(2) Beth Williams
Courtesy Steuben County Historical Society
(2) Courtesy Corning-Painted Post Historical Society Courtesy Corning’s Gaffer District
River of pain: three Market Street businesses that were flooded by Hurricane Agnes are walking on sunshine again, having also survived covid shutdowns.
Neither Flood nor Fire nor Covid Lockdown Three Corning Business Families Weather the Worst By Beth Williams
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ifty years ago, on June 23, 1972, what was arguably Corning’s biggest disaster struck. Her name was Agnes. Market Street, just south of the Chemung River, filled up with several feet of rushing floodwaters in the wee hours of that summer day. While Hurricane Agnes was “only” a Category 1 storm, the rainfall she spawned made her impact so widespread that she was the first Category 1 to have her name retired. While businesses went right to work cleaning things up and reopening in record time, only a handful of those are still around today. One of them, at 6 West Market Street, is the venerable Brown’s Cigar Store, a fixture here since 1889. The Smith family has owned the business for over seventy years, with siblings Terry, Sue Ellen, and Bejay Smith at the helm today. In addition to being tobacconists, Brown’s is also a newsstand where print newspapers—including the New York Times, New York Post, and New York
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News—are still available. During the disaster of the first covid pandemic shutdown, Brown’s was considered an essential business because they provided news and was allowed to stay open. How do you rate disasters? Terry Smith says that while Agnes and covid were both difficult, the flood was worse. Terry was fourteen at the time the hurricane came to town. He and his father came to the store the night before to stow some of their basementstored inventory up on pallets. “We had just received a large shipment of boxes with matches, and we put as much as we could on pallets, keeping them two feet above the dirt floor of the basement. We thought that would be sufficient,” Terry says. But Agnes had another idea. The entire basement flooded, and the water rose several feet into the store itself. Sue Ellen was a little too young to remember the flood, but she says the more
recent disaster, covid, provided its own trials for the business. “We had to curtail our hours severely for the first several months of the pandemic,” she says. They couldn’t hold their cigar events, which typically drew twenty to forty cigar aficionados to the store and provide an uptick in sales. “They both had their challenges,” Sue Ellen adds. • The building at 68 West Market Street survived the flood, covid, and a fire between the two. Sorge’s Restaurant, serving Italian/American cuisine, opened in 1951 with Renato Sorge, his wife, Loretta, and brother Remo at the helm. Today Renato and Loretta’s son, Michael, and his wife, Christina, own the family business. When Agnes arrived, Michael Sorge was home for the summer from SUNY Cobleskill, where he was enrolled in a
