Our friend and local business woman Donna DeClemente has suggested that the Eyes on the Future community connect with Branding Rochester — another group of Rochester thought leaders working to
get more people actively engaged in thinking about how to make Rochester a better place to live, work and visit and how to better promote Rochester to the world.
The Branding Rochester event was sponsored by the Harvard Business School Club of Rochester and held on May 24, but the discussion continues on the Branding Rochester blog. And there are some tough questions and intriguing ideas being discussed there.
For example, RIT graduate and now Philadelphia resident John Sherlock offers an extended comparison of the problems and efforts in both cities and then asks (and answers) himself:
Okay, smart guy - if you think your ideas are so great, what would you do for Rochester?
The answer is elemental. Water.
Between Lake Ontario, The Genesee River and the Erie Canal, you could make Rochester the Intercoastal Waterway of the north. Your BIG IDEA will be a combination of the Baltimore Inner harbor, combined with the San Antonio Riverwalk and a centerpiece Arts Complex for music, dance and theater designed by the hottest architect in the world — all centered in High Falls. It has to be so ambitious that everyone will be talking about it. It will mean changing the very infrastructure of downtown. And everyone has to buy into it. It would bring shopping, dining and hotels into the city. The rest of the good things (and population) would naturally follow.
And after noting her view of some of our problems, long-time Rochester real estate entrepreneur Judy Columbus suggests two ways to make Rochester a "Destination City":
- create a National Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame; and
- develop a World Class Intergenerational Camp.
Are there common threads in these ideas? What can we build on at our Eyes on the Future event? How can the two groups work together? Are there others out there?
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