“It kills me that the old guys in town meet to drink their coffee at McDonald’s.”
Greg O’Connell, Mount Morris, New York Redeveloper
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| Main Street, Mount Morris, NY |
O’Connell says it’s simple: he wants to breathe life back into the town. He remembers it fondly from his college days at Geneseo, a few miles up the road. Back then, Mount Morris was a thriving village, with lots of farms and small factories. That was before manufacturing packed up and moved on, an expressway skirted the town, and Wal-Mart elbowed in.
Lately, there’s been a buzz of activity as downtown comes back to life. Besides the renovations—O’Connell expects to spend about $1 million before it’s all done—high school students have been building and filling flower boxes along Main Street. Students from SUNY Geneseo are working on public relations and marketing strategies for the businesses. And Geneseo students staged a play in one of the empty storefronts.
Today, O’Connell’s buildings house more than 150 small businesses, among them an antiques store, barber shop, gourmet shop, Italian restaurant, deli, and coffee shop. O’Connell doesn’t charge an arm and leg for rent, but he does have a few requirements: businesses have to leave their lights on at night, stay open at least one evening a week, and change their window displays at least four times a year. O’Connell also fixed up and rents out the apartments above the shops. He says the way to keep downtown alive is to make it all about community.
O’Connell worries sometimes that the town won’t sustain its rebirth—that he hasn’t done enough to show his ideas will work. But the mayor of Mount Morris says what O’Connell is doing has lit a fire under the folks in town. Other businesses are spiffing up and going the extra mile, and the townspeople are putting a shine on their homes. O’Connell may have slipped quietly into Mount Morris, but his message is now echoing loud and clear.
· Early settler and namesake of the town was Robert Morris, signer of the Declaration of Independence and financier of the Revolution. Morris, considered the richest man in America in 1793, died penniless in 1806 in a debtors prison in Philadelphia.
· Francis Bellamy, born in Mount Morris in 1855, wrote the original Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. The Pledge was written and published in Youth’s Companion as part of a campaign to sell American flags to public schools. Originally, the Pledge was recited while doing the “Bellamy salute.” However, during World War II the salute was replaced—folks started placing their right hand over their heart when they saw that the salute resembled too closely Hitler’s Nazi salute.
· Roscoe C. Barnes, born in Mount Morris in 1850, hit the first recorded home run in professional baseball. Not a surprise—he was also the first batting champion of the National League.
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