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Ninth day, Monday Mar 28th
On a cold, gray, and blustery spring morning, I drive from Syracuse to Rochester NY, and head straight for a certain house very near Susan B. Anthony Square. As I suspect might be the case, the house is closed to the public today so I’ll return tomorrow; I head here first anyway to scope things out in person because it turns out, I have more free time to explore Rochester this morning than I thought I would. Hooray! …Susan B. Anthony Square, at 39 King St, is a little park crisscrossed with meandering paths and dotted with benches and neatly trimmed shrubbery, in the center of pretty blocks of well-maintained early 19th century houses. The square is dominated by a life-size sculpture of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony by Pepsy Kettavong, called ‘Let’s Have Tea’, installed in 2001…. Read the written account here:
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The ‘Let’s Have Tea’ sculpture at Susan B. Anthony Square is such a meaningful anchor for that neighborhood — there’s something quietly radical about freezing that imagined conversation in bronze, two people who shaped American history just sitting together like neighbors. I’ve walked past it more times than I can count and it still stops me. What’s fascinating is that Douglass actually lived in Rochester for 25 years and published his abolitionist newspaper *The North Star* there starting in 1847, making the city one of the most important sites in the entire antislavery movement — according to the Library of Congress, Rochester was also a key station on the Underground Railroad during that same period. The fact that these stories are embedded in walkable, living blocks rather than locked behind velvet ropes gives communities like this a kind of moral texture you can actually feel underfoot. Did you get a sense, visiting those sites, that Rochester residents themselves feel that weight of history as part of their everyday identity, or does it fade into the background the way local landmarks sometimes do?
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Hello, Adam, and thanks for your interest in this post!
(Sorry the podcast link doesn’t work anymore. I’ll be fixing that when I have the time that my current workload doesn’t allow.)
It’s been quite some time now since I visited Douglass-associated sites in Rochester, and wasn’t in the city long enough to get a sense of whether the sites have faded into the background for the people who live there. I do remember that when I visited them, I was almost always the only one there. But if I remember correctly, I visited most of them during normal work and school hours, so of course most people were otherwise occupied. So, in sum, you’d have to ask a Rochesterian!
P.S. Anna and Frederick Douglass’s Rochester home itself was a key station on the Underground Railroad as well. See https://ordinaryphilosophy.com/2016/06/07/frederick-douglass-rochester-ny-sites-part-2/
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