January 20, 2012

by Evan Lowenstein

With Kodak plummeting, the City of Rochester and its region is seen to be plummeting as well.  The association is understandable.  Kodak, which once had over 60,000 employees in Greater Rochester, was the driving force of the region’s economic and community development for decades. Today, Kodak employs fewer than 4,000 people in Rochester, the stock price is less than a dollar, and the company just filed for bankruptcy.

Once Kodak Park, the strategically located campus has found new life

But while the decline of Kodak continues, Rochester’s overall economy has proven resilient. Small businesses are growing in or coming to Rochester, with many hiring former Kodak employees.  An example: Recently granted $3.5 million through the Regional Economic Development Council (REDC) initiative is a battery and energy storage enterprise in Rochester’s expansive Eastman Business Park (EBP). A collaboration between a non-profit and several leading companies, the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Center (NY-BEST™) aims to commercialize effective energy storage systems in New York, and establish energy storage as a vibrant sector of the state economy.  NY-BEST™ is developing batteries and ultracapacitors, technology pivotal to the renewable energy quest.

Today, the transformation of EBP embodies several main tenets of smart growth and sustainable development: adaptive reuse of structures and infrastructure, infill development, location efficiency (EBP is accessible by multiple bus routes including a special Kodak Loop route), and green jobs in green industries.

View Eastman Business Park in a larger map

Reinvestment in the Kodak site is breathing new life into the economy, and will also buoy the revitalization of surrounding neighborhoods, both urban and inner-ring suburban. The adjacent Maplewood neighborhood offers EBP employees beautiful and shockingly affordable housing stock at literally one tenth the cost of similar sizes and styles in places like Boston and Washington, D.C.  Maplewood exemplifies what’s great about living in Rochester: cultural and recreational amenities abound, easily accessible. The spectacular Genesee River Gorge and the Riverway Trail are in the neighborhood; Great Lake Ontario is just three miles away.

In a no-population-growth region like Greater Rochester, reuse of existing infrastructure and redevelopment like what’s occurring now in Eastman Business Park is the essential precursor to renewed prosperity for the region’s communities and citizens.  It will also help preserve the right balance — in form and function — of the region’s city, suburbs, and rural areas.

A $150,000 home in the Maplewood Neighborhood, adjacent to Eastman Business Park

Twelve-hundred-acre Eastman Business Park was known as Kodak Park during the company’s heyday, and is the single largest urban industrial park in the northeast.  It was named for George Eastman (1854-1932), founder of Kodak and one of the great scientists and businessmen in the country’s history. As an entrepreneur far ahead of the cutting edge, Eastman might today be as impressed with the transformation of the Eastman Business Park and the region’s economy as he would be dejected in the decline of Kodak.

Yet Kodak had the foresight to prepare EBP for its next life, spending over $200 million to improve existing infrastructure for research and development operations and manufacturing. In addition to improving infrastructure and facilities, Eastman Business Park marketed Kodak’s ability to provide extensive expertise to many R&D and manufacturing areas.

Today, the Park’s extensive and impressive infrastructure includes a tri-generating (electricity, heating, and cooling from the same original source) power plant that squeezes efficiency out of a coal-fired system; a modern waste water treatment plant; thirty miles of roads, and remarkably, a railroad system with seventeen miles of track. The EBP is, as its web site states, truly a “city within a city.” Fully one-fourth of EBP is still available for adaptive reuse and new development.

Today, as Kodak’s presence in the EBP dwindles, new economic blood is rushing into it. And the blood is green. Companies like Natcore Technology (solar cell technology development, in partnership with Kodak’s thin film technologies), Cerion Energy (diesel fuel technologies that cut consumption, reduce costs and lower emissions), Graphene (energy storage and photovoltaic technology), and Novomer (converting carbon dioxide into sustainable chemicals) have made the Eastman Business Park their home. There are thirty-three businesses with approximately 3,000 jobs in the EBP right now, and its Director, Mike Alt, recently told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle that he has fielded fourteen other expressions of interest from clean technology and clean energy companies. Alt also says that companies like Natcore have real potential to go big, and create thousands more green Rochester jobs.

At the time Natcore finalized its deal to move to EBP, their CEO issued this statement: “We chose Rochester for several reasons. It will give us access to Kodak’s considerable prowess in thin-film technology and much of the infrastructure we will require. In addition, we can tap expertise at Rochester’s distinguished universities.”  Cerion is re-purposing Kodak technology to improve diesel fuel mileage and decrease emissions and soot–and they are doing this with six former Kodak Ph.D. scientists.

Kayaking the Genesee River Gorge, in the City of Rochester's Maplewood Neighborhood

EBP also happens to offer several important pieces needed for biofuel development: storage, shipping, and technical assistance from Kodak and other EBP companies.  What’s more, shovel-ready development parcels are available should the companies need to expand, and there are even ample supplies of biofuel raw materials—corn, algae, switch grass—close by, within the region.

The reinvention and resurgence of the Eastman Business Park is a harbinger of good things coming to  Rochester and auspicious for the pursuit of sustainability.  Its high-quality jobs are essential to the prosperity of the city, its citizens, and the region.  Property and sales tax revenue now being generated from the new businesses help too: as Kodak shrunk, it abandoned many buildings and demolished forty of them, leveling also a substantial hit on the City coffers.

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle columnist Steve Sink recently summarized the Eastman Business Park phenomenon this way: “Kodak Park was a big part of the past. Eastman Business Park is a big part of the future. And it’s evidence of what I believe is our most important characteristic as a region: resilience.”

In addition to resilience, Rochester and Kodak are showing their legendary smarts–by actualizing the principles of smart growth at Eastman Business Park.

Eastman Business Park: www.eastmanbusinesspark.com.

See a Rochester TV news story about Kodak Park’s transformation