Exchange is a boulevard north of the Ford Street Bridge. It passes the court house and the War Memorial and the place where they made Grant’s casket, and then it hands off northbound duties to State Street at Four Corners.
But south of the Ford Street Bridge, as it passes the church where they had David Gantt’s funeral and extends south between the river and Plymouth Avenue, it’s a street.
A dangerous street.
And why nobody warned the professor about that, I don’t understand.
Heikki Rantakari. A thin man in his 40s, 5-11, white, with an accent to match his name. He flew in Friday night from Boston, where he’s a PhD at MIT, to teach some classes at the University of Rochester. He flew in and got a ride to an Airbnb in the 1000 block of Exchange Street, got inside, laid out his stuff, and disappeared.
When Saturday morning came, and students gathered in class, there was no professor. The part-time visiting professor had vanished. His family in Massachusetts hadn’t heard from him, his colleagues in Rochester hadn’t heard from him. He was gone.
I suggest they check the river.
Because while the news glibly reported that his rental house was within walking distance of the U of R’s River Campus, it’s not a walk that a white guy from out of town would be well advised to make. It’s not a walk that many who live in that neighborhood would be willing to make.
Because this is 2023 and the southwest of Rochester is one of those stretches of urban America where opportunistic crime is not an uncommon occurrence. And setting out late on a Friday night looking to find some dinner is dicey, and walking down a dead-end street, past an abandoned factory with a nice mural, to catch a path along the river to the old Erie Lackawanna railroad bridge, and then finally to cross over the river to university property sounds a lot more peaceful than it is.
From Exchange Street, if he headed south, maybe looking for food, he’d come to Plymouth Avenue and its junction with Jefferson Avenue, where I think the Haitian place has closed. From there he could continue toward the intersection of Brooks and Genesee, where the pedestrian bridge from the university and constant patrols by campus police have gentrified a block or two. But either way, he’d be on or near Plymouth, Jefferson and Genesee, which the open data portal tells us is a pretty good place to get shot.
And a pretty bad place for a visiting professor to be, especially at night.
Hopefully he’s ok somewhere. Hopefully there’s an explanation, an episode, a bender, a breakdown, something that has him somewhere safe and unharmed.
But hope can’t always crowd out fear, and the fear is that he has been the victim of crime.
And that raises questions about what he had or hadn’t been told about the neighborhood where he rented a house, and what other accommodations were or weren’t available to him.
Does the university not have places for visitors to stay? In that sprawling campus aren’t there any quarters for people in Heikki Rantakari’s situation? And what about the usually empty hotel at Brooks Landing, doesn’t the university have a contract there or anything for visiting staff? Did he choose to get an Airbnb on Exchange Street because that’s what he preferred, or because other arrangements hadn’t been made by the university?
And even if he wanted a house to himself and he wanted it on Exchange Street, was there no one at the university to explain to him that that was not a good idea? Did nobody have a conversation with him about crime patterns in the city of Rochester? Could no one tell him that many “vacation rentals” in the city are used by people organizing house parties, not by folks looking for a quiet place to get a night’s sleep?
The worrisome disappearance of this professor bespeaks a possible tragedy that could have been prevented. The University of Rochester is a wonderful institution, and its River Campus is a sacred Rochester place, but the gunfire that’s heard across the river is a reminder of a different reality.
A reality that a genial scholar from Massachusetts may not have been warned about.