Recognizing the strengths of their combined assets, the East, Upper East, and Alexander Street Associations formed a joint marketing committee in 2009 and immediately conceived of the East End Bridge/Banner Project!

Click on the WHEC video link to the upper left below: East End Association President Jerry Serafine captures the essence of the project!

For Rochester residents East End and Upper East End mean fun. At the Eastman School of Music you get almost daily doses of world-class live music, much of it free. The Little Theatre offers five screens of independent and foreign films. Walking from one end of the neighborhood to the other you'll pass dozens of restaurants, cafes, and nightspots. The area also enjoys a 24/7 living environment with a cache of new apartments, townhouses, and chic loft-style units.

Live there, work there, play there.... click the links in the box to your upper left to learn how.

And then there are the two major East End Festivals: the now "historic", East End Festival itself and the Xerox International Jazz Festival. During the spring and summer the neighborhood streets are closed to traffic, stages are set up, and the area rocks, bops, and sways....

In 2009 the volunteer business, entertainment, and institutional leaders of the East End and Upper East/Alexander Associations voted to form the East End Marketing Committee with the goal of cooperating on joint initiatives that reflected the dynamism of their mixed-use, "Live, Work, & Play" community.

Running along the historically prestigious, East Avenue "spine" from Alexander to Main Street, the neighborhood also encompasses prominent and popular entertainment, residential, and commercial enterprises on several side streets.

Visit their website: http://www.RochestersEastEnd.com.

The "modern" East End's history began roughly two decades ago with the maturation of the Little Theatre art film venue and the launching of the East End Festivals. Bolstering those entrepreneurial efforts were pioneering retail outlets - several of which remain today as neighborhood stalwarts.

Subsequently, in the 1990s and early 2000s an entertainment scene exploded in the neighborhood, with a wide variety of dining cuisines and late night music and entertainment venues pumping new life into the architecturally stunning buildings. Drawn to the increasingly 24/7 scene, new residents poured into the neighborhood, at first renting units in newly built and renovated buildings and, more recently, purchasing homes in "The Sagamore on East" and the adjacent, long-established Grove Place neighborhood.

Further propelling these efforts was a unique combination of private sector developers and entrepreneurs, the progressive Cultural Commission, and a variety of municipal partners.

Bisected by a submerged state highway, separate business associations emerged on either side of the Inner Loop. However, recognizing that their customers, residents, and the wider community continued to view their enterprises as synergistic, the leaders of the East End and Upper East/Alexander Associations voted to form the East End Marketing Committee in 2009. Their desire to cooperate on joint initiatives reflects the dynamism of their mixed-use, "Live, Work, & Play" community.

The 2010 art and beautification Bridge-Banner project, their first effort in this regard, is a privately funded venture underwritten by generous sponsors of the neighborhood, with the donation of infrastructure resources by the City of Rochester. By visually linking the neighborhoods with the world-class, visual artistry of Walter Colley, the Bridge-Banner symbolically and literally ties together the East End community with a Rochester standard - the finest in photography.

Subsequently, the Marketing committee teamed with RDDC, City Blue Imaging, and the Philipson Group to create a "Welcome to Downtown" packet that has been distributed to all 600 ESL employees in the Rochester region. Highlighted by innumerable discounts, special deals, and coupons, the packet displayed the wide variety of offering in the neighborhood to ESL employees as they moved into their new downtown headquarters in March 2010.

Rochester's East End mixed-use, "Live, Work, & Play" community dramatically caps the northern end of New York State's historic Route 96. Beginning at the Susquehanna River in Owego, New York, Route 96 enjoys a stop in free-flowing Ithaca; rolls pastorally between the Seneca and Cayuga Finger Lakes; pays homage to Seneca Falls - the home of the Women's Rights Movement; cuts through the fast-growing towns of Victor and Pittsford; and then speeds through miles of mansions on its way toward downtown Rochester.

The East End has been enjoyed as a regional hub for generations courtesy of the George Eastman House, the Rochester Museum and Science Center, the Eastman Theatre, and, at its northern-most point, the Sibley Complex.

Running along the East Avenue "spine" from Alexander to Main Street, the neighborhood also encompasses prominent and popular entertainment, residential, and commercial enterprises on several side streets.