A Court Just Ordered Perinton to Approve the Burgundy Basin Development. Here's Everything You Need to Know.
A Place Below the Canal
A Place Below the Canal
I've ridden my bike past the Burgundy Basin probably a hundred times. Maybe more. As a kid I had friends out in Bushnell's Basin, and the ride from the city took you right along the canal towpath and then down Marsh Road, where the old inn sat — this big, boxy banquet hall tucked into the valley below the canal. Even then, something about it struck me as slightly precarious. The Erie Canal runs up there, elevated above the street, and the Basin sits down here in the low ground where Irondequoit Creek once carved its way through the valley. You can feel the grade when you're on a bike.
I'm pretty sure I went to a wedding there at some point. I don't remember exactly when. What I do remember is watching it go dark — the windows boarded, the parking lot empty, the old sign fading — and wondering two things every time I rode by: what are they going to do with this property, and isn't that basically a flood waiting to happen?
It turns out a lot of people have been asking the same questions. Today, a New York State Supreme Court justice answered the first one — and the second one is still very much unsettled.
Sixty-Five Years of Celebrations
Sixty-Five Years of Celebrations
The story of the Burgundy Basin starts with Carl Arena Sr., who began a catering business out of the back of his station wagon in 1951. By 1954 he had established a restaurant called The Burgundy at the Cadillac Hotel in downtown Rochester. Demand kept growing, and in 1956 he purchased a small neighborhood restaurant in Bushnell's Basin called The Basin Inn — the seed of what would become one of the largest banquet facilities in Western New York.
Over the next five decades, under the leadership of Arena's sons Joe and Carl Jr., the small pub evolved into a facility able to host events from 25 to 1,200 guests. By 2006 — its 50th anniversary — the torch passed to the third generation: Carl R. Arena and Michael Clarcq. The venue had earned Rochester's Choice Award for Best Banquet Hall every year since 2002. It hosted chamber luncheons, political candidate nights, BOCES graduations, Fairport Jazz Band galas, sports banquets, proms, and hundreds of weddings every year. For a certain generation of Monroe County residents, the Burgundy Basin is where the big moments happened.
Then 2020 arrived. In June of that year, the family posted a message on Facebook: "The Burgundy Basin's primary goal was to bring large groups together in celebration. Unfortunately, the current crisis has created immense challenges for our industry and has made the continuation of our business impossible." They were closing for good. After 65 years, the Basin Inn was done.
What Developers Want to Build
What Developers Want to Build
The property didn't sit in limbo long. By 2023, developer Basin Landing Partners — working through engineering and architecture firm Passero Associates — submitted a Special Use Permit application to the Town of Perinton to redevelop the 11.3-acre site into a mixed-use community. The proposal called for a three-story, 180-unit apartment building, for-sale townhomes, and retail space including a coffee shop or bakery. The plan also proposed new public access amenities along the Erie Canal — a detail that appealed to the towpath community, if not the immediate neighborhood.
Co-owner Carl Arena argued the project fit the land and the town. "Our families have been here again since the 50s," he told News10NBC. "We want to keep it in the family one way or another." He also made a case that had some teeth: when the Burgundy Basin was running at full capacity, thousands of people came through that lot every week. The proposed housing, he argued, would generate less traffic than a busy Saturday night banquet.
The application was filed under the Erie Canal Corridor Overlay (ECCO) District — a designation that adds layers of environmental and aesthetic review to development along the canal. The Town Board declared itself lead agency for the State Environmental Quality Review (SEQRA) process in November 2023, meaning every facet of the project — traffic, flooding, environmental impact, slope stability — would be formally evaluated before any decision was made.
Why Neighbors Said No — And Why a Judge Overruled Them
Why Neighbors Said No — And Why a Judge Overruled Them
From the first public hearing in June 2023, the room was divided — and loud. Residents packed the Perinton Town Offices at 1350 Turk Hill Road to speak against the plan. Their concerns fell into three categories, all legitimate, all interconnected.
Traffic. The Burgundy Basin sits at the end of Marsh Road, accessible only by crossing a one-lane historic bridge. There are no sidewalks. Cyclists, families with strollers, and pedestrians already share a bridge that was never designed for density. Adding hundreds of residents to that chokepoint felt, to neighbors, like an obvious problem in search of a disaster. "It's right next to a one-lane bridge that right now is a little bit hazardous to cross and this is going to make things considerably worse," said Derek Slovenec, who lives directly across from the property.
Scale. The proposal called for four-story buildings in a neighborhood of single-story homes. "It's kind of an over-development of the property. And they are proposing a lot of high-density population housing within this very small area," said neighbor Bill Corbett.
Flooding. This one hit closest to home — literally. The Burgundy Basin property sits in the low ground below the Great Embankment, the mile-long, 65-foot-tall engineered berm that carries the Erie Canal over the Irondequoit Valley. The embankment is one of the most remarkable feats of early American engineering, and also one of its acknowledged weak points. According to the Perinton Historical Society, the Great Embankment has suffered at least three serious failures: in 1911, when the new enlarged canal gave way and washed out Marsh Road itself; in 1912, when a break over an old culvert sent concrete blocks eight feet thick tumbling; and in 1974, when a construction engineering error caused the canal floor to collapse into a sewer tunnel being dug beneath it. Water flooded Bushnell's Basin and devastated many homes before guard gates could be closed. One woman was swept out of her basement wall by the rush of water.
I didn't know any of this history when I rode past. I just noticed that the building sat low. But the instinct was right: this is a valley that has flooded before, more than once, in living memory.
Developers brought in Terracon Consultants to perform slope stability analyses on the embankment, including additional studies in November 2024 assuming zero soil cohesion — a worst-case engineering scenario. Passero's president Jess Sudol told the town: "We don't plan on impacting the canal or the embankment. We don't plan on clearing any trees on the embankment. We're very much respecting what's there today."
The Town Board heard all of it and voted no. In May 2025, they rejected the Special Use Permit application, citing flooding, traffic, and the mismatch in building scale. Town Council member Michael Folino stated plainly: "We're not going to know if there is a serious compromise with the embankment until it's too late."
Basin Landing Partners went to court. Today — April 10, 2026 — Justice James E. Walsh Jr. ruled that Perinton must grant the Special Use Permit for the Burgundy Basin redevelopment, overturning the Town Board's decision. The full ruling text is not yet publicly available, but the outcome is unambiguous: the town's rejection has been reversed by a state court.
What This Means for Bushnell's Basin — and for Perinton
What This Means for Bushnell's Basin — and for Perinton
A court order to grant a Special Use Permit doesn't mean bulldozers arrive next week. Perinton may appeal the ruling. Additional site plan reviews, SEQRA compliance, and approvals from the Historic Architecture Commission still likely lie ahead. What today's ruling does mean is that the legal basis for blocking this project has been removed. The permit must be issued.
It's worth stepping back and looking at the housing context. Rochester is ranked the second-best [housing market in the nation for 2026 by Realtor.com](https://www.rochesterfirst.com/real-estate/what-makes-rochester-2-top-housing-market-for-2026/), with forecast home price growth of 10.3% — fourth-highest of any market in the country. The Greater Rochester Association of Realtors reported record-low inventory through mid-2025, with only about 1,400 active listings across the region at the end of June. New construction accounts for just 6.8% of listings in Rochester, well below the national average of 16.7%. Homes are selling in days, routinely above asking price, in a market that has been undersupplied for years.
The Burgundy Basin property isn't in Pittsford — it's in Perinton, technically a separate town that Bushnell's Basin straddles. But the housing pressure is the same across the whole corridor. A resident who sold his home in Perinton and tried to stay told the town meeting: "I tried to find a place to live in Perinton and really struggled to find a place. I think more housing is needed." Meanwhile, Monroe County expanded tax incentives for new rental housing construction in January 2026, acknowledging the shortage is now severe enough to affect site selectors evaluating Rochester for major employers.
None of that makes the flood concerns disappear. The Great Embankment has failed three times. The Irondequoit Valley is not flat. And anyone who has ridden a bike down Marsh Road on a Saturday morning knows that the one-lane bridge situation is real. What Monroe County's 2025–2029 Consolidated Housing Plan calls "a declining affordability for both owner and renter occupied housing" is also real.
The question Bushnell's Basin is now living through — whether the land that has always been part of this community's identity can absorb the density the housing market demands — is the same question playing out in neighborhoods across Monroe County and across the country. The Burgundy Basin property is 11.3 acres of complicated history. What it becomes next will be just as complicated.
What would the Basin — the place, the valley, the community that formed around the canal — look like if the project is done well? And what does it mean that a judge had to order a town to build housing that half its residents didn't want?
