Despite Long Slide by Kodak, Rochester Avoids Decay

They were plucked from the personal memories immortalized 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 plummeted 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. “But if you step back and look at the last two or three decades, you see the emergence of a much more diversified, much more knowledge-based economy.”

Kodak announced last week its most recent reorganization, an effort to cut costs and enhance digital operations, which now account for 80 percent of revenue. But after the company said in November that it could run out of cash in a year if it could not sell more than 1,000 digital-imaging patents, fears of bankruptcy have emerged among investors, retirees and employees.

A Kodak spokesman, Christopher Veronda, said the company did not comment on market rumors. In an e-mail, he added, “Rochester has been our home for more than 130 years, and it remains our home.”

Still, nowhere have Kodak’s troubles resonated more than in Rochester, where George Eastman’s philanthropy and legacy live on in myriad institutions, including the University of Rochester and its Eastman School of Music. The George Eastman House museum of photography and motion pictures still has the oak box he used to keep up with his donations, whether it was the $625,000 he gave in 1901 to the Mechanics Institute, now the Rochester Institute of Technology, or his smaller gifts to groups like the Vacant Lot Gardening Association or the Rochester Association of Workers for the Blind. The company’s charitable contributions continued long after his death in 1932, and local officials say its generous buyout and severance packages have cushioned the blow of its decline.

Kodak’s fall carries an emotional punch, too, like seeing an enduring part of the American experience wither away.

James Ulrich, who volunteers as a docent at the Eastman House, thinks back with pride on the greatest summer job ever, traveling the country in a Kodak company car taking pictures of tourists taking pictures.

Robert Shanebrook, who until his retirement in 2003 spent most of his 35 years at Kodak working with world-class photographers like Ansel Adams and Yousuf Karsh, said: “We all had this personal investment and personal pride in being part of this organization; we felt we were working with the most capable people in the world. And then it all sort of crumbled, like finding out something bad about someone you were close to.

“You think, ‘How could that be?’ ”

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, or seeing the “Kodak” sign blazing across the night sky downtown and wondering if before long the lights will go dark.

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 percent of Rochester’s work force. Today, it is 6 percent.

“Part of my job is convincing people we aren’t the place we once were,” Mayor Thomas S. Richards said.

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