Sites include properties from Monroe, Wayne, and Seneca counties.
The Landmark Society of Western New York announced its 2026 Five to Revive – a list that identifies opportunities for targeted strategic revitalization.
The 2026 List includes:
PEIRSON COBBLESTONE HOUSE
Village of Newark, Wayne County
SENECA FALLS MACHINE COMPANY PLANT
Seneca Falls, Seneca County
MORGAN-MANNING HOUSE MUSEUM
Village of Brockport, Monroe County
CUTLER MAIL CHUTE COMPANY BUILDING
Rochester, Monroe County
HISTORIC LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY SITES
Thematic Listing
Launched in 2013, The Landmark Society’s Five to Revive list calls attention to sites across our region in need of rehabilitation. Through this list, the organization strives to facilitate investment and to protect our area’s architectural heritage, working with owners, developers, investors, and other partners to create connections and reactivate buildings within their communities. These sites can serve as key projects for surrounding neighborhoods, inspiring communities to reinvigorate and reinterpret their historic assets while leading the way for preservation advocacy and vitality. Find more information at www.landmarksociety.org/five-to-revive/.
Peirson Cobblestone House
240 W. Pearl Street, Village of Newark, Wayne County
Cobblestones are arguably the most unique aspect of our architectural heritage in Western New York: of the 1,054 identified cobblestone structures in North America, 855 (81%) are located within eighty miles of Rochester, with over one hundred each in Wayne, Orleans, Monroe, and Ontario Counties alone. The manifestation of a unique confluence of glacial processes and skilled masons remaining in the region after its canal building boom, each cobblestone structure—though perhaps easy to overlook in isolation on the modern landscape—is an irreplaceable treasure testifying to the power of craftsmanship, recording our shared story on this landscape, and charming our daily lives.
Built by Jacob Hill between approximately 1825 and 1835, this cobblestone house is an early example of cobblestone masonry in the region, valued for both its historical and architectural significance. The cobblestone on the northern fringes of Newark functioned as a farmhouse for a century and a half after its construction ca. 1830, during the earliest period of cobblestone building. Several generations of the Peirson family owned and occupied the house—or rented it to tenant farmers—for much of that history, from the mid-nineteenth century until the late 1920s.
By then, however, Newark’s growth began to encroach on the farmstead. In 1929, most of the property’s adjoining farmland was sold to serve as the Newark airstrip, even as the house’s remaining grounds were extensively gardened, becoming “a show place of [Newark’s] north side.” In the 1950s and 1960s, the Newark-Wayne Community Hospital rose in turn on the airstrip land, eventually surrounding the historic house with new institutional development.
In 1947, Joseph Campbell purchased the property and undertook renovations, followed by additional modifications by Drs. Michael McCusker and Walter Muth in the 1970s. While the interior has been altered over time to accommodate new uses—including use as an ophthalmologist’s office beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s—the exterior retains the original craftsmanship that makes cobblestone buildings so distinctive and significant. The property was later purchased by the hospital itself and reportedly used to house visiting staff, though this use was short-lived.
Today, the Peirson Cobblestone House sits vacant on the campus of Newark-Wayne Community Hospital, with its landscaping overgrown and the building accumulating pressing maintenance needs—including a leaking roof—that pose serious risks to the integrity of this iconic structure. Now nearly two hundred years old, it remains one of the Town of Arcadia’s and Village of Newark’s oldest cobblestone buildings. The Landmark Society, along with concerned citizens, is exploring ways to preserve this important historic resource and prevent its continued deterioration, potential demolition, or even collapse, while working toward a future rehabilitation that could once again enliven and charm Newark’s civic life.
Seneca Falls Machine Company Plant
314 Fall Street, Seneca Falls, Seneca County
A stately but weathered factory stands watch over the west entry to the historic Village of Seneca Falls. The bulk of the complex was completed in 1916 to house the production and offices of the Seneca Falls Machine Company, manufacturers of scroll saws, table saws, and lathes used to make machines for the early automobile industry. During the Second World War, the factory turned out artillery shells for the Allies and reached a peak employment of around 200 workers, making it one of the village’s largest employers. In the postwar period, an office addition was completed on the complex’s east side, and the firm refocused on specialty machining jobs.
Production slowed and employment fell with globalization and deindustrialization in the late twentieth century. The plant was put up for sale in 2006, but the complexity of the property discouraged buyers. The factory’s disrepair increasingly greeted visitors entering the village from the west; the older portion of the building was condemned in January 2017 owing to the lack of a functioning fire suppression system.
Finally, after fourteen years on the market, the property was purchased in 2020, with the new owner quickly completing stabilizing repairs. In 2023, the complex was determined eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, opening the possibility that historic rehabilitation tax credits might be available to facilitate the conversion of the building’s more than 100,000 square feet of well-preserved former manufacturing space and 14,000 square feet of office space to uses that would once again make the property a driver for dynamism in Seneca Falls. Moreover, rehabilitation of this highly visible structure would make for a better welcome and bolster the unique sense of history that draws people to live, learn, work, and play in Seneca Falls.
Morgan-Manning House
151 Main Street, Village of Brockport, Monroe County
Historic landmarks are resources in the important work of placemaking, embodying and communicating the uniqueness of each of the localities we call home. The stately Italianate house on Main Street has long been such an icon in the village of Brockport. Built in 1854, it was the home of successive generations of the Morgan family from 1867 until 1964. In the latter year, however, a fire severely damaged the house, seemingly dashing the desire of the last Morgan sibling Sara Morgan Manning – who lost her life in the fire – that the home “stand forever as a monument to the fine old traditions that are so important to our heritage.”
However, volunteers organizing themselves as the Western Monroe Historical Society in 1965 succeeded in restoring the house, and have fulfilled Sara’s dream for sixty years by maintaining the highly-visible property as a museum with programing that invites people young and old throughout the region to commune with our shared past. As such, it is an irreplaceable anchor to Brockport’s identity through time.
A fire again caused significant damage to the building in January 2025. Nevertheless, the steadfast work of many area fire departments ensured that the opportunity remains for us to revive this icon so that it continues to serve as a grace and an identity-defining resource to the community. With a recent organizational name change, the Morgan-Manning House Museum is marshalling all available expertise and funding to restore the house, with its contractor, Struck and Sons, under the guidance of Bero Architecture and Jensen/BRV Engineering, completing extensive stabilization and assessment efforts over the past year. Still, there is a great amount of work to do to preserve this icon that reminds Brockport what it is: will we together keep Sara’s dream, and our shared story, alive?
Cutler Mail Chute Company Building
76-94 Anderson Avenue, City of Rochester, Monroe County
Preservationists from our region can always count on finding a little piece of home in the lobbies of historic buildings across the country and the world, including the Empire State Building, the Savoy Hotel in London, and the Bacardi Building in Havana: take a look, and it’s likely that the mail chute, which quickly conveyed letters from the highest stories of ever-growing towers to their lobbies for pick-up, is emblazoned with the eagle insignia and name of the Cutler Mail Chute Company of Rochester, New York. Holding the patents of James Goold Cutler, a Rochester architect and mayor, that company exercised a virtual monopoly on mail chute production in the late nineteenth and early to mid- twentieth centuries, the boom years of high-rise construction. A 1920 headline labeled the Cutler mail chute an “essential part of every skyscraper equipment,” with the subsequent article noting the company “has the only factory in the world devoted to the production of mail chutes.”
That factory is the humble 1908 structure at 76-94 Anderson Avenue in Rochester’s Neighborhood of the Arts, but passersby who look carefully will see the Cutler eagle rendered in terracotta gazing down from its parapet. With its history producing a singular product found in buildings across the world until its closure in 1971, as well as its well-preserved early twentieth century industrial architectural features including its intact sawtooth roof, the Cutler Mail Chute Company building uniquely testifies to the city’s and the nation’s industrial history and graces a neighborhood transformed by a focus on arts & culture.
However, recent redevelopment plans appeared online that were unsympathetic to the history embodied by the site and indicated demolition as a possibility, prompting concerned neighbors to enlist the help of The Landmark Society. Led by the NOTA Neighborhood Association and guided by preservation architect and researcher Christopher Brandt, former Landmark Architectural Research Coordinator, Cynthia Howk, and The Landmark Society, advocates quickly took action to pursue City Landmark designation—an important tool that would require the City’s Preservation Board to review and approve future changes to the structure’s character-defining exterior. While the Preservation Board recommended designation, the Planning Commission denied the application, citing concerns that designation would hamper development efforts. Yet preservation and development are not mutually exclusive; time and again, adaptive reuse has proven to be a catalyst for redevelopment by retaining the character and history that make a place distinctive and community-supported. This has been the story of many of Rochester’s historically significant buildings.
With no further local recourse available, The Landmark Society has filed a lawsuit challenging the Planning Commission’s decision. The case is awaiting a ruling, but the vision remains the same: that one of Rochester’s foremost connections to our nation’s architectural heritage can be retained and repurposed for new use, rather than lost to demolition or incompatible alterations. The Landmark Society looks forward to continuing to build partnerships that will protect this structure and keep the Cutler eagle watching from its perch on Anderson Avenue.
Historic LGBTQ+ Community Sites
Thematic Listing
Historic landmarks are important resources in part because they help make the lives of the past more tangible—and help each of us see ourselves in history. Places significant to LGBTQ+ communities, however, can be overlooked because many of these communities formed out of the public eye by necessity, often receiving little mainstream attention at the time. As people age and disperse, and as many sites close or are repurposed under new ownership, knowledge of these places’ significance can fade, along with the irreplaceable opportunity to document and preserve them.
Landmarks like the recently closed Avenue Pub on Monroe Avenue in Rochester—a place of LGBTQ+ community for half a century—are valuable resources in telling our collective story in all its complexity and nuance. Yet without documentation and recognition, sites connected to historically marginalized communities can be quickly lost, sometimes without anyone realizing what has disappeared.
Through its LGBTQ+ Landmarks Initiative, The Landmark Society works with community partners and stakeholders to identify and elevate places significant to local LGBTQ+ history. Walking tours, interviews, and archival research have helped make LGBTQ+ landmarks more visible in Rochester today and have yielded narratives strong enough to support formal recognition. For example, the University of Rochester’s Todd Union was listed on the National Register of Historic Places specifically for its significance as the first meeting place for the Gay Liberation Front in Rochester. Important sites tied to the community’s experience with AIDS have also been documented, including the building that now houses Abilene Bar & Lounge on Liberty Pole Way, but was once Tara’s—a piano bar that offered upstairs space to the first AIDS Rochester office.
Still, this work remains vast and urgent. Many LGBTQ+ people grow up in straight families and may not inherit intergenerational connections to community history in the same way other groups sometimes can. Combined with decades of enforced secrecy and the historical pressure to remain “in the closet,” many significant LGBTQ+ places were never formally recorded. Without proactive effort, we risk losing these sites without ever knowing what they were.
Notably, in our region there are currently only two National Register–listed properties explicitly recognized for LGBTQ+ significance: Todd Union and the Jemima Wilkinson House in Jerusalem (Yates County), recently updated to include LGBTQ+ history related to The Public Universal Friend. Other sites, such as Genesee Valley Park, have significant LGBTQ+ ties, while many more remain unknown and undocumented. In a moment when LGBTQ+ history is increasingly threatened by erasure and censure, this thematic Five to Revive listing is a step toward documenting a fuller, more accurate community story—one in which more people can see themselves reflected in the past.
