Traffic may not have stopped, but Rochester businesses are happy with visitor turnout for eclipse

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – While the crowds may not have come out en masse, not everyone thought the total solar eclipse in Rochester was a total bust.

While there are currently no hard numbers on just how many people visited the region on Monday, we do know that all 8,000 hotel rooms in Monroe County were sold out. Some of the most popular museums in town saw record-breaking crowds and a number of small businesses had some of their best sales days ever.

It’s pretty clear that when some of the more dedicated eclipse-chasers saw our cloud forecast, they kept right on moving to other cities in the path of totality but not all of them.

“The George Eastman Museum had the best day ever the day before, the Strong Museum of Play was wall-to-wall with people so, people came early, they did all the things and every person that checked into a hotel in Rochester got a brochure from us saying what they could do besides the eclipse and it worked,” says Don Jeffries, the CEO of Visit Rochester.

But we clearly didn’t come close to the top estimate of as many as 500,000 visitors.

Jennifer Lewke: “When you look at what to expect, how do you calculate that? How do you say, okay, here’s what we need to prepare for?”

Don Jeffries: “What we did is we went to Greenville, S.C., Lexington, three or four others. St. Louis had one. We talked with them a year ago, said what can we expect, how many people, what should we do.”

Jennifer Lewke: “What would you say to the people who say, it didn’t materialize, we didn’t see the visitors we thought we were going to see?”

Don Jeffries: “We did, we did. The hotels were full.”

Jennifer Lewke: “There’s been nothing from the hotels or anything saying people canceled to try somewhere else along the path?”

Don Jeffries: “Nope, I think people were committed. They were going to come. We sat down with the hotels a year ago and said get a two-night minimum, non-refundable deposit to make sure that people did come, and they did. We heard that there were 120 different events in Monroe County, so it was spread out, so it wasn’t like everybody going into one spot. Even downtown was spread out.”

The manager at Calabresella’s on Park tells News10NBC that business was booming all weekend, especially on Monday.

“We actually quadrupled our business yesterday, most places aren’t actually open down here on Monday so, we were fortunate enough to be open already plus with all the traffic coming in and people coming into town,” says Tom Comstock.

It wasn’t just sandwiches those visitors were looking for.

“Weeks out there’s people calling up ordering nine dozen cookies, 10 dozen and so we sold a lot of eclipse cookies,” Comstock says.

Business was just as busy across Park Avenue at Parkleigh. While the gift shop didn’t open on Monday, sales were strong all weekend long.

“It felt kind of like a celebration weekend, a little bit like a festival almost,” explains manager, Jessica Irwin.

And the visitors were interested in a lot of the eclipse merchandise that the shop had stocked.

“We had a lot of local artists approach us early on, like maybe a year ago and we thought, it’s so far away but as soon as we brought things in, people bought them, we had great local artists,” she adds.

So, while our area didn’t see the major surge like some predicted, it got a steady stream of visitors that spent their money, despite not getting best view of the total solar eclipse.