Every spring the check came. Then the light moved on.
This is the twenty-third profile in The City That…, a series about American cities that invented an industry, led the world in it, and then watched the center move on. We tell their stories plainly and with affection — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
The Founding: A Shop in the Arcade
Rochester began with flour. Mills crowded the falls of the Genesee River, and for years the place was simply the Flour City.
Rochester’s optics trade began small, in 1853, in a shop in the Reynolds Arcade. John Jacob Bausch, a German immigrant optician, opened it and waited, and almost nobody came. A cabinetmaker named Henry Lomb lodged with the Bausch family and turned over his earnings to keep them going. The shop held on and became Bausch & Lomb.
Others followed. In 1880 a bank bookkeeper named George Eastman rented a third floor on State Street and began making photographic dry plates. That year William Walker opened a camera business on Exchange Street, and in 1883 Bausch & Lomb added photographic lenses. The lens on Eastman’s first Kodak camera, in 1888, was probably theirs, the optical historian Rudolf Kingslake judged.
The trade grew the way a family grows, by leaving home. Ernst Gundlach left Bausch & Lomb in 1878 and soon set up for himself practically next door. A Bausch & Lomb foreman and his brother founded Wollensak in 1899; two of the firm’s shutter designers started what became Ilex in 1910. By Kingslake’s count, Bausch & Lomb was making some 20 million spectacle lenses a year by 1903.
The First World War cut the country off from German optics. A decade later, with a grant from Kodak and Bausch & Lomb, the University of Rochester opened the Institute of Optics, which calls itself the country’s first optics program.
The Height: Rochester Optics and the March Check
By the mid-1960s Kodak Park ran four miles along the city’s north side. Twenty thousand people worked there, in 140 manufacturing buildings on 1,300 acres, making film, paper, processing chemicals and some four thousand other chemicals besides. Across town Haloid, a photographic-paper firm founded in 1906, spent $12.5 million on one copying machine, more than it had earned in all of the 1950s. The 914, as the 650-pound machine was called, made the company Xerox. In 1980, by one economist’s count, Kodak, Xerox and Bausch & Lomb employed 74,000 people in the Rochester area, about 17 percent of its jobs. Kodak’s Rochester payroll peaked two years later at 60,400.
What people remember is the check.
Kodak paid its first wage dividend in 1912, a profit share figured on a worker’s pay and declared at the company’s discretion. In time it came every spring, most years in March. Jack Germond, then at the Times-Union, remembered the furniture stores’ big sales and the new cars. Everybody was rich, he said, and nobody wanted to rock the boat. Then he finished the thought: nobody wanted to hear about the ones who weren’t rich.
Kodak’s assistant treasurer, Marion Folsom, worked on an unemployment plan several Rochester companies adopted in 1931, and in 1935 he sat on the President’s advisory council on economic security, whose work fed into Social Security. By the 1950s, the University of Rochester’s archives record, the city had been dubbed Smugtown, for the comfort that came with prosperity and peaceful labor relations. In 1957 a newspaperman, Curt Gerling, put the word on a book cover.
Many of the ones who weren’t rich were Black. Constance Mitchell recalled applications to Kodak, Bausch & Lomb or Xerox going into File 13, the wastebasket; David Gantt remembered that most Black workers got into Kodak behind a broom. In July 1964 the city came apart for three days. Five people died in the end, four of them as a result of a helicopter crash. Out of it came FIGHT, led by Minister Franklin Florence and organized with Saul Alinsky’s help. In December 1966 a Kodak officer signed an agreement with FIGHT on jobs and training; the company backed away, Florence took the dispute to Kodak’s shareholder meeting in New Jersey, and in June 1967 the two sides reached terms.
The Turn: Built Here
Xerox was the first of the giants to move its headquarters, to Connecticut in 1969, though its plants and laboratories stayed in Webster. In 1974 Kingslake, surveying the city’s camera and lens makers, wrote that the optical center of America had left Rochester and spread out between Boston and Los Angeles.
In December 1975 a Kodak engineer finished a camera that recorded a picture without film; a plaque for it went up at Kodak Center on West Ridge Road in 2022. The company’s story of that camera belongs to The Brand That Taught America to See. For the city, one fact matters. It was made in the Rochester area, on Kodak’s payroll, by the company whose film it would help replace.
By the end of 1996, years before film sales began to fall, Kodak’s Rochester payroll was already down to about 34,000. After 2000 film sales fell away. In January 2004 Kodak announced the year’s wage dividend four days after it said it would cut 4,000 to 5,000 Rochester jobs. Between 2000 and 2010 Xerox cut half its local positions and Bausch & Lomb about a third, and the three payrolls shrank by some 25,000, a figure its compiler said overstates the loss, since some sold divisions stayed with their people.
Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012. In 2013 Bausch & Lomb’s new owner announced it would move the headquarters to New Jersey, ending 160 years in Rochester.
Some of this, I think, Rochester did to itself. I can’t prove it; no ledger shows comfort closing a plant. But comfort is what the record shows, from Smugtown to the spring check, and comfort is slow to go looking for the next thing. Nobody wanted the boat rocked, Germond said. The people who rocked it anyway, Florence and FIGHT among them, were the ones the comfort had left outside.
What Was Lost: The Yellow Boxes
Kodak’s Rochester payroll fell from that peak to about 1,300. The city’s losses ran longer. It counted 332,488 people in 1950 and fewer than 242,000 by 1980, two years before Kodak’s peak, so most of its decline came before the company’s fall. By 2020 the count was 211,328.
Some of the loss was underground. In February 1987 Kodak Park spilled about 5,100 gallons of methylene chloride, a solvent basic to making film. In December 1988 a corroded pipe leaked solvent about 500 feet from Public School 41, 10,000 gallons by Kodak’s first report and more by later accounts, and 1,300 gallons ran untreated into the Genesee. In 1990 Kodak pleaded guilty to two state misdemeanors over incidents in 1986 and 1987 and paid $2.15 million. In 2013 the Associated Press described the contamination under the park as the most extensive ever found in the Rochester area. In bankruptcy Kodak put $49 million into a cleanup trust, and the state agreed to cover the next $50 million.
In 1989, with neighbors suing, a Kodak spokesman told the New York Times why people were surprised. Kodak had never been thought of as a chemical company, he said. “We just made the yellow boxes.”
What Remains: Shops from Shops
Whether Rochester fell depends on which numbers you trust. In 1997, after Kodak had shed 26,000 local jobs, a research group found no clear link between the cuts and the region’s total income, which kept rising in the dollars of the day. In 2019 an economist counted about 8,500 jobs at Kodak and the firms that grew out of it or bought its divisions, by what he called a somewhat arbitrary rule. The university Eastman left most of his estate to is now the region’s largest employer, with 38,565 people on one 2025 list; Kodak, Xerox in Webster and Bausch & Lomb each count between 1,100 and 1,300. To me those are the numbers of a region that bent. They leave out the workers. The 1997 study said it was hard to learn what became of the people Kodak let go, and I have found nothing that answers it.
The craft kept splitting. The industry counts more than 150 optics, photonics and imaging companies in the Finger Lakes region, with about 19,000 jobs. Stefan Sydor, a longtime Kodak optician who had worked on the 200-inch mirror for California’s Palomar Observatory, started his own shop in 1964 at fifty, mostly on Kodak work. His son James remembered him working all day and all night, home in the morning for coffee before driving the boy to school. “Companies like Kodak and Bausch & Lomb are no longer grinding glass,” James said in 2007. “I never thought that would happen, but it did.” In 2026 the family broke ground on a new plant near the airport.
Eastman’s ashes lie just inside the old main gate of Kodak Park, beneath a stone in a sunken plaza ringed with trees. Downtown, over the doors of the theatre he built, are the words Rush Rhees chose for it: For the enrichment of community life. On Goodman Street, Bausch & Lomb’s contact-lens lines still run. Out by the airport the Sydors are building. The glass is still ground in Rochester, and the light still bends through it on its way to someone’s eye.
Rochester bent the light, and that is worth remembering.
Why Rochester? For most of the twentieth century one mid-sized city held the country’s dominant film maker, a leading lens maker, the company that put the copier in the office, and a pioneering school of optics. Light was its trade.
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Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he uses AI tools for research, editing, and occasional image creation; the arguments, the voice, and the final judgment are his. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live at Water Tower Residences, where they co-host the Chicago Salons.