Michael Bonafede, Judith Koehler praised for work reviving historic complex

Photos by Tom Rivers: The historic Pratt and Day buildings, plus a stone building in back, have many tenants in downtown Albion. When Michael Bonafede and Judith Koehler acquired the Day and Pratt buildings about 20 years ago, there was only one paying tenant at $50 a month. Now the Pratt Event Center, at 114-120 North Main St., has several tenants offering an array of services and merchandise.

ALBION – Twenty years ago the fate of the Pratt Opera House and the neighboring Day and Day Building looked grim. The old opera house had a stage thick with pigeon poop and bird carcasses. It hadn’t hosted an event in about 70 years.

The roof was shot and windows were missing. The entire complex was mostly vacant. There were only two tenants – David Gates, who ran a martial arts studio on the second floor, was a paying tenant at $50 a month, and McDonald’s paid $25 a month for storage space.

Michael Bonafede and Judith Koehler saw potential in the historic buildings, and they weren’t afraid of the hard work to get there. They were strongly urged by Albion’s mayor at the time, Ed Salvatore, to take on the challenge of reviving the site, with Salvatore seeing the opera house as a cultural destination and a drawing card for the downtown.

The couple has met their goal of bringing many tenants to the downtown and securing a certificate of occupancy for the theater. They have passed the reins to new owners, Taylor McCabe and Sara Barbur of Genesee County. McCabe is an electrical contractor with McCabe Enterprises in Pembroke while his partner, Barbur, works as a traveling registered nurse.

They have been friends with the Bonafede-Koehler family for many years. The new owners have deep respect for Bonafede and Koehler’s work with the historic structures in the downtown.

“It has been 20 years of toil to bring these buildings back,” McCabe said. “It went from near condemnation to a hub of the downtown. They basically saved the buildings.”

Sara Barbur and Taylor McCabe are shown with Michael Bonafede and Judith Koehler on the stage in the Pratt Theater, which opened as the Pratt Opera House in 1890. The stage was expanded in 1902, becoming the largest stage between Buffalo and Rochester for many years. The theater once sat 800 people and included a horseshoe-shaped balcony, orchestra pit and four surviving boxes. The theater has 300 seats today and will be hosting a concert on Sunday.

McCabe’s father, Barry McCabe, has been a long-time friend of Bonafede and Koehler. McCabe and Bonafede worked together fixing about 50 older homes in Rochester.

When Mike and Judy had a fire in their Albion home in 2010, Barry and his son Taylor were there in the middle of the night to repair the electric and get the power back on.

When Bonafede and Koehler bought the Pratt and Day & Day buildings, the electric in the building could have been considered a fire hazard. Barry McCabe put in new electric, doing it as a favor to his friends with his son Taylor helping over the years on some of the projects.

“We have crawled around so many cubbies of this building,” Taylor said.

Bonafede and Koehler say the buildings are in good hands with the new owners.

“They will do things different from us but their vision is aligned with ours,” Bonafede said.

Besides the Pratt and Day & Day sites, Barbur and McCabe acquired a historic stone building and a parking lot in back from Bonafede and Koehler. That stone building was owned by Mary Hollenbeck before Bonafede and Koehler bought it about a decade ago. It shares a common wall with the Pratt.

The “Stone Building” is behind the Pratt and Day & Day buildings, facing Liberty Street.

Argento’s Deli and Bakery, and the Furniture Room are among the tenants in the stone building that was originally built in 1840. It survived big fires close by in 1860 and 1880, Bonafede said.

The stone building also is used for storage. McCabe sees other potential in that building for loft apartments, or a green room because it is connected to the Pratt theater.

Although they are no longer the owners, Bonafede and Koehler were remain active helping to promote the sites, especially with concerts and entertainment in the theater. Bonafede was the drummer of the famed Black Sheep band, where Lou Gramm was lead singer before joining Foreigner. Gramm sang on the Pratt stage on June 23, 2024 in two reunion concerts with his Black Sheep band mates.

There will be another concert this Sunday starting at 4 p.m. with Black Sheep. Gramm won’t be available this time because he is on tour. Garrett Crumb, a lead singer with “Johnny Smoke,” will be singing with Black Sheep.

Other performers in the concert include The Pratt Pack Pit Band, Eclipse, Frequency Theory and The Royal Body Church Choir.

Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door, and are available at Argento’s Deli, Rise and Grind, The Downtown Browsery, Digital Ink Arts and Arnold’s Auto Parts, or online at www.prattmusic26eventbrite.com.

The tenants of the three sites now include the Downtown Browsery, Argento’s Deli & Bakery, The Furniture Room, Paranormal Response, Red Check Rustic, Albion Bible Baptist Church, Homestead Mending Company, Project U, Old Books at the New Bridge, a holistic health and healing business, studio space for D.J. Button, and a pottery business, the Maggie Potters.

“This is the most occupied space in downtown Albion,” Koehler said.

Sara Barbur and Taylor McCabe, new owners of three downtown buildings in Albion, see lots of potential in the district, and want to see the theater hosts many events for the community. They are shown in the historic Pratt Theater.

McCabe said owning the three historic sites is a good business opportunity, especially with the buildings now in good condition with many tenants. But he sees it as an outlet for community service. As McCabe Enterprises has got busier, McCabe said he has had less time for community initiatives.

He used to be president of the Lyndonville Tigers amateur football team, and McCabe often had the players out doing community cleanups, projects and fundraisers.

Barbur said owning the downtown buildings is “outside the daily grind” in her usual career. She embraces the challenge of bringing even more activity to the properties.

“Taylor is the dreamer, and I’m the more practical person,” Barbur said. “But this will be an adventure together.”

Lou Gramm gave a high-octane performance at the Pratt on June 23, 2024. He is shown singing one of seven Black Sheep songs with Michael Bonafede playing the drums and Alona Kuhns on bass. McCabe Enterprises, an electrical contractor, and Milton CAT brought in the equipment and installed an air conditioning system in the theater for the two shows.

When the Pratt was gearing up for the Black Sheep reunion concert on June 23, 2024, the area was gripped in a stifling heat wave with temps in the 90s. That was too hot for the third floor of the opera house. Bonafede was worried about the crowd and the performers in such a hot space.

He reached out to McCabe about bringing in air conditioning. McCabe was able to secure a generator from Milton CAT and bring in an enormous air conditioner and install the piping to keep the temps down to 72 degrees in an uninsulated theater. Bonafede could see McCabe’s commitment and ability to solve problems with that feat.

McCabe said working out the AC for the two concerts that day was exhilarating.

“I felt incredible,” he said, recalling those concerts in a cool theater. “We enjoyed being a part of that. It was a big milestone.”

Judith Koehler is shown given a tour of the GAR Room last year. This is a rare, historic Grand Army of the Republic meeting room at 116 North Main St. Civil War veterans from three local brigades gathered in this room from 1884 to 1930.

Bonafede and Koehler said some potential buyers have shown interest in the properties, but they didn’t feel like their vision matched Bonafede’s and Koehler’s. They are confident Barbur and McCabe are the right people to lead the properties.

“We see these buildings as a community,” Bonafede said about the three historic sites. “We want fair rents for the tenants and for them to be cooperative people, working together.”

McCabe and Barbur said their goal is to foster economic development for small businesses, while preserving the Pratt theater for performances and events, and also to continue to safeguard at the GAR Room on the third floor of the Day & Day Building.

“These are two sacred spaces with the Pratt and the GAR,” McCabe said. “They need to be cared for and preserved for the long-term.”

Michael Bonafede is shown in November 2022 with a mural in Beaver Alley with a Gold Medal Flour mural on the Pratt building. Bonafede had paint scraped off that summer from the brick wall when he saw remnants of the original Gold Medal Flour mural. He and his wife, Judith Koehler, decided to recreate the original mural from the early 1900s.