Phase I Environmental Site Assessment in Rochester, NY

Industrial and Commercial Heritage

Rochester was chartered as a city in 1834, a decade after the Erie Canal aqueduct over the Genesee River turned the village of Rochesterville into America's first boomtown, and by 1838 it milled more flour than anywhere else in the country. When the wheat trade moved west, commercial nurseries, shoemaking, and men's garment houses such as Hickey Freeman, Bond Clothing, Fashion Park, and Stein-Bloch took its place, and then a generation of technology firms made the city a manufacturing center: Bausch & Lomb from 1861, Eastman Kodak from 1892, the Haloid Company that became Xerox in 1906, the Gleason Works, Stromberg-Carlson, Taylor Instrument, Symington Gould's rail car works, the Cunningham automobile works, and General Motors' Rochester Products Division. The Vacuum Oil Company refined petroleum on the Genesee's west bank, Rochester Gas & Electric operated manufactured gas plants and the Beebee Station coal plant on the river, and the drained Erie Canal bed carried the Rochester subway from 1927 to 1956. The city peaked above 332,000 residents in 1950 and lost more than a third of its population as those plants downsized, leaving a dense inventory of vacant, partially demolished, and underused industrial parcels through the Lake Avenue, Lyell-Otis, Marketview Heights, Plymouth-Exchange, and Upper Falls districts that drives Phase I ESA recommendations today.

Current Environmental Profile

Rochester carries an unusually deep regulatory record for a mid-sized city. The former Vacuum Oil Refinery site — a 33-acre petroleum legacy on the Genesee's west bank in the Plymouth-Exchange neighborhood, now in the NYSDEC Brownfield Cleanup Program with Exxon Mobil as corporate successor — is the city's most visible cleanup, while Eastman Business Park, the 1,200-acre former Kodak Park campus at 1669 Lake Avenue, runs under RCRA corrective action supported by a $49 million environmental trust Kodak funded to NYSDEC in 2014. Rochester Gas & Electric's manufactured gas plant properties are State Superfund sites, and the lower Genesee River and the 35-square-mile Rochester Embayment of Lake Ontario were a designated Great Lakes Area of Concern until their 2025 delisting. Soil and groundwater concerns commonly include chlorinated solvents from photographic, optical, and precision machining operations, silver and heavy metals from film and plating processes, manufactured gas plant coal tar and BTEX, petroleum hydrocarbons and dense underground storage tank inventories, foundry sand, slag, cinder, and demolition fill, PCBs along transformer and rail corridors, and uncontrolled urban fill in the abandoned canal and subway bed. Sediment expectations apply along the Genesee River, Irondequoit Creek and Bay, and the Lake Ontario shoreline, and vapor intrusion screening is routinely required where former industrial parcels are repositioned for residential, student housing, or community-facing reuse.

Real Estate and Development Market

Rochester pairs an anchor institution economy built on the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the region's optics, imaging, and photonics cluster with a deep inventory of convertible mill, loft, and industrial building stock. Current activity centers on ROC the Riverway along the Genesee, the completed Inner Loop East infill that opened roughly six acres and more than 500 mixed-income housing units, the $225 million Inner Loop North Transformation Project that will reclaim some 22 acres of downtown-adjacent land, Eastman Business Park and its Project Forward reindustrialization, remediation and riverfront park conversion at the former Vacuum Oil refinery site, Sibley Square, Tower280 at Midtown, Innovation Square in the former Xerox tower, the High Falls district and the state park planned around the falls, and the Port of Rochester and Charlotte waterfront. New York State BCP tax credits, NYSDEC remediation funding, Restore NY, Empire State Development incentives, and County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency support make Rochester one of the more economically workable brownfield markets in Upstate New York. Lenders, attorneys, and developers active in Rochester, Brighton, Irondequoit, Greece, Gates, Chili, Henrietta, Pittsford, Penfield, Webster, and Fairport rely on ASTM E1527-21 Phase I deliverables that hold up under NYSDEC review.

Local Regulators, Authorities, and Stakeholders

Environmental work in Rochester is coordinated through the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) Region 8 office at 6274 East Avon-Lima Road in Avon, the Division of Environmental Remediation (DER), the New York State Department of Health and the Monroe County Department of Public Health for vapor intrusion and exposure review, and the federal EPA Region 2 office for Superfund matters. Closure is delivered under the Brownfield Cleanup Program (BCP), the Voluntary Cleanup Program (VCP), or the State Superfund Program. Key local stakeholders include the City of Rochester Department of Neighborhood and Business Development, the City Planning Commission and Zoning Board of Appeals, the Rochester Land Bank Corporation, the County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency, the Monroe County Department of Environmental Services, the Monroe County Water Authority, Greater Rochester Enterprise, and the Genesee Transportation Council. Sites in the Genesee River, Erie Canal, and Irondequoit Creek corridors often require additional water quality, floodplain, and Lake Ontario shoreline coordination. Resource Renewal's Mount Holly HQ team works fluently across the NYSDEC BCP framework alongside our NJ and PA practice.

Why This Local Context Matters for Your Project

Rochester is a uniquely layered environmental market — a canal-era milling and manufacturing base, a century of photographic chemistry, optics, and precision machining that left chlorinated solvent and heavy metal signatures across the city, manufactured gas plant coal tar and Vacuum Oil-era petroleum along the Genesee, uncontrolled fill in the abandoned canal and subway bed, Rochester Embayment and lower Genesee sediment expectations, and steady regulatory attention from NYSDEC Region 8. Resource Renewal delivers Phase I ESA and follow-on investigation, remediation, and brownfield support that is anchored in NYSDEC BCP practice, Upstate New York experience, and the kind of locally informed judgment that keeps Rochester projects moving on schedule.