Travel: Company town reborn

Company town reborn

Corning, N.Y., reinvents itself as a prosperous marketplace, with nods to its architectural past and its ties to Corning glassware and Mark Twain.

By ROBERT N. JENKINS

CORNING, N.Y. -- Around here, everything old is new again. Well, not everything, but a lot.

For instance, Market Street offers a look at the commercial avenue of a prosperous, late 19th century town. But far from some Disneyfied invention, Market is busy with restaurants and retail stores, antiques and comic-book dealers, a bike shop and banks and bars.

Testifying to the town's prosperity, there were three temporary-employment agencies in Market's four or so blocks late last month and just four empty storefronts.

A prime attraction here is the architecture. Wealthy residents used to boastfully add their names to commercial buildings. While some of those title stones still exist, they are outnumbered on the brick facades by dating tablets, set high, near the roof lines. These stones bear dates such as 1879, 1886, 1887, 1893.

Most upper-floor windows on Market Street are arched; design accents include glazed terra cotta. Flower baskets hang from lamp posts, a farmers' market is held twice a week, and a small plaza next to a parking garage features a permanent stage.

"Market Street didn't used to be like this," says Shawn M. Copp, who has learned to ignore the double-takes when people stop this police officer and then read his name badge.

Born and reared in the area, Copp says, "There used to be more vacancies on Market Street. And it used to be in the Guinness Book of World Records for the number of bars."

Now there are few bars -- though there is the mandatory brewpub -- and the local economy is booming.

"People are moving in, houses are going up," adds Copp. "They're even working at cleaning up the backs of the buildings (facing on Market), to make them more attractive" to tourists coming into town on the next street over.

It's a great area, adds Copp: "You can get on your Harley and in 10 minutes you're in the countryside."

Since 1868, Corning has been associated with one product, glass. With multiple varieties of it and research into more offshoots, the town kept going and, often, growing. A devastating flood in June 1972, spawned by Tropical Storm Agnes, redirected modest urban-renewal plans and helped create the renovated Market Street.

While Corning spun off its Corning Wear cooking-container production, the company celebrates the history and varieties of glass products in the marvelous Corning Museum of Glass. Demonstrating and reinforcing the fact that this is a company town, a free shuttle runs a loop from a satellite parking lot to the museum and on to a stop near Market Street.

The philosophy of the free-form museum is summed up by noted artist Dale Chihuly, from whom the museum commissioned a large sculpture that stands just inside the front door. Chihuly says on a sign there:

"Glass is a unique material and it is a continuing source of inspiration for me. It is transparent, translucent and opaque -- anything you want it to be. And you can make forms with your own human breath. Just think how mysterious the whole process is."

Actually, in a couple of floors of innovative displays, the museum tries to demystify the ancient process of making glass. There are explanatory displays on everything from auto safety glass to fiberglass to thermal-resistant windowpanes. There are interactive touch screens, a splendid display area of thousands of artistic works and a video.

Despite all this, the crowd-pleaser is titled simply the Hot Glass Show. Visitors watch as two experts use just a few minutes to work a glob of molten glass -- taken from a puddle of the stuff kept in a 2,300-degree oven -- into everyday service pieces such as a pitcher.

The museum's adjacent studio, at which artists are busy creating, offers instruction in glassworking, and the staff hopes next year to have brief versions of these "Fun With Glass" classes for drop-ins. I sat in on one of these classes and now have an original Jenkins green glass flower adorning a shelf at home.

The museum has glass items dating to Egyptian and Roman times, but western New York offers something much older -- and much larger. Someone long ago pinned the label "Grand Canyon of the East" on Letchworth State Park. That wasn't fair, because while the gorge in this park does drop as much as 600 feet and follows a river-cut path about 17 miles, it is not as long, as deep or as wide as the real thing.

Still, Letchworth offers a grabber of a view, accented by three waterfalls. There are thousands of forested acres, plus cabins, campsites, horseback riding, white-water rafting, hiking, cross-country skiing, swimming, summertime concerts and re-enactments, the occasional woodchuck scurrying across your path. Things a park ought to have.

It is the kind of place that would have inspired that world traveler, Mark Twain. He probably visited Letchworth, even if just to ogle it, because Twain spent several summers relaxing and writing a few dozen miles to the east, in Elmira, N.Y.

Married into a wealthy Elmira family in 1870, Twain would move his clan from Hartford, Conn., to cooler Elmira. A sister-in-law had built for him a study in which to work, away from distractions. Knowing his love for his earlier years as pilot of steamboats on the Mississippi, she had the study built as an octagon, to mimic the shape of the pilot houses on the boats. The study now sits on the campus of Elmira College.

Twain was buried in Elmira, alongside his wife and three children, in Woodlawn Cemetery. It seems odd that the riverboat pilot, reporter in the hardscrabble prospecting camps and peripatetic traveler should finally rest on a tree-shaded plot perhaps a hundred yards uphill from a busy city street.

Interestingly, Twain -- his tombstone reads Samuel Langhorne Clemens/Mark Twain/Nov. 30, 1835-Apr. 21, 1910 -- is not the only celebrity buried here. Hal Roach, a successful producer of such early Hollwyood staples as the Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy films, was born in Elmira in 1892. When he died 100 years later, he was buried there.

Also in the cemetery is Ernie Davis, a town native who won the Heisman Trophy while starring at Syracuse University. Davis died of leukemia before he could play pro football.

Signs in the cemetery also point the way to the grave of John W. Jones, a runaway slave who got off the Underground Railroad here and is credited with helping about 800 other runaways use the Railroad to freedom. Jones' headstone recounts that as a local minister, he helped bury "those who might have enslaved him" -- the 2,973 Confederate soldiers who died in Elmira's hellish POW prison in about a year's time.

The city cemetery is adjacent to Woodlawn National Cemetery.