Walk the canal path past the Box Factory smokestack this month and the site looks quiet. No cranes, no crews, just a fenced lot behind a building that has stood there since the early 1900s. But paperwork is moving. A Rochester restaurant owner has proposed turning the former BME Associates engineering office at the east end of the parking lot into Blackbird, an American contemporary restaurant with a rooftop bar over the water, along with six apartments on the second floor. The plans are under review by the village planning board, and the owner has said he hopes to have the space open by December.
A few blocks away, at Village Hall, something bigger is being decided, and most of the people deciding it have never touched a blueprint. They are residents, shop owners, and anyone who walks Main Street regularly, and the village is asking them, right now, to submit ideas for what downtown Fairport should become next.
Here is the part that surprises most people who hear about this for the first time. The common assumption is that a government program picks a winning town, hands over a check, and then asks residents to help spend it. Fairport's process runs the other direction. The village is competing for New York State's Downtown Revitalization Initiative, a program that awards $10 million to one community in each of the state's ten economic development regions. Fairport hasn't won that money. It is trying to convince Albany it should. And the tool it's using to make that case is the same "Call for Projects" that's open to any resident with an idea, through October 5.
The Application Is the Ask
The DRI isn't a grant Fairport already holds. It's a competition, and the Finger Lakes region has only one seat at the table. In past cycles, that seat has gone to places like Seneca Falls, which won the designation in 2019. Ten regions, one winner apiece, and the village currently drafting its pitch is Fairport, not a village that has already secured the funding and is now figuring out how to allocate it.
That distinction changes what the Call for Projects actually is. It isn't a wish list for money already in hand. It's the evidence the state will use to decide whether Fairport gets the money at all. Every idea submitted between now and October 5, whether it comes from a longtime resident, a downtown property owner, or a developer with early sketches, can help shape the application itself.
What the State Is Actually Grading
Johnna McCooey, executive director of the Fairport Office of Community and Economic Development, put it plainly: a strong application is more than a list of individual projects.
"We are looking for investments that reinforce one another, projects that can leverage state funding, encourage additional private investment and contribute to a more connected and vibrant downtown."
That word, reinforce, is doing real work. New York isn't scoring applications on whether each idea sounds nice in isolation. It's checking whether the pieces add up to a coherent story: does new housing sit near improved public space, does public space connect to the canal, does the canal connection support the businesses that are already investing on their own. A downtown that can show that kind of alignment reads as a safer bet for state money than one submitting a scattered list of separate favors.
Village Manager Bryan White framed the invitation the same way when he opened the process, calling it a rare chance to think about what could make a lasting difference in how people experience downtown Fairport, whether that means new life for an existing property, new housing, a better public space, or an easier way to move between the places that already make the village work.
The Box Factory Is Already Making the Case
This is where the Blackbird proposal matters beyond its own merits as a restaurant. It's private money moving on a canalfront property with zero dependence on DRI funding, and it happens to be exactly the kind of momentum that strengthens a state application. A reviewer weighing Fairport's bid isn't just reading a list of hopes. They can point to a building at the edge of the Erie Canal that's already converting from vacant engineering office to restaurant and housing, permit pending, on a timeline independent of any grant decision.
Whether the Box Factory redevelopment ends up cited by name in Fairport's final submission isn't public yet. But the pattern it demonstrates, private reinvestment already underway along the waterfront the village is trying to strengthen, is the same pattern the DRI program says it wants to see.
What Counts as a Project
The village has been specific about what it will consider, and the list is wider than sidewalks and streetlights. Submissions can address:
- New investment in existing downtown buildings
- Creating or expanding downtown housing (Fairport carries the state's Pro-Housing Community designation)
- Improvements to public spaces
- Better connections between Main Street, the canal waterfront, and other downtown destinations
- Enhancements to the Erie Canal waterfront itself
- Support for downtown economic activity generally
Ideas don't need architectural drawings or a construction timeline. The village has said early-stage concepts are welcome, which means a resident who has a strong sense of what's missing from a stretch of Main Street, or what would make the canal path easier to use, has as much standing to submit as a developer with a rendering already in hand.
The Window Is Open Now
The village held an information session for property owners, developers, and businesses on September 8 at the Village Hall Board Room, aimed at anyone considering a private project submission. If that date already passed you by, the door hasn't closed. Ideas can be submitted online at FairportDRI.com through October 5, and hardcopy forms are available at the Fairport Public Library and at Village Hall in the clerk's office for anyone who would rather write it out than fill in a web form.
There's no cost to submitting, and no guarantee any single idea makes the final application. What gets built into Fairport's pitch to the state will be shaped by whoever takes the two weeks left to say something.
Fairport residents already carry the kind of knowledge this process is built to capture, the sense of which corner feels underused, which building has sat quiet too long, which stretch of the canal path could do more if it connected better to what's around it. The village asked for that knowledge on purpose. It runs out in a couple of weeks.
If you're thinking about what a home in this village means for the next several years, not just the next transaction, Renee DeMars has spent a career watching how Fairport's downtown decisions ripple outward into its streets and its market. Let's Connect.
