Sounds familiar
Rob Price

If you stick around long enough in the business of small town newspapering, a lot of the news begins to sound awfully familiar.

That doesn’t make it boring, by any stretch. Earlier this week, I thoroughly enjoyed covering a Bath village board meeting in which, according to the unofficial advance word, board members were to consider applications to demolish an old elementary school building in the middle of the village.

The meeting – which did not go as expected — reverberated with uncanny echoes of a controversy that erupted in Hornell in the second half of the 1990s. The Great Hornell Rite Aid Caper concerned efforts by a development company to build a Rite Aid drugstore on the site of the Hornell Area Chamber of Commerce building and the Martin Adsit house — two attractive old buildings in the center of town.

The idea stirred the passions of just about every historical preservationist in Hornell and split the community between those who supported historical preservation and and those whose primary concern was local economic development.

As I recall, proponents of economic development tended to be closer to the levers of power. They occupied positions on the Planning and Development Committee of the Common Council; they sat on the board of the Hornell Industrial Development Agency, whose executive director also was the director of the Chamber of Commerce, which owned the Chamber building.

The preservationists, however, quickly rallied and organized. They showed up at public meetings; they involved themselves deeply in the environmental review process; they yelled their heads off and became thorns in the sides of many local officials — including the chairman of the local zoning board who, on one memorable occasion, was reduced to shouting “So sue me!” in the middle of a public meeting.

Eventually, the Rite Aid corporation solved the whole problem by plunging itself into a fiscal crisis and shelving plans for the new drugstore. The great Rite Aid controversy basically went away, like so much smoke, and I for one was glad to see the controversy concluded; people shouting at each other gets on my nerves after a time.

Which brings me back to Bath. The argument this time is whether to build an Eckerd Pharmacy building on the site of the old Dana Lyon school building. This construction would entail knocking down the main portion of the school building, thereby destroying what I just learned is an excellent example of the “neoclassical academic design.”

This plan has brought Bath’s historical preservationists into the limelight, and they are a determined and wellinformed group. They love their history, and they love the old neoclassical lines of the Dana Lyon building. Many of them are involved in a feisty local group known as The Save the Lyon Commission. How feisty is this Lyon Commission? If you’re like me and value a placid quality of life, pick your arguments carefully with this group. It is as committed to its goals as the group in Hornell that rallied around the Martin Adsit House. If I were to close my eyes and just listen, the two groups even sound familiar.

There is at least one other piece that makes the two controversies echo each other. Both controversies involved buildings that are privately owned, and the historical preservationists were and are in the business of telling the owners they couldn’t and can’t turn their property into a box store. Sometimes the private owner of a piece of property needs to told he or she can’t do something obnoxious with a piece of property. Other times, it seems they ought to be allowed to do exactly what they want to do; it’s nobody else’s business.

Is the Great Dana Lyon Demolition Caper a case of the former or the latter?

As I recall, I asked a similar question seven or eight years ago when I covered the Rite Aid story in Hornell. I may have even popped off in a column or two; proclaimed my own opinion on the matter.

You think I’m going to do that again? I don’t think so. Better to concentrate on getting the facts straight. You can decide for yourself what you think.

But I’ll tell you this much: Nothing is ever over.