Malone's Flanagan Hotel on the stimulus list
This morning, when we reported that some North Country communities would get shares of $153 million dollars of federal stimulus money under the state Restore new York Initiative, we left out an important project. An alert listener tells us Malone will receive $2.1 million to restore the Flanagan Hotel, long in decline after being the grand anchor of the village downtown.
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posted by Martha Foley @ 9/03/2009 03:04:00 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Waste of taxpayer money. If it made any financial sense to pour money down that hole it should be a private enterprise doing it. And there's been ample time to do so.
But sometimes a government boost can help begin the turn around of a decaying downtown. Downtowns were the center of all communities and have been essentially deserted by the edge-of-town development that was a cheap and easy way to do "economic development", as in mostly chains and bog box stores that, in turn, gutted downtown community cores. Although community residents do run into each other here and there in stores located on the outskirts of town, they certainly don't have that "community" orientation that downtowns had for centuries. Anyone with a sense of community looks to their downtown. Running into each other in Wal-Mart is hardly a genuine community experience. I say, let the government toss a couple million into starting the rehab of Malone and perhaps we'll see Malone residents start to reinvest in their community downtown themselves... after all, it is economic "stimulus" money. I suspect, in time, we'll start to see more and more of a return to our downtowns as that is where the vitality of a community is and the outskirts of towns will start to look like abandoned warehouses... which happens every time another big box or chain store closes anyway.
Mark, Saranac Lake
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