and special events director for the city. “If you're out in a Florida beach somewhere, and somebody sees that mark, it’s like, ‘Hey, Rochester!’ It's like the Bills logo, and you're yelling, ‘Go Bills.’”
The symbol is a registered trademark of the city of Rochester, and the city has legally challenged people who have used it without their consent. Pierce said the city tries to keep the cost to use the symbol low. For commercial use, rights to the symbol cost $100 per year. For non-profits, it’s $50 per year.
“It's pretty much nothing in the scheme of trademarks,” she said.
The Flower Fest is another step in a series of actions taken by the city to capitalize on the mark. Last year, the city moved to change its official flag — a tri-colored yellow, white and blue banner featuring the coat of arms of Nathaniel Rochester and a crane at its center—with a blue flag with a Flower City mark.
That news came as a bit of a surprise to many Rochesterians. The official flag, designed in 1934, was rarely displayed publicly and relatively unknown. Meanwhile, the Flower City mark had already served as the official symbol on city vehicles and buildings for years.
“I've gotten calls in my five years here from other cities wanting to know what we do with our mark, how it works, all of that stuff,” Pierce said. “Because other cities see real value in the pride that we generate out of that mark.”
