It’s April and Rochester, our close neighbor to the east, offers the perfect place to celebrate the end of our long winter with flowers, fun, and photos.
This is a city with an officially designated Neighborhood of Play highlighted by the Strong National Museum of Play and world class parks and flower gardens. Rochester is also known as Flower City.
May brings the 127th annual Rochester Lilac Festival to Highland Park. The 10-day festival is considered the largest free festival of its kind in North America. The park boasts 1,200 lilac bushes as well as other spring flowers. The festival celebrates the arrival of spring with ten days of lilacs, live music, art, food, a parade, a run, and family friendly fun.
The city has received many accolades as a most child and family friendly city.
There is one man who put Rochester on the world stage and created or greatly influenced many of the city’s top rated cultural attractions. It was George Eastman, founder of the city’s most famous industry, Eastman Kodak.
Eastman, Rochester’s favorite son, had a passion for flowers and designed the extensive gardens at his East Avenue mansion. He moved into his grand 50-room house (now the George Eastman Museum) in 1905 and lived there until his death in 1932. It was in this garden in 1928 that he and Thomas Edison introduced the world to color motion picture film invented in the nearby Kodak plant.
The house was designed for entertaining and comfort and was filled with gadgets including an elevator, 21 telephones, and a garage with its own car wash. The paintings on the walls are mostly copies and the originals are hanging in the nearby Memorial Art Gallery because the gallery’s air conditions are better for the valuable art works.
Be sure to stop in the second floor Discovery Room and check out the various family friendly craft projects.
After leaving school at age 13 to support his family, Eastman spent hours at his mother’s kitchen table experimenting with glass camera plates to develop an improved photographic system. He was bothered by the cumbersomeness of the early photographic process that required that glass plates be exposed in the camera while wet and development had to be completed before the emulsion dried.
“The bulk of the paraphernalia worried me. It seemed that one ought to be able to carry less than a pack-horse load,” he once said.
By 1888, he had his first camera on the market—the “No. 1 Kodak.”
Ten years later he was a millionaire. During the next two decades, Eastman consistently reduced the price of cameras; the simplest Brownies sold for $1, so every family could afford a camera. On the 50th anniversary of the company, Kodak gave every 12-year-old child in the country a camera.
The George Eastman Museum is the world’s oldest photography museum with a collection of several million objects and is a longtime leader in film preservation and photographic conservation. This year the museum is celebrating the 75th anniversary with a new exhibition exploring the history of photography.
When Margaret Woodbury Strong died in 1969, she was the largest single Kodak stockholder. She left her amazing collections with more than 300,000 objects and most of her more than $77 million estate to establish a museum. The Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum opened in 1982. It boasts what is considered the world’s most comprehensive doll collection.
From the beginning, it was a museum like none other and over the years the innovative museum, interactive exhibits, and collections have greatly expanded. Now it is the most popular year-round indoor attraction in Upstate New York with more than 700,000 visitors annually.
In the summer of 2023, the new $75 million, 90,000 square foot expansion formally opened. The world’s only museum devoted solely to play; it is the centerpiece of the city’s all new Neighborhood of Play. Across the street is the 100-room Hampton Inn & Suites that opened shortly after the museum expansion. It offers family friendly accommodations including canine members. An overnight at the Hampton Inn allows families to totally immerse themselves in the museum and other nearby museums and attractions.
Though Rochester is an easy day trip from Buffalo, an overnight at the Hampton Inn offers a relaxed fun adventure for the whole family. There are two-day tickets for The Strong, as well as half-price tickets for Friday evenings. It is open daily with late closing at 8pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Spend some time at the museum and then take a short walk to the hotel for a swim in the indoor pool, a meal, or a nap, and then return for more exciting discoveries.
The Strong is very much a museum for all ages and interests from an historic carousel to a high ropes course, to butterflies, to video games galore. It is the place for children and adults alike to come to touch, explore, and play.
The new outdoor 17,000 square foot Hasbro Game Park, a colorful play area, was developed with funding from Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, whose family founded toy giant Hasbro in 1923.
“This is an incredible magic kingdom and the greatest repository of play in the world today,” Hassenfeld said at the expansion opening ceremonies.
Back inside, Wegmans Super Kids Market remains one of the museum’s most popular exhibits. Kids run the store. They cruise the aisles and fill their grocery cart with real looking food products. Then they scan barcoded products at working check-out counters. At the expanded toddler area, little ones can pick, count, sort, and weigh organic veggies; crawl through a raised hoop house; and sit under the apple tree.
Climb the dramatic National Toy Hall of Fame exhibit staircase and view a gallery of 21 portraits of classic toys, some that move and interact with guests. Inductees in the Hall of Fame include the Yo-Yo, Erector Set, Etch A Sketch, Frisbee, G.I. Joe, Hula Hoop, Jacks, Monopoly, Raggedy Ann, Silly Putty, Slinky, Teddy Bear, Top, American Girl dolls, alphabet blocks, and View-Master. Every year, new toys are inducted into the Hall of Fame and the public is invited to nominate toys.
Next stop is the Rochester Museum and Science Center, filled with hands-on educational fun for the entire family. Everyone is invited to explore science and technology, the natural environment, and the region’s cultural heritage. There are special shows for children in the adjoining Strasenburgh Planetarium.
There are more than 1.2 million collection objects, as well Live Science demonstrations and Planetarium Star Shows.
Any LEGO fans in the family? Be sure to visit Sean Kenney’s Animal Super Powers on temporary exhibit through April 27. Immerse yourself in the world of Sean Kenney’s amazing animal sculptures made of LEGO bricks. Walk through a display of larger-than-life-sized creatures built brick-by-brick while learning about their unique super powers.
Living beside the Great Lakes water has played a critical role in the development of our species, our communities, our ecosystem, and our economies. The Wonders of Water exhibit allows visitors to:
- Dive into a multimedia exploration of Lake Ontario’s shipwrecks. Learn what life was like for sailors aboard the USS Scourge and discover why the 19th century ship sank.
- Pretend you’re an underwater archaeologist and explore a shipwreck or relax in the Quiet Quarters.
- Manipulate a Remotely Operated Vehicle to investigate the HMS Ontario, the oldest shipwreck on the Great Lakes.
- Check out a climbing structure to discover aquatic species living at various depths and emerge with a birds-eye view of the shipwrecks below.
The museum’s newest permanent exhibition tells the stories of the culture of Haudenosaunee Native Americans throughout the region. It is called Continuity Innovation Resilience. You’ll pass through a building which depicts the partial interior of a Longhouse located south of what is now Rochester in the Appalachian Plateau around 1400.
Visitors also view works of contemporary Native American artists and learn their stories. Members of local clans tell their stories of life on reservations or life outside the reservation.
At The Western Door tells the story of the more than 400 years of cooperation and conflict between Native Iroquois residents and the Europeans who came here as explorers, traders, and, eventually, settlers.
Be sure to stop in the Electricity Theater where visitors are mesmerized by zaps of lightning. How Things Work offers fun, hands-on investigations into how mechanisms such as light switches, thermostats and traffic signals work.
Travel Tip of the Month: For information on Rochester call 585-279-8300 or go to visitrochester.com. For the Lilac Festival visit roclilacfest.com. It runs from May 9-18. There are free guided walking tours and more than 120 musical performances. For Hampton Inn & Suites Rochester Downtown call 585-450-3801 or visit Hilton.com. A free hot buffet breakfast is included in overnight stays.
Deborah Williams lives in Holland, NY and is a veteran travel writer whose work has appeared in national and international publications. She is the recipient of the Society of American Travel Writers’ Lowell Thomas Gold Travel Writing Award.