About Rochester Parks (.org)

Rochester Parks has a rather short history in this area.  I’m the founder, Mark Goho, and I moved here in 2007 from Fredonia, NY where I was doing my undergraduate work.  In the past nine years, I and my family have visited only a handful of the dozens of parks that Rochester has to offer. Unfortunately, I found myself visiting the same few parks over and over again, based on familiarity and consistent expectations.

A new Rochester Park is discovered

Sometime in late February, as I planned for my daughter’s first birthday and Rochester temperatures were unseasonably warm, I came across a new park: Corbett’s Glen Nature Park. This is surely one of the gems of Rochester. Located in Brighton, the park is quite large and has an amazing trail system that literally takes you to each and every feature of the park.  After visiting this park, I wondered, “How many people know about this park?” It was after this that I decided to launch a website dedicated to increasing awareness about the parks in the greater Rochester area!

Scope of the site

There are three types of parks in Rochester: county parks, city parks, and town parks. City parks and town parks are fairly obvious as to their geographical location.  Greece parks are in Greece, Parma parks are in Parma, etc. When trying to decide what I’d use as a boundary for “Rochester” parks, I had to default to a wider, more comprehensive list. When you consider where the Monroe county parks are located, there’s essentially no way to make a site that’s called “Rochester Parks” and not include Black Creek Park and Webster Park, Northampton Park and Oatka Creek Park. Perhaps I could have limited the parks to the City and towns that are adjacent to it.  That would have left out some pretty awesome parks in Webster, Henrietta and Pittsford.  I think, after living here for just a few years now, most people consider themselves residents of Rochester (in some sense) anywhere in Monroe County.  Most of us put Rochester, NY for our address even if we live in a nearby township.  So, for the scope of the site, I’ve chosen to include and document every park in Monroe County and call them Rochester Parks.

What we do at a park

Since there are so many parks, we want to make sure we get into a rhythm and have a clear goal in mind for what we do when we document a park.  As stated earlier, our overall goal is to increase awareness about the parks in Rochester.  We do that by having a dedicated page for each park.  From there, the plan is document the features of the park both verbally and through photography.  We offer some review of the overall quality of the park based on a community-based rubric. Feel free to add your own dimensions to the rubric and we’ll decide whether it seems like a feature we should be reviewing.