Neighborhoods

Old houses, renewed appeal

By Megan Malugani

If you ask Kutzky Park residents what they love most about their neighborhood, you’ll get strikingly similar answers from strikingly dissimilar sources, whether you’re talking to Tom Hennessey, who’s lived in the neighborhood since 1933, or to Kellie Threinen, who just moved in five years ago.

Kutzky’s appeal is in its people, its houses, and its proximity to downtown, they say, and those qualities have been ever-present, from the heydays of Hennessey’s youth (when there was a grocery store every two blocks), to the decline of the neighborhood in the late 80s and early 90s (when drugs and crime threatened the neighborhood), to today, when Kutzky lovers like Threinen are buying and fixing up dilapidated houses, converting duplexes and triplexes back to their original design as single family homes, and restoring the neighborhood to its former glory, one home at a time.

“So many people here are really invested in cleaning up the neighborhood,” Threinen says. Their efforts are paying off. “Kutzky Park is one of the very few neighborhoods in Rochester, if not the only one, where price tags on houses are definitely going up,” says Threinen, who is not only a Kutzky resident but also a real estate broker in the area. “It’s on the up and up.”

The heydays
Kutzky Park homes were built mostly in the 1910s and 1920s, during a home building boom spurred by the opening of the 1914 Mayo Building. Kutzky was the middle to upper-middle class domain of many merchants and businesspeople, like Tom Hennessey’s parents, who operated a dairy. Hennessey grew up in a home his parents built in Kutzky in 1928 for $3,500, and he lived in the home until 2006, when he moved to another Kutzky home three blocks away. “I never left the neighborhood,” says Hennessey, who turns 75 this month.

Hennessey went to school at the old Lincoln Elementary (which stood where the United Way building now stands), St. John’s, and Lourdes—all Kutzky neighborhood fixtures. He spent many hours hanging out with his friends at Cascade Creek, where they would swing off a rope into the water in the summer and ice skate in the winter. Kutzky was a good place to be a kid and a parent, he says. “Neighbors cooperated in good times and bad. There was a oneness to the neighborhood,” Hennessey says.

By the 1940s, however, the character of the neighborhood began changing. The Plummer Building was completed, which led to another huge demand for housing. “At that point the Kutzky housing stock was 20 to 30 years old, and empty nesters in the neighborhood began converting their homes into [rental] housing for nurses and into the early hotels for Mayo,” says Dave Edmonson, president of the Kutzky Park Neighborhood Association and a 27-year resident of the neighborhood. Through the decades, many of these makeshift duplexes and triplexes have deteriorated as the properties have changed hands, and live-in landlords have been replaced with absentee landlords. “That’s the legacy we still struggle with today,” Edmonson says.

Still, Hennessey recalls that his own kids, who grew up in the 60s and 70s, experienced childhoods similar to his own. “They still rode their bikes all over and still had a curfew. They knew that when the Plummer Carillon started going at 9 o’clock, you better get yourself home.” Hennessey’s kids walked to St. John’s and Lourdes, and he and his wife both walked to work at Mayo every day.

Hitting rock bottom
By the time Dave Edmonson moved to Kutzky Park in 1981, the neighborhood was suffering from a bad reputation. “When we moved here, the people I worked with at IBM said ‘that’s a slum, that’s a bad neighborhood,’” Edmonson recalls. "But I’m an old house lover and wasn’t particularly concerned, since I had lived in Baltimore and Los Angeles,” he says. “Within a month I knew half the people on the block and most had lived here for a long time,” he says. “I loved this street the minute we moved here.”

Kutzky’s bad reputation was partly attributable to the changing demographics of the renters in the neighborhood, who were now a poorer bunch on average than they had been in earlier decades. Long gone were the days when patients’ families and nurses were the primary short-term renters in the neighborhood residences—hotels and motels now lodged patients’ families, and nurses and other Mayo workers now owned cars and lived further away from downtown.

By the late 80s and early 90s, the neighborhood struggled with crime and drug activity. “Rochester got discovered on the drug highway from Chicago to Minneapolis, and we began seeing a lot of criminal activity, drug activity, and violent behaviors,” Edmonson says. “There were nights when we heard gunfire go off. We wouldn’t let our kids go out in the yard,” Edmonson says. The neighborhood “bottomed out in the early ‘90s,” he says. Many rental properties were rundown or condemned, and rates of crime and violence were high.

Restoring the glory
Kutzky lovers wouldn’t let the neighborhood go to pot, however. Some neighbors banded together into neighborhood watch groups. And while Kutzky still has its share of problems and criminal complaints, groups like the Kutzky Park Neighborhood Association and Imagine Kutzky have taken action to help drive out crime and force accountability to rental property owners. Many homes have been completely remodeled; others have been converted from multi-family dwellings back to single family residences.

According to real estate broker Kellie Threinen, Kutzky Park now offers one of the widest ranges of home prices in town. “You’ll see anything from an $80,000 complete dump fixer-upper to a single family home that sold for $306,000 this spring,” Threinen says. And the “complete dumps” are less common than they used to be. The neighborhood has “done nothing but get better since I’ve been here the last five years,” she says.

Old-timer Hennessey concedes that the neighborhood “was starting to go,” but has made a much-appreciated comeback. “I think it’s going to get even better as the downtown grows and is so vibrant again,” Hennessey says. “We’re within walking distance to so many things downtown."