Third Ward Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Tucked into the inner southwest corner of Rochester and cut off from downtown by Interstate 490, this seven-block residential district holds about 126 buildings and ten vacant lots. Most are brick houses, ranging from heavy Greek Revival "temples" to flamboyant late Victorian villas, with some early twentieth-century apartment buildings. Only a few mid-twentieth-century buildings intrude. From roughly 1830 to 1880 the Third Ward was the city's choicest residential neighborhood, set apart from the business district by the Erie Canal. Its homes reflect Rochester's mid-nineteenth-century economy: millers Hervey Ely and Benjamin Campbell built grand Greek Revival houses, and lumber merchants, a mayor and a telegraph pioneer also lived here. Leonard Jerome, grandfather of Winston Churchill, lived in the ward in the 1840s. After decay in the early twentieth century, urban renewal and a landmarks foundation that rehabilitated demonstration houses revived the area as a multi-income neighborhood.