Dr. Anthony L. Jordan was Rochester’s second Black physician, but he’s known to far more today as the namesake of the Anthony L. Jordan Center.
That center is part of the Jordan Health Network , whose mission it is provide comprehensive health care “with dignity and respect to all regardless of ability to pay.”
It’s a fitting tribute to the doctor who was said to have never turned anyone away.
Anthony Jordan: ‘The doctor who would come’
Jordan established his medical practice at 136 Adams St. in 1932 during the Great Depression and served patients for decades, frequently caring for the poor who had no place else to go and, often, no way to pay.
According to a February 2019 article written by Christopher Brennan for the Rochester Public Library’s Local History & Genealogy Division, Jordan soon found that much of his business came from the city’s Seventh Ward, a multicultural area in northeast Rochester including North Clinton, Joseph and Hudson Avenues.
“Then as now, the neighborhood was largely working class and poor, and though many doctors would not serve its population, Dr. Jordan did,” Brennan wrote of Jordan. “He was known as ‘the doctor who would come,’ when and where he was needed.”