Brooks Crossing Apartments

Brooks Crossing is an apartment-style residence hall open to juniors and seniors.  It was built and managed by a third-party developer and opened in 2014.  The building is at the west end of the pedestrian bridge across the Genesee River.

The river level of the building includes a boathouse for the university's crew team and a rowing dry land training center.

Brooks Crossing is built on the site of the early Castletown settlement.  In 1800, James Wadsworth built a tavern and store at the site and hired Isaac Castle to manage them. Thereafter the community was officially known at Castletown, but its location by the river gave it the more common, but less grandiose nickname of “The Rapids.”  Wadsworth’s belief in the viability of his settlement was rooted in its location. With few roads in and out of the settlement, aside from a few well-trodden Indian trails, most goods to market had to travel the Genesee and then be transported by land to Lake Ontario, where they could be shipped to other early New York settlements or across the lake to Canada. Wadsworth envisioned Castletown as an ideal fording point from the river to land, bypassing the High, Middle and Lower Falls between the settlement and Lake Ontario.
In its initial decades, “The Rapids” was a transportation hub, with grain, pork, lumber, barrel staves, flour and other goods passing through the community. Shortly after the tavern and store were established, a church, a school and several houses were built, but the growth of the community would be short-lived.  In 1822, a feeder canal (located at the present site of the Brooks Avenue bridge) was built to supply Genesee River water to the new Erie Canal. Because of the feeder, boats no longer had to unload at Castletown. They turned off the river and poled up the feeder to the main canal at Rochester (where Mount Hope and South Avenues converge).

The Brooks Landing building sits on the former Genesee Valley Canal, which operated from 1838 to 1878, and the Genesee Valley Canal Railroad, which later became part of the Pennsylvania Railroad and operated from 1882 until to the early 1970s, but the tracks were not removed until 1984.

References
1992 "At the Rapids on the Genesee Settlement at Castletown," by Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck, Rochester History 54(3):1-24 (Summer, 1992)

2013 Groundbreaking Held for The Flats at Brooks Crossing, July 12, 2013.
The University of Rochester will be the main tenant of The Flats at Brooks Crossing, a 12-story mixed-use project near the corner of Brooks Avenue and Genesee Street in the Brooks Landing area. University President Joel Seligman participated in the July 12 groundbreaking ceremony hosted by Rochester City Mayor Thomas S. Richards, with the $18.7 million development scheduled to be complete by fall 2014.
The Flats at Brooks Crossing is slated to feature 10 floors of housing accommodating 170 University students in approximately 70 units; a 2,000 square-foot common area; a lower-level scull boat house; a 5,000 square-foot restaurant on the first floor of the building; and a second, 4,000 square-foot, single-story building on Genesee Street.
The 19th Ward and Plymouth-Exchange neighborhood associations, along with the Sector 4 Community Development Corporation, have been very involved with the Brooks Landing planning process over the past 25 years and joined in the groundbreaking ceremony for the Flats at Brooks Crossing. Other participants included developer Ron Christenson, president of Christenson Corporation; City Council President Lovely A. Warren and council members Dana Miller and Loretta Scott; and Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks.

© 2021 Morris A. Pierce