Richardson's Canal House Reopening: What the New Owners Are Planning in Bushnell's Basin

The best way to reach Richardson's Canal House is on a bike. Three miles east of Schoen Place along the Erie Canal towpath — flat, shaded, no traffic — and at the end you lean the bikes against something, sit on the lawn, and have a beer while the light goes long over the water. We have made that ride, and we have eaten inside, where I always found the menu a little stodgy. The lawn was never the problem. The lawn has been empty since September 2025, and the Richardson's Canal House reopening now has owners, a timeline, and a structural engineer.

What the Richardson's Canal House Reopening Actually Involves

What the Richardson's Canal House Reopening Actually Involves

Nothing is open yet, and nothing will be this year. Developers Dennis Wilmot and Jim Barbato bought the property at 1474 Marsh Rd. in January and told the Rochester Business Journal they intend to launch a new restaurant by late spring or early summer. The photo caption on that same story puts the target at summer 2027, if not earlier, so treat the date as a range rather than a promise.

Barbato said discussions with a new restaurant operator are being finalized. Before any of that, the building needs work. The roof line is visibly uneven from the road, and they have a structural engineer on it. Interior work covers flooring and painting, with limits on what can change in a structure more than 200 years old. "It's really a cool piece on the canal," Barbato said.

So the operator is unnamed and the menu is unwritten. That is still more than the building had a year ago.

The Waterfront Plan Is the Bigger Story

The Waterfront Plan Is the Bigger Story

The restaurant is the headline. The water is the actual change. Wilmot and Barbato are working with the New York State Canal Corp. to determine whether the foundation of a former trolley bridge can be moved, which would open the bank for docks and water features.

That trolley was the Rochester and Eastern, which Barbato said ran from downtown Rochester to Geneva from 1903 to 1935, with stops along the Finger Lakes, until cars made it unnecessary. The Town of Perinton historian keeps a photograph of its tracks crossing the canal here. The same purchase included the adjacent Binder's Building and Cottage, which house office space, and the old Oliver Loud House, a short-term rental that also has an apartment. The block changed hands as one piece.

Two Hundred Years in One Building

Two Hundred Years in One Building

The building dates to about 1818, in what is now the hamlet of Bushnell's Basin in the Town of Perinton. Monroe County library records trace it from John Pardee to John Hartwell in 1821, then William Bushnell in 1823 — the man who ran a fleet of canal boats here and gave the hamlet its name — and then to Elias and Gould Richardson. It operated as a hotel until 1917, was converted into four apartments, and sat abandoned from 1972.

Believed to be the only remaining establishment from the canal's earliest years.

By 1978 it was slated for demolition. Vivienne Tellier and her husband Andrew Wolfe, owner of Wolfe Publications, bought and restored it, and the restaurant opened on Valentine's Day 1979. In 2002 busboy-turned-restaurateur Johannes Mueller bought Richardson's and the neighboring buildings from Tellier. Matt Hudson led the kitchen for nine years before becoming its owner, and he confirmed the last meal would be served on September 27, 2025.

Three Miles of Towpath and One 1912 Bridge

Three Miles of Towpath and One 1912 Bridge

Ride it. The Erie Canalway Trail mile markers put Pittsford's Main Street at 26.4 and Great Embankment Park at 28.0, and Bushnell's Basin sits about a mile and a half past that. Call it three miles each way, six round trip, flat the whole way. You cross the Great Embankment, where in 1822 crews carried the canal seventy feet above the Irondequoit Valley on a nearly mile-long ridge of hauled fill.

There is one catch, and there is no getting around it. Bushnell's Basin sits on the south side of the canal, and Marsh Road is the only crossing for miles in either direction. It is a single-lane truss bridge built in 1912, put up the year after a canal break destroyed its predecessor. Watch yourself on it, but the single lane works in your favor: traffic both ways has to stop and wait its turn, so nothing is coming at you fast.

Great Embankment Park is the halfway point and has parking if you want to cut the ride down. The towpath is open every day. The lawn at 1474 Marsh Rd. is not, and will not be until 2027.