Rochester, New York
City of Rochester and Rochester Raging Rhinos, LLC

Rochester was the first city in upstate New York to be awarded a $200,000 grant from the USEPA to fund a brownfield redevelopment program. The Erie Canal Industrial Park is a four-block area located on the northwest side of downtown Rochester, and the grant leveraged initial evaluation of redevelopment of the property. The four blocks were assembled under city ownership; and previous metals recycling, coal storage, railroad, service station, and residential usage were demolished to create a tract of land for redevelopment. Several stages of investigation had been performed previously that identified potential areas requiring remediation. Haley & Aldrich provided geotechnical and environmental services maximizing use of data from previous investigations, and supplementing that data with additional investigation only as necessary to satisfy completion of health and environmental risk assessment for property reuse, remediation approaches, and concurrent creation of potential redevelopment scenarios.

After several industrial/commercial enterprises pursued acquisition and development discussions with the City of Rochester, the city offered the property to the Rochester Raging Rhinos professional soccer team. The former brownfield is the site of the new PaeTEC Park Stadium, home of the Rhinos soccer team and Rochester Rattlers, a local professional lacrosse team. The state-of-the-art, multi-use outdoor stadium contains 17,500 permanent seats, 1,250 club seats, and 30 luxury suites, concession and merchandise facilities, and a Hall of Fame area. Haley & Aldrich made recommendations for foundation design, prepared construction documents and specifications, and provided construction monitoring.