By BEN DOBBIN
The Associated Press

ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Lilacs long have signaled the true advent of spring in this Snow Belt city, home to one of America's oldest municipal arboretums.

A fragrant, multihued corner of Highland Park draws a half-million visitors each May to the Lilac Festival, two-thirds of them winter-weary residents of the Flower City.

''It's about the first time you can come out with a short-sleeve shirt on,'' ventures Tom Pollock, superintendent of horticulture.

''Yeah, hopefully,'' interjects colleague John Stewart, mindful that winter's last hurrah can occasionally keep the 1,200 bushes in 535 varieties from blooming for an extra week or so.

The floral, music, art and food festival runs May 14-23. Begun in 1898 as purely botanical Lilac Sunday, it began transforming itself in the mid-1970s into an all-encompassing celebration of springtime.

The long-awaited warmth does wonders for a bevy of regional attractions, from boat tours along the Erie Canal and Lake Ontario's shore to intimate museums memorializing photography magnate George Eastman, doll collector Margaret Woodbury Strong and suffragist Susan B. Anthony.

World of options

Within a 45-minute drive are the vineyards of the fjordlike Finger Lakes; the mini-Grand Canyon vistas of Letchworth State Park, and Genesee Country Village and Museum, the nation's third-largest ''living history'' museum with its array of 19th-century pioneer farmsteads, mansions and log cabins, interpreters in period clothing and artisans of old-style crafts.

Eastman's 50-room Colonial Revival mansion, built in 1905 and set off by Italian Renaissance villa-style gardens, is marking its 50th year as a museum of photography and film.

Here can be found the originals of the most famous photos the world has known. The archive of 400,000 images runs the gamut from 1830s daguerreotypes to motion pictures to digital prints. The patriarch of popular photography, Eastman transformed Kodak into one of the world's most recognizable brands and Rochester into a manufacturing hub. He also pumped his riches into education and the arts, founding the University of Rochester, the Eastman School of Music and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, a perennial performer at the Lilac Festival.

The city's most famous daughter remains Susan B. Anthony. Her red-brick Victorian home, where she was arrested for daring to vote in 1872, chronicles the women's rights movement. Artifacts on display include her trademark alligator bag, eyeglasses, black silk dress and embroidered cape.

A long-awaited museum honoring Frederick Douglass, who published The North Star journal on Main Street, opened in April at a temporary site downtown. A public statue of the anti-slavery crusader erected here in 1898 was the first in the nation to honor a black American.

Mrs. Strong's dream of creating a ''museum of fascination'' to house her collection of 300,000-plus objects of American culture dating back to the 1820s wasn't realized until 1982, 13 years after her death.

The museum boasts the world's most comprehensive doll collection, plus thousands of toys, household furnishings and miniatures. In recent years, it has evolved into an interactive educational center for children, featuring a street scene from television's Sesame Street, a whaling ship, a 1918 carousel and a 1956 diner transported from Williamsport, Pa.

Outdoor offerings

The rejuvenated High Falls district, anchored around the Genesee River gorge, is a lure for night-lifers and fans of minor-league baseball and soccer streaming out of Frontier Field, a 3-year-old stadium fashioned after Baltimore's Camden Yards.

For peace and quiet, nothing beats hilly Highland Park with its profusion of blooming flowers and bushes, from daffodils and azaleas to rhododendrons and lilacs in myriad pastels from deepest purple to purest white.

''They're real sturdy,'' says Mr. Stewart, a horticulturist for 29 years. ''Not much happens to them, unless a car runs into them or something.''

That did happen a few years back. As for the city's heavy snowfall -- averaging 90 inches a year -- it usually leaves behind little more than a few broken branches.

''Everyone recognizes that once the festival comes, the winter's over,'' says organizer Jim LeBeau. ''Some years we've had snow on the first weekend and 80 degrees by the second weekend. People don't mind it. You're outdoors, you're seeing friends, spring is in the air at last.''

JOURNEY