Page 6A Sunday, June 8, 2014

DemocratandChronicle.com

ROCNews

Keep walking, Assemblyman Gantt, I mowed your lawn

As a homeowner, there
are days I want to throw
in the towel just like
David Gantt, the longtime Democratic state
assemblyman from
Rochester.
One of them was last
week, when I returned
from a vacation to a
smattering of knee-high
dandelions on an overgrown lawn and a village
of Fairport tax bill in the
mail.
I wanted to tell Mother Nature and the taxman to stuff it, like Gantt
did at a house of his in his
legislative district. Instead, I fired up the lawn
mower, filed the tax bill
where I wouldnt forget it
and daydreamed of walking away from it all.
By the looks of it,
Gantt walked away from
489 Central Park sometime around his ninth
term in office. Seven
elections later, to call the
house an eyesore would
be an insult to the broken
light fixtures over my
garage that my wife tells
me are eyesores.
The house is a fullblown blight, with graffiti, busted windows,
boarded-up doors and a
lawn like a cornfield. No
one has lived there for
years, but a Keystone
drinker appears to frequent the porch.
Its a disgrace to a
neighborhood that has
more than its fair share
of blight and whose residents have helped keep
Gantt employed in Albany for 31 years.
How did it get so bad?
To hear Gantt and the
homeowner next door tell
it, he couldnt stay ahead
of the vandals.
Every time Id do
work on the home, theyd
break in, Gantt told me,

Dave
Andreatta
COLUMNIST
DANDREATTA@DemocratandChronicle.com

estimating he sank upward of $20,000 into the

house. You want to keep
losing money?
That new furnace?
Gone. New plumbing?
They tore the copper
pipes right out of the
walls. They even took the
water meter. The driveway he resealed was a
catwalk to ruin.
Selling the place
wasnt an option, he said,
because he couldnt even
give it away.
I said to the city,
Take the house. Ill give
it to you, Gantt recalled. They didnt want
it.
Eventually, Gantt did
what deadbeat landlords
who want to get rid of
their bad investments do.
He stopped paying the
property taxes.
Two weeks ago, the
city that didnt want the
house took it through a
tax foreclosure.
Its sad because I
know he worked hard at
it, said Maxsene Hanks,
the homeowner next
door. You dont give up
on your kids, but this is a
property thats sucking
you dry. What are you
going to do?
I dont know. But I
have to believe the answer lies somewhere
between throwing good
money after bad and
throwing your hands up
and walking away.
Taking care of what
belongs to you, and to
your neighbor when need
be, is how communities
keep from falling apart.

Democrat and Chronicle columnist Dave Andreatta mows the front lawn of a house at 489 Central Park that used to be
owned by State Assemblyman David Gantt and now belongs to the city of Rochester on Thursday. CARLOS
ORTIZ/@CFORTIZ_DANDC/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Enough people walk

away like Gantt and
there goes the neighborhood.
Maybe its easy for me
to say stay and fight
because the worst vandal
on my street is a Westie
whose owner follows her
around with a baggie.
After snowstorms, one
of my neighbors snow
blows her driveway then
chugs her way to the
next. When a guy hired to
fell an old locust tree out
front of the house across

the street walked away

from the job, neighbors
showed up with chainsaws and wheelbarrows.
They do these things
because they recognize
that not only is their
property their problem,
but so too is the health of
their neighbors property.
Now that Gantt
dumped his carcass of a
house on the city, his
mess is our problem. I
say our problem because a healthy city is
vital to all of us.

Overburdened city
taxpayers will pay for
whatever the city does
with the house refurbish it, sell it or, more
likely, demolish it.
In the meantime, since
our problem is my problem, I figured Id do my
part and relieve Gantts
constituents on Central
Park of some of the
blight he left behind.
So, on Thursday, I
fired up my lawn mower
for the second time last
week and cut his corn-

field of a lawn.
And all the while, I
daydreamed of walking
away from it all.

D&C
GO DEEPER
ON DIGITAL
Go to DemocratandChronicle
.com to see a video of David
Andreatta mowing the lawn.

A dubious award for Rochester:

Parking crater champion
Gary McLendon
Staff writer

In what appears to be a
true Cinderella story,
Rochester has overcome
larger, more glamorous
cities to win the heralded 2014 Parking Madness title.
The winning designation which was reached

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by the submission of online votes at the Streets

Blog USA website indicates the Flower City has
the worst downtown parking crater in the country.
Parking craters are
areas where the proliferation of parking lots make
downtown look like a lunar landscape.
Rochester routed Jacksonville, Fla., 611 to 165 in
the finals of the college
basketball-style singleelimination tournament.
Rochester advanced to
the finals after outlasting
Miami (447 to 47), then
Detroit (301 to 251) and
Kansas City (328 to 271) to
triumph over 15 of the
worlds worst parking
craters; making the victory less of a triumph and
more like a cry for help.
I get a lot of people
asking me, Why are you

were Atlanta, Calgary, Alberta, Chicago, Dallas,

Denver, El Cerrito, Calif.,
Grand Rapids, Mich.,
Newark, N.J., Portland,
Ore., Salt Lake City, and
St. Louis.
It appears a local online uprising led to Rochesters win.
It used to be a real
neighborhood. It used to
be a downtown, wrote
Matthew Denker, about
Rochesters
downtown
parking.
There was a beautiful
park there that got cut in
half by a highway. Theres
nothing to even drive to
anymore. Theres a four
point intersection (at
Pleasant and Franklin
streets) with nothing on
the corners.
And an aerial photograph on the website
roughly identifies the
boundaries of Americas

It used to be a real
neighborhood. It used to be a
downtown. There was a
beautiful park there that got cut
in half by a highway.
MATTHEW DENKER
promoting this? said
Mike Governale, in a display of the winning comments on the website. Governale, who writes at
Rochester Subway and
leads the local advocacy
group Reconnect Rochester, noted that it doesnt
present a very positive
image of the city.
But I see this as a tool.
I think we can use this going forward, get more
people involved. We can
go to our policy makers
and say, Is this the image
you want out there? Because if its not, we need to
plan a little bit better.
Also in the field of 16
North American cities

greatest downtown parking crater as North Chestnut Street, Main Street,

North Clinton Avenue and
the Inner Loop.
Streets Blog USA covers federal transportation
and land use policy, and
surface
transportation
trends from around the
country.
The website and tournament are the creation of
Angie Schmitt, a newspaper reporter-turned planner/advocate in Cleveland.
GMCLENDN@Gannett.com