<p>My daughter and I recently visisted the campus and couldn't help but notice the HUGE Mt. Hope cemetery bordering the school. Is it visible from any of the dorms? Does it upset or put off anyone?</p>
<p>Also, how safe is the community around the school and in the city of Rochester? We noticed a few sketchy people when we were out exploring. Do students feel comfortable taking the shuttle buses to various points around town?</p>
<p>Are there many trendy local restaurants and shops?</p>
<p>3N9977</p>
<p>The Mt. Hope cemetery is one of Rochester’s historical gems, not to mention a beautiful place to run/walk. It is also the burial place for Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. </p>
<p>You can only see the cemetery from 1 residential dormitory, “Phase”, and only 25% of the rooms will actually face the cemetery. Phase is where some students reside during their junior year.</p>
<p>I loved the fact that the University of Rochester was “protected” by a large cemetery on one side and the Genesee River on the other. These two barriers separated the campus from the hustle and bustle of city life, making campus quieter, safer, and more scenic.</p>
<p>I’ve been on A LOT of campuses where major roads cut right through or right along the campus borders, but the Mt. Hope cemetery and the river divert traffic and people away from campus for the most part, giving campus more of a quiet collegiate feel.</p>
<p>That said, getting off campus is easy and convenient. There are shuttle buses that run every day (free for U of R students) to various locations around the city of Rochester. This is how students who live off-campus to go to/from campus, and it is how students go to activities off of campus.</p>
<p>This means that the University of Rochester River Campus is afforded the luxuries of isolation while being within a 5 minute shuttle/car ride to get to downtown Rochester and to all of the local restaurants & shops.
It is an absolute blessing to be flanked by a massive cemetery and a large river. </p>
<p>To conclude the Mt. Hope cemetery topic, the cemetery doesn’t put off anyone at all. The cemetery is a great place to explore, and it means that we have quiet neighbors to the east. I like the fact that Mt. Hope itself was created by receding glaciers, leaving behind eskers and a few glacial pools.</p>
<p>I’ll be honest and say the 19th Ward section of Rochester isn’t a good neighborhood. The university has made efforts to reach out into this community by placing the Riverview apartments for juniors and seniors there, as well as building a new hotel there for friends and families of the university to utilize. Both Riverview and the Stay Bridge Suites are AMAZING. All seniors should live in riverview! Our relations with the community are continuing to improve. </p>
<p>Once again, having the Mt. Hope cemetery and Genesee River as a barrier dissuades most “shady” people to stay off of campus, but bikes still get stolen and a few people get mugged each year if they walk around alone at night. Our security force is pretty strong, and Blue Light Emergency phones are strategically located all over campus. I never had an issue with crime on campus personally. I firmly believe that crime numbers stay low due to U of R’s “isolation”, which is great.</p>
<p>The University of Rochester is an urban campus, merely 2 miles from downtown, and very much in the center of everything: with the Strong Memorial Hospital, Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Marketplace Mall, Genesee Vally Park, Highland Park, Blue Cross Arena, Frontier Field, the Erie Canal, and Park Avenue all within a very short distance from campus. Thanks to the cemetery and the river, campus doesn’t feel urban at all.</p>
<p>Are there trendy local restaurants??? The fact that there are 7 large colleges in the Greater Rochester area, and due to the sophisticated crowd drawn in by the Eastman School of Music / corporations such as Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and Xerox, Rochester has an incredible variety of restaurants. Check out this site… [Rochester</a> New York Local Restaurant Guide | Rochester Restaurants](<a href=“http://www.allrochesterrestaurants.com/]Rochester”>http://www.allrochesterrestaurants.com/)
Park Ave., which is a 5 minute shuttle ride from campus, has a ton of options and a great “College Town” atmosphere. You’ll find enough places to try out on that street alone!</p>
<p>Hope that helps.</p>
<p>D2 is a UR sophomore. </p>
<p>Mt Hope Cemetery is not issue wrt campus safety. In fact it provides some rather attractive green space around campus and tours of the some of the historic and architectural unique memorials are offered. And being a cemetery, it makes for a quiet neighbor to the Phase dorms. (Quieter than, say, frat row, esp on a Saturday night.)</p>
<p>There are some sketchy neighborhoods not far from campus, places I wouldn’t recommend a young woman walk alone at 3 am. Of course the same can be said of my hometown (We live in a city about the same size as Rochester, and not some huge urban area.) and can be said of probably most towns and cities. However the campus itself is quite safe, with property crimes being the typical occurrences. (theft of unattended backpacks, laptops, etc)</p>
<p>There are no trendy restaurants right next to campus, but there are plenty of interesting and trendy places downtown in the Park St. area. Again, no nearby shopping, but Marketplace Mall isn’t too far away and UR runs shuttle buses to Marketplace and other areas (like movie theaters, Park St., etc) that students go. </p>
<p>Also once your child is 18, she has the option of joining the Zipcar program at UR which rents cars by hour if she needs to get someplace truly off the beaten path.</p>
<p>D2 said that the University is trying hard to develop its property on the other side of the River adjacent to the Riverview Apts. (UR upperclassmen dorms) and that there is now a upscale hotel and coffee/tea shop there.</p>
<p>It’s definitely not as scary as the cemetery in New Haven that borders Yale, directly behind Freshman Commons. The gate says, “The Dead Shall Be Raised.” </p>
<p>Mt. Hope is a not a typical cemetery; it’s a Victorian cemetery park, called a garden cemetery. The first was Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, where Emerson is buried. Mt. Hope came 6 years later. The Victorians had a markedly different attitude toward death than the earlier Americans or us. The earlier folks used to care more about the marker than the body and the colonial cemeteries you see in Boston are sort of misleading because many people were shoved in there, often many to a crypt, and the markers were straightened up in rows to look better later on. (In other words, odds are that x is not really that person’s grave.) The garden cemeteries are impressive monuments to the relation of the living to the dead - and they are often tourist attractions, notably Mt. Auburn and Greenwood in Brooklyn (had to look up that one’s exact name). They are highly landscaped and that also reflects the naturalistic but shaped movement that combined traditional American attitudes with British. Emerson, for example, stated bluntly how much he preferred rough American lawns over the manicured British style and garden landscapes - think Central Park - allowed Americans to shape the land and thus “enhance” its beauty while leaving it natural looking. A nice expression of one of the American dichotomies.</p>
<p>While perhaps not “trendy”, one local restaurant within walking distance of campus is the Distillery - kids are there all the time.</p>
<p>My d loves having a cemetary on one side (and it is beautiful) - they don’t bother her, and she can’t bother them!</p>
<p>The food at the Distillery is better than decent. And I think that students can use their Declining Dollars (part of the meal plan) there too. (Not 100% sure, but reasonably so…)</p>
<p>Besides the river and the cemetery, UR is also hemmed in on the east(?) side by the huge medical complex. Look at the area on google maps–the medical center may cover more acreage than the River Campus.</p>
<p>How about the train tracks I see along the east side of the river campus [on Mapquest]?</p>
<p>Are they active?</p>
<p>No, those train tracks are not active. You cannot hear any trains from the River Campus (the nearest active railroad is north of downtown Rochester, over 3 miles away from campus)</p>
<p>D is a freshman. There was a dorm hall program where the students visited the cemetery on Halloween. D said it was a blast. D takes the UR shuttle bus every weekend to the malls. She is comfortable taking them, but sometimes the buses don’t run on time or get cancelled so students need to plan ahead of how they would get back to campus if the bus didn’t show up. This only happened twice to my D this year, and both times it was at the beginning of the first semester. As far as safety around the school, as previously mentioned, it is protected on 3 sides by the Genesee river, the graveyard and the medical school/hospitals. The only unsafe side I know about is the street behind the campus that eventually brings you to downtown area, but students should not be in this area anyway. It is past UR housing and there is no reason to be that far down that street. We had indepth conversation with Security Dept. about this, they do constant monitoring of the campus for any issues. Security Dept. enforces safety to students, but I’m sure not all of them take the advice given. There seemed to be a bad area located near every college my D applied to last year so I think its an issue you have to deal with wherever campus you child ends up at. Hope this helps!</p>
<p>How’s Genessee Valley Park in terms of safety? My son is a runner, so he’ll probably be wanting to explore it.</p>
<p>D has gone there a few times on dorm hall events and has had fun. Hopefully some students will write to give you more info.</p>
<p>To the best of my knowledge Genesee Valley Park is perfectly safe. Like anywhere, it isn’t necessarily a place to walk alone in the middle of the night, but I have never in my time here heard of crime at the Park.</p>
<p>A lot of students take advantage of the park for exercise… I play in a softball league over the summer there - we have a team as an admissions office - we are better at shaping the next freshman class than we are at playing softball. 
But in all honesty, GVP is safe.</p>
<p>samoanattorney,</p>
<p>I was a Varsity X-C/Track Runner during my college experience at the U of R. First off, your son will love Coach John Izzo (if he decides to join the team, which he should consider)! He is charismatic, caring, and an overall excellent coach. My time with the team was one of my most important extracurricular experiences. </p>
<p>Running around the University of Rochester is phenomenal. Genesee Valley Park is where we host our X-C Invitational, so we end up running there every day there during the fall and at least 3 times a week throughout the year. The park is beautiful in the fall! GVP was designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead (who designed Central Park in NYC). Also, the Erie Canal runs through the park, which gives runners access to the Canal Path to avoid traffic for miles and miles. </p>
<p>I could talk forever about my fantastic running experience with the team… To answer your question, GVP is very safe, and the team really enjoys running together or at least in small groups, so your son will most likely be running everywhere with a teammate. I guess, like any park near a city, you wouldn’t want to walk through there at night. I’ve never heard of anything happening to runners in GVP, and some of my teammates do run through there at night. </p>
<p>I am pleased to report that throughout my time with the team, never has a teammate encountered a dangerous situation while running through Rochester. Perhaps this is b/c we typically run during the day, and always in groups. We tended to get some positive feedback as we passed the local women in our short shorts & occasionally we would hear a “Run Forest! Run” from an envious male.</p>
<p>URgrad, that sounds fantastic. One of the pluses of UofR for my son is that he’ll have an opportunity to run varsity XC - his HS times are good for DIII but not DI. Our tour was led by a XC runner who said the team atmosphere is great.</p>