Genesee River High Falls Rochester
— the city the river cut straight through.
Not only on a wall.
“A 96-foot waterfall in the middle of downtown Rochester, where the Genesee River drops off the Erie shelf before turning north for Lake Ontario. The falls powered the flour mills that gave the city its first name. The Pont de Rennes pedestrian bridge crosses the gorge just below the brink, the public view, the one the postcards have always shown.
Genesee River High Falls Rochester, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
High Falls is the second of three drops on the lower Genesee River, falling 96 feet from a sandstone ledge in the middle of downtown Rochester. The Genesee runs 157 miles north from Pennsylvania to Lake Ontario, cutting through the city in a deep gorge. The falls are crossed just below the brink by the Pont de Rennes pedestrian bridge, restored from the 1891 Platt Street Bridge. The High Falls neighborhood, including Brown's Race, the old raceway, and the Triphammer Forge, is a designated city historic district.
The Genesee carries the runoff of roughly 2,500 square miles of upstate New York, peaking in spring and after heavy autumn rains. The 96-foot drop at High Falls was harnessed beginning in 1816 by raceway canals that powered more than twenty flour mills along Brown's Race; Rochester was known as the Flour City through the 1840s. The mills are gone, but the water still falls. The river is dam-regulated upstream at Mount Morris, so the flow in summer can run lower than the spring volume the early millers counted on.
The classic view is from the Pont de Rennes, an 858-foot pedestrian bridge open year-round at the foot of Brown's Race. The Genesee Riverway Trail runs along both rims of the gorge from downtown to Lake Ontario, about seven miles end to end. Parking is on Commercial Street. The falls are illuminated after dark on summer weekends and during festivals. Spring runoff is the dramatic season; autumn brings the gorge walls into colour. The High Falls Center exhibits the milling history at the south end of the bridge.