It was not because Rochester is a bad place, it isn't. It is a planned, clean, and safe place to live. However it also is more of a sterile, safe and soulless place. I believe the main passion is to make money. Not surprising when it is dominated by two large corporations, the Mayo Clinic and IBM. The people are well mannered professionals. Many jobs are medical or engineering.
Where I live in Montana it is almost the opposite of Rochester. It is unplanned, wild, unruly, messy. Definitely not sterile, safe or soulless. While there is a desire for money, it seems to be more of the entrepreneurial gold-rush mentality. But there are also other passions that make it unruly; passions for property rights, individual freedoms and the environment. People are not well mannered professionals.
People in Rochester are rich. In Flathead county the people who are from other places and have second homes are rich. The typical Flathead resident is not rich.
Here are some snapshots from the U.S. census web site. As you can see Rochester (Olmsted county) is well above the national average in income while Flathead county is well below the national average.
Rochester continued to grow after I left. More and more cornfields converted to subdivisions. Huge houses - McMansions - that look alike. In one suburb one of Tammy's daughters' house was about the only different one as it was at least painted a shade of red, out of a sea of gray or beige. About the only way I could pick out Tammy's townhouse was the one whose garage door opened when the button was pressed.
And there were subdivision after subdivision that looked the same, each with their own cute subdivision name, large houses, manicured lawns and lack of trees.
*shudder*
It was nice to see old friends. It was mildly interesting to see places: that is new, that is the same, that has changed. But I seemed to have moved from liking it, feeling stifled by it, to an indifference to Rochester as we drove around it.
Some places I made no effort to revisit. For example, the first apartment I lived at is now hidden behind a noise barrier wall as the highway has been expanded to 6 lanes now. I never went behind the wall to see what that apartment complex is like now. I did visit the last apartment I lived at, but that was to see if the trees I planted still were there. They were, and thriving. I'll post photos of them later when I get home and am able to upload photos from my camera to the computer.
Here are a few photos of Rochester. The old photos are from a souvenir booklet I found the other day that my mother had bought when we visited Rochester prior to my moving there in the early 1980s. The other photos are more recent ones I have found.
Note the smallish white square building a little north of the tall white Mayo Clinic building. That is the Damon parking ramp. I have a photo of it later before it was demolished.
The following is a building that existed when I moved to Rochester: the Damon parking garage. Before I left the Mayo Clinic demolished it and built the large building that sits north of the Mayo Clinic building as seen in some of the previous photos. I think they opened the new building shortly after I left.
1 comment:
Your third paragraph sums up most of why I moved here from Arizona- from a town dominated by one corporation and one college. I wasn't cut out for that kind of life, and it was smothering me one day at a time.
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