Entrepreneurs bring the energy Glens Falls needs
Esmond Lyons enhances our city
I’ve learned not to predict when the city’s downtown project will get done.
What the city seems to have to show six years later for the $10 million promised by the state in 2017 is a big empty lot at the southwestern end of South Street.
Dwelling on the lack of progress is unfair to city officials like Bill Collins, the mayor, and Jeff Flagg, the economic development director, who have been trying without big staffs to navigate the state’s bureaucracy and balance the project’s commercial and community facets.
Now, Flagg said, after all their efforts, the multi-use building planned by a subsidiary of Bonacio Construction is running into the obstacle of rising interest rates.
“It’s so frustrating. For five years, the interest rates were near zero,” he said.
Nonetheless, he predicts work will start before winter on at least the streetscape improvements and perhaps more of the project.
Meanwhile, across the street, the building that housed a bagel shop for a short time and the Off Track Betting parlor and Irish Pizza for longer has been gutted and renovated. The sprinkler system is in, and owners Gregg Singer and Larissa Ovitt intend to have the Golden Monkey Lounge open in a few weeks.
The next-door spaces will be filled by a “refillery,” which will sell bulk eco-friendly cleaning supplies and herbs; and a Mexican cafe that will serve breakfast and lunch.
The Golden Monkey, Singer said, will be a “very elevated cocktail lounge — elegant, calm — with a higher standard of cocktail.”
The lounge will have three distinct indoor seating areas, where small groups can gather for drinks, conversation and games on couches and chairs, and an outdoor space in back.
It will be defined in part by what it doesn’t have — “no TV , no pool table, no darts,” Singer said.
They intend to resurrect “Prohibition-style cocktails,” he said, but reconstituted for the contemporary imbiber.
The lounge will have a menu of appetizer-like food — “shareable plates,” with “interesting local ingredients.”
Local craft beers will also be sold, and music and other live entertainment featured on the small stage.
“It’s a lounge,” he said, “something we thought the town needed.”
Upstairs, the entire second floor has been converted into four one-bedroom apartments for short-term rental. The apartments on each side can be connected through interior pocket doors, and groups can rent all four at once by opening the front doors to a central sitting room.
They intend to provide the amenities sought by people from larger cities or those like Ovitt who have lived in big cities and moved back here to their hometown.
The partners both have eclectic business backgrounds, with experience in marketing and real estate but also audio production (Singer) and CPR/First Aid training (Ovitt).
They closed on the building in February and, despite delays, started renovations in April — a rush job compared with the city’s Downtown Revitalization Initiative.
“We don’t do slow,” Singer said — good news for Glens Falls.
Despite a smattering of new businesses and a downtown that has grown gradually more busy over the past 30 years, the city is still hovering on the edge of urban blight. Every empty storefront and boarded-up window on Glen and South streets broadcasts its unrealized potential.
Glens Falls is picturesque but not yet prosperous. Getting there will take more energetic entrepreneurs like the partners at Golden Monkey Lounge.
Esmond Lyons
Speaking of picturesque, I saw Esmond Lyons a couple of times recently on a ladder as he worked on his latest trompe l’oeil mural on the house at New Pruyn and South streets, across the street from the entrance to the hospital. He has transformed a plain white one-story house into a marvelous work of art, a clever, fun and pretty display for the many thousands of motorists who pass that way every day.
Lyons has done a lot to enhance the city, inside and outside. Years ago, I bought a wonderful painting from him as an anniversary present for Bella, and I believe many other local homes are enlivened by his paintings and murals. His own home at Garfield Street and Grove Avenue — a huge brick church that he has restored from top to bottom — is a beautiful centerpiece of the neighborhood. And he recently completed the fantastic mural on the side of Eric Unkauf’s building at 153 Maple St. If by some strange chance you haven’t seen it, you must go over there and take it in.
I saw those blue shutters being painted and thought how wonderful, the Post Star should have a photo, and now here it is, from the eyes of a retired Post Star reporter! Thanks Will.
Diane Collins
Beautiful murals