Granville Then & Now – January 27, 2022

Price Chopper merger leads to Grand Union return

By Erik Pekar, Town Historian

Cold hardly begins to describe last week, and just about every day had a temperature featuring single digits in some form, whether it was single digit highs, single digit lows, or even below-zero single digit lows. The one thing that didn’t happen was a below-zero daytime high. There was snowfall last Monday, and some cloudy and some sunny days afterwards.

January ends in a few days, and this will bring to a close a month that has been, for the most part, colder than many a January in a while. This follows an unusually warm November and a December that at times was either warmer or colder than normal. Hopefully February brings weather that may be cool, but not freezing cold as it was last week.

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The merger of the Price Chopper and Tops grocery store chains, announced last February, was finalized in November. The chains are now subsidiaries of a new holding company, Northeast Grocery. As part of the approval of the merger, 12 stores had to be sold; all 12 were Tops stores, some of which were in markets that also had Price Chopper stores. Of the 12, 11 were in New York: Cooperstown, Cortland, Norwich, Owego, Peru, Rome, Saranac Lake, Sherrill, Warrensburg and two in Watertown; the twelfth was in Rutland, Vermont.

The 12 stores were sold to C&S Wholesale Grocers, who announced that the stores would be renovated. The big surprise, however, was that the stores would reopen afterwards under the name of Grand Union. This was the name of a large and well-known grocery store chain for many years, until it went into a long decline, with the last stores bearing the name being rebranded in 2013.

There is one more turn to the story, however. It was announced this month that one of the Watertown stores that was set to become a Grand Union, will instead reopen as a Piggly Wiggly. This chain is more common in the Midwest, and this likely is the first New York store of that chain. Those who take interest in the details of grocery store operation may be intrigued at how the Grand Union revival will play out.

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The Christmas tree in a second-floor window of the former Manchester Wood factory, on County Route 24 just north of the village line, is a sign that something may be going on at the factory. The tree was placed in the window above the main front entrance of the factory building sometime before Christmas and has been lit every night since then. The factory has been vacant since 2018, when the Manchester Wood company suspended operations and shuttered the doors.

The tree isn’t the only sign of potential activity at the factory. During some nights this month, some of the parking lot lights have been turned on. Cars have occasionally been seen parked in the parking lot; this was more frequent in the summer, although it could have also have had something to do with the farmland to the west of the factory.

No announcement has been made regarding any developments with the factory since the spring of 2020. A public notice appeared in the Post-Star in early April regarding a window and door company seeking applicants through a program affiliated with a program at SUNY Adirondack. Reportedly, the window and door company later attempted to buy the building, but was outbid at the last moment by another entity, and has since located elsewhere. The sale did not happen, however, because the high bidder ultimately did not have the funding to make the purchase.

The property sold last April to 1159 Granville LLC, a company registered to an address in Wappingers Falls; cost was $610,000. No information has appeared since then regarding the LLC, its owners, or their intentions. The building, however, is still listed for sale on the CBRE website, and their sign still sits out front.

The factory’s parking lot has ample parking space for factory and office workers, and easy shipping and loading access; the factory building has several loading bays on both the west and south sides of the building. For trucking routes, there would be easy access to Route 22, by way of County Route 24 (the Middle Granville road).

Many in the Granville area hope that a new business will reopen the factory soon. Perhaps the owners of 1159 Granville LLC could develop something at the vacant factory that would create jobs and benefit the Granville area.

If the owners of the LLC have no intention of doing something to open the factory, hopefully the property gets sold to an enterprising business, whether it be a startup or an already established company seeking to expand production. A new factory operation in Granville would be welcomed by all, and hopefully someone will bring such a factory into operation there in the near future.