Brian Sharp

@SharpRoc

It's part of planned expansion of CGI Communications on Main Street.

Renovations include an enclosed parking garage for workers and a rooftop bar and event space.

Owner Bob Bartosiewicz hopes to use museum to tell Rochester's role in the birth of the automobile.

Inside a nondescript warehouse just outside of downtown sits a multi-million-dollar collection of rare muscle cars that is at the heart of an outrageous idea to transform Main Street.

Come May, these and other classic cars should go on display in the showroom of a new Rochester Auto Museum across from the Hyatt Regency. The central attraction might be the red 1958 Plymouth Fury from the movie Christine, or a white, automatic 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda convertible — one of five ever made.

The collection belongs to Bob Bartosiewicz, founder of CGI Communications. And the museum is part of a planned business expansion that will redevelop the old Atrium and Gateway buildings between St. Paul Street and North Clinton Avenue. His role as businessman/developer is a first for downtown, as is his plan to convert one of the buildings to an enclosed parking garage for his employees.

But as he walks the unpolished, marbleized acrylic floor of the cavernous future display room, Bartosiewicz has another story to tell, one with which he likely will regale museum visitors. It is, he claims, the greatest story never told: Of how, by some accounts, the Flower City can lay claim to being the birthplace of the automobile.

"This is the biggest miss in the history of Rochester," he said. Had things gone differently, a largely forgotten patent lawyer and a defunct carriage company "would have owned the world."

'Outrageous and wonderful'

Bartosiewicz started CGI in 1988. The digital marketing company works with communities and businesses, employing 330 in Rochester, and 370 nationwide. With the planned expansion, CGI would have space for 500 or more employees downtown.

The firm is located in the Granite Building at the corner of Main and St. Paul, owning nine of 12 floors. One floor currently is being renovated for a kitchen and gym area. The roof is being built out for a bar and event space. Property records show Bartosiewicz and CGI spent about $2.2 million between 2007 and 2009 buying space in the condominiumized Granite Building. Bartosiewicz bought the adjacent 150 E. Main St. from Monroe County for $500,000 in July 2015. That is the focus of the expansion and redevelopment.

That stretch on the north side of East Main Street has been something of a "hole in the donut" when it comes to investment in the area, said Heidi Zimmer Meyer, president of Rochester Downtown Development Corp.

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The redevelopment plan has been evolving since first announced two years ago. Originally, the plan was to put housing in the Granite Building. But that concept is fading, Bartosiewicz said, as the other main tenant, the Lacy Katzen law firm, owns three floors, has been there 30 years and hasn't found a suitable place to move despite actively scouting locations the past three years.

The expansion would push CGI into the Atrium Building to the east, with a grand new entrance rising five stories to an arched glass ceiling. The museum would occupy a ground floor space, and could be converted to retail in the future. Continuing down the block, the Gateway building would become parking, with room for 325 spaces on five levels, more retail at the street level and the top two floors available for CGI.

"We're doing this all on our own dime," Bartosiewicz said.

He puts the total project cost at $16 million, eying completion in 2019-20. The garage will cost $4 million, but he has at different times said he pays $276,000 or as much as $300,000 a year for his employees to park downtown.

Zimmer-Meyer is confident Bartosiewicz will deliver, calling him "a visionary guy." So what did she think when she first heard the idea for a car museum?

"I laughed," she said, "because I thought it was outrageous and wonderful, and I know Bob Bartosiewicz well enough to know he’ll do it."

She continued, "It changes everything on Main Street. It is kind of a quixotic, unusual thing ... not what you'd expect to put downtown."

Zimmer-Meyer had never heard the story.

Long, costly and bizarre

The greatest story never told? Well, more accurate would be rarely told, but also quite the unusual thing.

Former city historian Joseph Barnes once described it as "one of the longest, most costly, and bizarre civil suits in American legal history." But that's jumping ahead. First, you have to know about George Baldwin Selden.

Selden was born in 1846 in Clarkson, and moved with his family to Rochester in 1859. His father, Henry R. Selden, a lawyer, would defend Susan B. Anthony after her 1872 arrest for voting in Rochester. The younger Selden was more mechanically inclined, and while his father succeeded in steering him into law, his passion was inventing.

George Selden focused on what he called a "road engine" and, as Barnes wrote in a 1981 historical account, "tinkering late at night in the basement workshop of his father's house on Gibbs Street," he designed a three-cylinder engine.

A limited prototype was built and tested and, a year later on May 8, 1879, he filed a patent application witnessed by an assistant bookkeeper at Rochester Savings Bank named George Eastman, himself an aspiring inventor.

The patent would not be issued until 16 years later, however, as Selden would stall the process, apparently on purpose, filing amendments and being slow to append other paperwork. The extent of delay was seen by many as purposeful, be it to allow time to find investors or wait for the market to catch up. Once issued, the patent would remain in effect for 17 years. By the time Selden got his patent in 1895, a pair of Germans (Daimler and Benz) and the Massachusetts brothers Duryea had gained notoriety for inventing the automobile.

But Selden — who, as it happens, had become a patent lawyer — would see his patent move to the fore, first with the ill-fated Electric Vehicle Co., and ultimately with Packard Motor Car Co. and Olds Motor Works organizing an automobile association that guaranteed Seldon a percentage (albeit a small one) of the value of all new licensed car sales for its licensed members, Barnes wrote.

When Ford Motor Co. came along with its low-cost, assembly-line models, it was either not admitted to the association or balked at the notion. A lawsuit followed in 1903.

"The trial and its appeal dragged on for the next eight years, one of the longest patent litigations in United States history, and one which produced one of the greatest quantities of written evidence ever submitted in a case at equity," Barnes wrote, with testimony given in Rochester, Detroit and elsewhere. "The completed court record finally exceeded 14,000 pages and 5,000,000 words."

The engine was less advanced than what had developed since, and the patent offered a broad but not particularly unique description of an automobile. Still, a federal judge upheld the patent on Sept. 15, 1909, and "awarded Seldon formal recognition as the inventor of the gasoline automobile," Barnes wrote. Ford appealed. And, while a three-judge panel again upheld the patent, it did so only for the engine Seldon described.

At that point, Seldon had only two years remaining on the patent and dropped the matter.

Building on an era

That wasn't the end of Rochester's involvement with the automobile industry.

Selden would invest his royalties into the Selden Motor Vehicle Co., beginning production in 1908, reportedly near Probert Street, a block-long stretch between East and University avenues that borders the Wegmans parking lot. Selden would soon switch to trucks and have some success, besting a number of fledgling car manufacturers that sprung up across the Greater Rochester area.

That was commonplace around the early 20th century. Most notable locally was James Cunningham, Son & Co., which also started making cars in 1908, continuing into the 1930s, even making single-engine aircraft in its Canal Street facility — including the one in which Eastman took his first airplane ride, Barnes wrote.

The former carriage company was a longstanding business in Rochester, and one that Bartosiewicz points to when calling Selden a big miss for the city. Had the two connected earlier, he reasoned, maybe things could have been different. When Cunningham switched to manufacturing cars, however, it, like Ford, didn't bother with the association or paying any royalties to Selden.

The legacy lives on in companies like Delco that manufacture car parts. And with the region's sizable and active community of car buffs and collectors, with their classics, their hotrods.

"It's really amazing here in Rochester," Barry Brown, owner of Riter Vintage Automotive Specialists which has been in the business or fixing up the classics for more than two decades in East Rochester. "You don’t realize how many there are until you have a real show. It's huge."

There are popular cruise nights and shows from Canandaigua to Webster and Pittsford to Brockport, and these are family events, Brown said. Syracuse Nationals is the big one, and Brown is a representative for that summertime event.

Bartosiewicz is in a different league, an investor more than a hobbyist, Brown said. Bartosiewicz describes his 25-car collection as a "one of" collection, seeing as all are "one of" a handful ever made or still in existence. Cudas. Super Bees. Super Birds. Two of the most rare Pontiac Judge convertibles in the world. He has been "a ferocious collector" the past seven years, he said. Asked to value his collection, he answers: "High."

The museum could increase street vitality, building on a streetscape enhancement project to be completed this year. He would leave the showroom lit at night, so it would be visible to passers-by. His idea is to donate museum profits to charity, particularly to veterans as most of his cars originally were bought by Vietnam veterans with combat bonuses.

"Downtown is desperate for some activities for visitors," Bartosiewicz said. "They're twiddling their thumbs: 'OK, we've been to Dinosaur (Bar-B-Que). Now what?'"

Come May, Bartosiewicz hopes to provide an answer.

BDSHARP@Gannett.com