You can't change Utica overnight, but there's a small group aiming to at least spruce up the downtown corridor.

Tuesday evening, about 40 people attended the second Genesee Street Design Development Workshop held by Rust2Green at Hotel Utica.

During the event attendees offered several ideas, including adding Wi-Fi hotspots, utilizing sidewalks more to promote the urban landscape, and in one case, converting the entire street into a walking space.

Paula Horrigan is a professor at Cornell University and heads the university's Rust2Green Capstone Studio for graduating students.

She says Genesee Street is unique.

"It's not just one street," Horrigan said. "It's a series of different districts and different places, and how to develop a public space and infrastructure improvement plan that could respond and respect those kind of characteristic qualities of it."

Horrigan says her students have four goals when it comes to updating Genesee Street, with plans to make it more welcoming, connected, activated and more green. But, in order to make the downtown corridor a more popular place there first has to be partnerships built between public and private sectors.

As for a timeline, Brian Thomas with Urban Renewal says there isn't one just yet. The project remains dependent on money and the city still has to apply for grant funding.

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