By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 25 October 2013 at 12:00 am
Albion and Medina both keep up annual tradition
Photos by Tom Rivers
Karen Appleman, left, and Paula Brooks, vendors in the Downtown Browsery in Albion, were among the local merchants that served up big baskets of candy for youngsters this evening.
Albion and Medina business owners both welcomed hundreds of children on the hunt for candy and treats during their annual Beggar’s Night events, which are typically the Friday before Halloween.
Hanna Kumalac, 5, and her brother Traper Croft, 1, were in costume for Beggar’s Night in Albion.
Krantz Furniture added a large Whoville display along the sidewalk as part of today’s Beggar’s Night in Albion.
Matthew Bloom, 3, of Albion dressed as a San Francisco 49er football player for Beggar’s Night.
Linda Smith and her son Ryan serve up treats and cider from Krantz Furniture.
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 25 October 2013 at 12:00 am
ALBION – Vendors for the Orleans County Farmers’ Market won’t be selling their wares on Saturday in Albion due to the high winds forecast.
The National Weather Service has issued a wind advisory for Saturday from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The winds, forecast for 25 to 35 miles per hour with gusts up to 50 to 55 mph, would be dangerous for the vendors, and could send their overhead tents flying.
ALBION – Children 10 and under are welcome to dress as monsters and other characters and then head to downtown businesses for treats.
Beggar’s Night is returning to Albion after taking a hiatus last year. The event begins at 5:30 p.m. on Friday at the Albion Fire Hall on North Platt Street.
The Village and Town of Albion, along with the Albion Merchants Association, are sponsoring Beggar’s Night. Thanks to the efforts of many individuals and groups, including past organizer June Persia, the Albion Police Department, and Auxiliary Police, we are looking forward to a large turnout for the Oct. 25 event.
During this Trick-Or-Treat event, local businesses will provide candy and other treats throughout the downtown area along Main Street and Bank Street. Parents must accompany children on the walk.
This year the route has been shortened but there will still be plenty of goodies! Businesses that fall outside of the planned route will be provided with space downtown to participate. This was done to make the walk safer for the children. Krantz Furniture had added a large Whoville display straight out of the world of Dr. Seuss.
Hoag Library on Friday is also hosting a Halloween party for teen-agers from 6 to 8 p.m. That event is free and includes dancing, refreshments and a costume contest. To register for that event, call 589-4246.
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 24 October 2013 at 12:00 am
Photo by Tom Rivers – Tierra Hastings, right, is interning at Hoag Library in Albion with a focus on event planning. She is pictured with Susie Gaylard, an administrative assistant who plans many of the events at Hoag. Hastings has coordinated a first-ever Halloween party on Friday for local teen-agers.
ALBION – Tierra Hastings, a senior at Albion High School, said many of her classmates still like to dress up for Halloween, but they feel like they are too old to go trick-or-treating.
Hastings, 17, is planning a “Spooky Spectacular” party on Friday for teen-agers. They can dress up as their favorite characters and come to what they think may be unlikely place for a party: the local public library.
Hastings is an intern at Hoag Library, working with Susie Gaylard to plan events. Hoag tends to focus its programming on children’s activities or local history that is geared towards adults.
Hastings suggested the party for teens, and Gaylard was quick to back the proposal. Hastings has designed the flyers for the free event, and will work with Gaylard to line up refreshments, door prizes and music.
“There will be Halloween music – Thriller and Monster Mash,” Hastings said.
The library is staying open late on Friday for the party from 6 to 8 p.m. Participants must be ages 13 to 18 and they need to register by calling 589-4246. Hastings and Gaylard need to have a sense of how many people are coming so they can have enough food. That’s one of the tricks to planning events: anticipating the crowd.
Once the Halloween party is over, Hastings has other ideas in mind to welcome the teen-age crowd for the library. She is planning movie nights.
“She is going to get kids to come here who don’t normally come here,” Gaylard said.
ALBION – Local tales of dastardly deeds and miserable misfortunes will be told by ghostly guides on Saturday during a Haunted History of downtown Albion.
Community members will portray past residents in a candlelight tour of the downtown. The event runs from 5 to 8 p.m. with tours leaving every 15 minutes from 120 North Main St. The event ends with treats and hot apple cider.
Tickets are $5 each. The Albion Main Street Alliance is planning the event. Reservations are required and can be made by calling 589-2502 or by email at albionmainstreet@gmail.com.
(Editor’s note: Tom Rivers will portray George Williams, the tight rope walker from Brockport who was walking over the Erie Canal in Albion when the Main Street bridge collapsed on Sept. 28, 1859, killing 15 people.)
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 23 October 2013 at 12:00 am
“I owe these guys a huge amount of gratitude. If this had spread it could have been tragic for the community.” – Shawn Malark, owner of Orleans Pallet
Photos by Tom Rivers – Shawn Malark said he is thankful the massive fire at his warehouse last Thursday didn’t cause more damage to neighboring structures. A demolition crew continues to work on taking down two remaining walls in the warehouse.
ALBION – Shawn Malark watched the fire take off on Thursday afternoon, a blaze that destroyed a 16,000-square-foot warehouse and threatened his business, Orleans Pallet.
Malark worried the fire might be unstoppable, and could consume his neighbors, Empire Coating Inc. and a grain storage facility on West Academy Street. He envisioned major disruptions for residents if there was a big explosion.
But about 150 firefighters contained the blaze to the stone warehouse that was built in 1901.
“The firefighters were huge,” Malark said at Orleans Pallet today, where the business continues to make pallets and ship them to customers. “I owe these guys a huge amount of gratitude. If this had spread it could have been tragic for the community.”
Orleans Pallet continues in a manufacturing site, in an adjacent building to the warehouse. The surviving building suffered water and smoke damage, but Malark and his six employees have worked long hours to keep the operation going.
“There have been no service interruptions,” Malark said. “We’ve been trying to assure our customers that we’re fully operational and we have inventory for every customer.”
Malark and Orleans Pallet have a larger site in Rochester on Lee Road. He lost the main warehouse in Albion due to the fire, but the manufacturing site has about 11,000 square feet. His equipment for breaking down old or damaged pallets and rebuilding them with fresh wood all survived the fire.
The office with his computers also was spared, and so were his forklifts and a lineup of about 10 tractor trailer trucks. Most of them were parked by the loading dock of the fire and they all escaped unscathed.
Orleans Pallet employees Andrew Steffen, left, and Robert Morehouse use a saw to break down some pallets that will be rebuilt with fresh pieces.
Malark is thankful so many critical components of the business survived, especially when they were only a few feet away from the fire. A building across the street had its siding melt because of the heat from the fire.
“Not losing any trailers was a huge blessing,” Malark said.
Some of those trailers were full of 500 to 600 pallets. A smaller sandstone building next to the warehouse also was spared from the fire. That building is used for storage.
Malark opened Orleans Pallet in Albion at the corner of Hamilton Street and Route 31 in 2006. He had worked from three buildings at the site and had plans to put a new roof on the big warehouse.
“We had big plans for the building,” Malark said. “It’s just devastating, but it’s one day at a time. It’s nothing you can conquer in one day.”
Demolition crews continue to dismantle two remaining walls from the warehouse. That building could be down this weekend or next week, Malark said.
Once the site is safe, he will work on cleaning it up. He wants to salvage the sandstone from the building. He said many people have already expressed an interest in buying the stone.
On Wednesday morning, he signed off on donating the Albion Cold Storage Company sign to the village. The stone sign from the building’s original owner split in half but survived the fire and demolition.
Malark thanked Albion Fire Chief Rocky Sidari, Police Chief Rollie Nenni, Dale Brooks from the DPW, Ron Vendetti in code enforcement and Mayor Dean Theodorakos. They have all been cooperative in coping with the fire and its aftermath. (Malark had to put up $35,000 for the demolition.)
“We had to take the building down because it was a threat to the community,” Malark said.
He remains very impressed with the teamwork from the firefighters. More than a dozen fire companies from four counties responded to the fire and Sidari, the Albion chief, led the effort.
“Had Rocky not got everyone going where they needed to be the other buildings would not have been saved,” Malark said. “These were volunteer people risking their lives to not only save this business but to look out for the community. The heart and soul of the community was present at this fire.”
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 22 October 2013 at 12:00 am
ALBION – An Albion man who went to a home late on night on Feb. 1 and brutally beat up a 59-year-old resident, causing severe injuries, was sentenced to four years in state prison on Monday.
Domingo E. Candelaria, 22, of 175 North Main St., was sentenced to four years in state prison and three years of post supervision. That was the maximum sentence possible as part of a plea deal in August.
Candelaria pleaded guilty to second-degree assault. Candelaria said he was heavily intoxicated when he “overreacted” on Feb. 1. He went to the victim’s home at 2 a.m. He was looking for the man’s son. Candelaria said the man’s father, Ronald Hubbard, answered the door.
Candelaria then punched him many times, including several blows when Hubbard was already down.
“You beat the heck out of this guy,” County Court Judge James Punch said during the sentencing. “He was doing nothing to deserve the beating you gave him.”
Hubbard was in the hospital for three weeks and has mild brain damage from the incident, District Attorney Joe Cardone said. Hubbard also continues to be plagued by headaches and is lethargic, Cardone said.
Candelaria and the man’s son had a dispute over a woman, police have said.
ALBION – The Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority and Orleans Transportation Service celebrated the installation of a new bus shelter on Monday at the corner of South Main Street and West Avenue in the village of Albion.
RGRTA CEO Bill Carpenter was joined by RGRTA Commissioner Henry Smith, Jr., Orleans County Legislature Chairman David Callard, OTS Manager Mike Patterson and Jake Olles, the Albion deputy town supervisor.
Other RGRTA executives include Director of Regional Operations Ray LeChase and Chief Operating Officer Daniele Coll-Gonzalez also attended the ribbon-cutting. RGRTA installed its first bus shelter for the county in August by the County Administration Building.
“OTS provides quality, convenient and affordable transportation to over 35,500 customers annually,” said Carpenter, the RGRTA leader. “By adding this new shelter and the one installed in August, we are reinforcing our commitment to modernize our infrastructure to ensure our customers will no longer have to wait for the bus in the rain and snow.”
The OTS bus stop serves the shelter on a fixed route 11 times per day.
Funding for the bus shelter in Orleans County totaled $15,000, and was provided by the Federal Transit Administration.
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 21 October 2013 at 12:00 am
Photo by Tom Rivers
ALBION – Two of the remaining walls from an Orleans Pallet warehouse in Albion are still standing after a massive fire on Thursday.
A demolition crew is shown in this photo taken from Washington Street at about noon today. The demolition specialists are bringing boom lifts to Albion so people can remove pieces of the remaining corner walls by hand.
The demolition experts worry that pushing a section of the wall could cause the whole thing to topple, said Ron Vendetti, the village’s code enforcement officer.
“They’re going to try to limit the damage,” he said about the towering walls’ impact on other buildings very close nearby. The two standing walls have “significant cracks,” Vendetti said.
The Albion Environmental Group is the lead contractor on the demolition. Vendetti said he expected the boom lifts would be on site this afternoon and the demolition would soon start on the two remaining walls.
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 21 October 2013 at 12:00 am
Photo by Tom Rivers
ALBION – A worker was up high on a boom lift at about 2 p.m. today, dismantling some of the Medina sandstone in the corner of where a side wall joined the back wall of the former Albion Cold Storage Company, which burned in a massive fire on Thursday.
Two of the walls of the structure used by Orleans Pallet were removed on Friday. The remaining two walls will be a more delicate takedown, with the corner pieces removed by hand to reduce the risk of the walls toppling and damaging some of the neighboring structures.
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 20 October 2013 at 12:00 am
Photo by Tom Rivers
ALBION – Albion Rotary Club members joined artist Nin Bogue and village of Albion trustee Eileen Banker for a ribbon-cutting Saturday morning for a new mural in downtown Albion in honor of the workers who cut stone in local quarries for about a century.
The Rotary Club is the main sponsor for the project. The mural is in Waterman Park on village-owned land on Main Street, about a half-block south of the Erie Canal.
Bogue, an artist from Lyndonville, created the mural that is 20 feet long and 5 feet high.
Rotary Club President for 2013-14 Cindy Perry, left, is pictured next to Kelly Kiebala, the club president in 2012-13. Bogue cuts the ribbon while Banker stands next to him at right.
The ceremonial ribbon includes four different colored ribbons that were interwoven to symbolize the four main countries – Ireland, Poland, Italy and Britain – where immigrants came to this area to work as quarrymen.
The project included a matching grant from the Rotary District and some support from the Orleans County Tourism Department.
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 20 October 2013 at 12:00 am
Photos by Tom Rivers – The back wall of Orleans Pallet on Friday, soon before it was knocked down by a demolition crew.
ALBION – When the demolition crews arrived Friday afternoon to knock down the back wall of the Orleans Pallet building on Hamilton Street, I wondered if the sign way up at the top of the warehouse could be spared.
The site was originally called the Albion Cold Storage Company and the Medina sandstone sign faced the railroad tracks. This was a popular site for shipping products in the early 1900s.
The demo crews had a shovel and pushed in the wall. If the sign survived, it would be by chance.
I stopped at the site yesterday, and there was the sign, face up in a pile of rubble. It was snapped in half.
It would be great for the community if the sign could be displayed somewhere in public. I think it would be a nice heritage piece for the Albion Fire Department, which fought the blaze at the warehouse on Thursday, and prevented the fire from destroying more property.
Maybe the sign, and the other half, could be at the fire hall and displayed as part of an exhibit of notable fires in the community.
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 19 October 2013 at 12:00 am
Photo by Tom Rivers
ALBION – Renee Ebbs, right, and Andrea Coccitti whip up cotton candy during today’s Country Fair at the First United Methodist Church of Albion.
The church put on its annual Country Fair, an event that features numerous baked goods, food, gift baskets and other items.
The church, which faces some uncertainty over the future of its building at the corner of Platt and East State streets, wants to continue the annual event, although it could be at a different location in the future.
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 19 October 2013 at 12:00 am
Photos by Tom Rivers
ALBION – Will Francis of the Albion Fire Department keeps a steady stream of water on the smoking ruins of a warehouse that was owned by Orleans Pallet. The site went up in flames on Thursday. This photo was taken at about 11 a.m. today.
Small fires continue to flare up at the site due to the hot smoldering piles. Firefighters say the twisted metal, wooden beams and now piles of sandstone have created a barrier from getting water on some of the fires that erupt in the bottom of the piles. Two of the three-story sandstone walls have been knocked down, beginning on Friday. Two remain standing.
Matt Francis, Will’s brother, was in charge of this hose for another flare up in the smoking remains of the warehouse.
The massive three-story structure was built in 1901 as the Albion Cold Storage Company. Half of a stone sign is setting in the rubble. The sign faced the railroad tracks on the north side of the building. A stream of water from one of the hoses is directed over the sign and at one of the smoldering piles.
Firefighters on the scene said the smoldering ruins with the jagged metal sticking up reminded them of the piles of rubble from the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Older firefighters said the scene looked like the aftermath of World War II bombing.
Orleans Hub has tried to talk with Shawn Malark, owner of the building and Orleans Pallet. I didn’t speak directly with him today but his employees said the company will continue and will keep its customers happy. The company rebuilds wooden pallets and has many customers in the agricultural industry.
By Tom Rivers, Editor Posted 19 October 2013 at 12:00 am
Photo by Tom Rivers – Firefighters use the ladder truck from the Clarendon Fire company this morning to keep water on the smoldering ruins at the warehouse on Hamilton Street. Empire Coatings Inc. is next door and visible below the firefighter on the ladder.
ALBION – A fire broke out at Empire Coatings Inc. in the middle of the night in the exhaust vents of a building next door to a warehouse that was engulfed in flames on Thursday.
The fire at Empire Coatings was on the roof and was quickly knocked down by firefighters who were already on the scene because of the smoldering ruins of the warehouse.
“The flames were shooting out of the roof,” said Rocky Sidari, fire chief for the Albion Fire Department.
Sidari credited the fast action from firefighters for containing the fire.
