The Future of Downtown RochesterRochester, N.Y. – New details are emerging about the future development of downtown Rochester, N.Y. The developer of Midtown has released renderings of the project, showing the planned transformation. “We are working very closely with a very large national movie theater chain to put a ten screen movie complex in, we are working with several food retailers, Tops being one of them and another one from out of town. We have several women's clothing manufacturers and the normal assortment of restaurants, national restaurant chains and a couple bars looking it,” said Larry Glazer, CEO and Managing Partner of Buckingham Properties. “A lot of retailers who are not in the area said, 'I don't want to be in Greece cause then I can't hit Pittsford, I don't want to be in Victor because then I miss Greece.' This is a midpoint.” Apartments will fill the top 14 floors of the building, the third floor will be office space and the bottom two floors are planned for retail, for the Midtown project. “We are in for building permits, we expect to have trailers onsite sometime in March and we’ll start actual construction, late April first of May at the latest,” said Glazer, who hopes to start announcing leases in a few months and has Spring 2015 as a target day for completion. It’s just some of the hundreds of millions of dollars going into revitalize downtown. “We've got huge landscape changing, big block buster projects, like the filling in of the inner loop, like what's happening on the midtown block, Sibley complex, Alexander Park. There are a lot of big multifaceted investments going in,” said President of the Rochester Downtown Development Corporation, Heidi Zimmer-Meyer. Developers of the Sibley Building are hoping to bring back a building that once was. “We're fortunate enough to be developing the most beloved building in the city of Rochester and our goal is to transform it into the premier destination downtown,” said Joe Eddy, Vice President of Winn Development. “[We want] the Sibley building to be a continuation of what’s happening on East Avenue and connecting it to the St. Paul corridor and also expanding into the new Midtown.” These changes all come as the population downtown grows. “We’ve lost in the city of Rochester 120,000 people in the city of limits since the year 1960 or so, beginning to see that starting to reverse, downtown is part of that story,” said Zimmer-Meyer. “We've got a lot of responsibility to make sure the environment works for the investment and for the people who are coming into the center city, because we abandoned it 35 or 40 years ago and we need to take it back now.”Read More at: http://13wham.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/the-future-downtown-rochester-9578.shtml The same architect who designed the Culver Road Armory has actually been doing work for Buckingham on Midtown. There are quit a few rending on the website Philp Michael Brown Studio While I am guessing these are not finalized plans, they were published by the studio and developer. A 10 screen theater downtown seems to be a huge bet by Buckingham that downtown will continue to grow with 500 to 600 units coming on line downtown in three projects alone (Midtown Tower, Sibley Building, Alexander Park) within the next 5 years. They have proven to be smart & successful in all of their previous projects so lets hope they can continue that success.Midtown Tower and the proposed movie theater renderings.I noticed another rendering also. The building in the image below does not exist and no project has been announced for this site at midtown. You can see the Sibley building at the end of the road. I'm wondering if this was just something thrown together by the architect or if Buckingham has their eyes on the site. I know the Mayor has been pushing to have the Rochester Broadway Theater League's new preforming arts center in the City. This site would be the most logical site for the new preforming arts center.I'm really looking forward to Shopping at "Retail Signage" I hear its a great store and I'm excited they are coming downtown.