Bowman Street is a quiet two-block strip in an easily overlooked pocket of a neighborhood on the city’s east side.
It’s a tight-knit community. Neighbors can be seen chatting from porches, waving from the sidewalk as they pass by, and keeping an eye on the handful of houses falling into disrepair. In one of those houses, 110 Bowman St., roughly halfway between Atlantic Avenue and East Main Street, James Bradley made a home.
Bradley, a heavyset man in his early 60s, lived alone.
“James was delightful,” said Sunshine Jacobs, a member of the Atlantic-Culver-East Main, or ACE, neighborhood association. “He loved Harry Potter. He was a gentleman.”
What troubled Jacobs was the shabby 2 ½-story house where Bradley rented his first-floor apartment. The property exemplified Rochester’s struggles with an aging housing stock and a subset of landlords unable or unwilling to invest in upkeep.
The administration’s get-tough approach to ensure affordable housing is also safe and habitable translated to multiple citations for problems at Bowman Street. And while it’s not clear what could have saved Bradley, what is clear is that those efforts to maintain the property proved ineffective.