In what was once the ultimate company town, virtually everyone has a trove of bright Kodak moments.
They were plucked from the personal memories immortalised on the film made here, the bountiful jobs that allowed children to follow their parents into Kodak?s secure embrace, the seemingly endless largess that once allowed the company?s founder, George Eastman, to provide dental care at little or no cost to every child in town.
Now, with Eastman Kodak?s stock price below $1 and talk of bankruptcy inescapable, people here are pondering a thought as unimaginable as New Orleans without the French Quarter or New York without the Yankees ? Rochester after the calamitous fall of the company Eastman founded in 1880.
It feels like the wrenching culmination of a slide over decades, during which Kodak?s employment in Rochester slid from 62,000 in the 1980s to less than 7,000 now. Still, for this city in western New York, the picture that emerges, like a predigital photograph coming to life in a darkroom, is not a simple tale of Rust Belt decay.
Rochester has been a job-growth leader in the state in recent years. In 1980, total employment in the Rochester metropolitan area was 414,400. In 2010, it was 503,200. New businesses have been seeded by Kodak?s skilled work force, a reminder that a corporation?s fall can leave behind not just scars but also things to build upon.
?The decline of Kodak is extremely painful,? said Joel Seligman, president of the University of Rochester, which, with its two hospitals, is the city?s largest employer with 20,000 jobs.
Nowhere have Kodak?s troubles resonated more than in Rochester. The images of prosperity are being replaced by ones in shadows and shades of gray ? the largely empty parking lots at the Kodak headquarters and its sprawling manufacturing complex. Rochester?s troubles go beyond Kodak. Xerox and Bausch & Lomb have shed thousands of jobs as well. Twenty-five years ago, the three companies employed 60% of Rochester?s work force. Today, it is 6%.