Paul Post
By Paul Post
Glens Falls was a shadow of the proud, prosperous community people called “Hometown USA” when Ben Miller left home to pursue a music career.
Vacant storefronts lined Glen Street, attractions were far and few between, and dysfunctional traffic patterns made trips downtown a nightmare.
When visiting home, however, Miller saw a steady resurgence that has blossomed, making Glens Falls one of upstate New York’s more vibrant small cities.
“It was really within the last five years that things really started to explode and more and more, every time I came home I saw Glens Falls as a place where I could see myself some day,” he said. “There’s been a huge amount of work done by the business community to make Glens Falls a place where people want to live and have the amenities they’re looking for.”
Building on this positive momentum, Miller has opened a fine dining restaurant, deli and grocery mart called Park & Elm, which fills a void while revitalizing an historic building that turns 100 years old in 2023.
“When I was living abroad I missed these types of stores where you can go and pick up groceries for the evening so you can make a nice dinner after work, or you can pick up a great sandwich at lunchtime,” he said. “We really want to provide a pretty full spectrum, whether you want a date night out in the dining room, or your morning coffee and a pastry and hopefully everything in between.”
“We’re really hoping it will be a little something for everyone,” he said. “We want to have things as simple paper towels and dish soap, but we also want to provide some gourmet products you may not see in the big-box stores around here. We’re offering a lot of the same meats, cut to order at the butcher counter, that we use for the dining room menu.”
The convenient, 19 Park St. location is within walking distance for downtown visitors and businesspeople, and the hundreds of employees at nearby Glens Falls Hospital.
The deli and market began welcoming patrons on Nov. 19 and the restaurant opened on Friday, Dec. 9. It replaces the popular eatery called Doc’s, located across the street in the Park Theater building, which Miller’s mother, Elizabeth Miller (Miller Mechanical Services Inc. owner), brought back to life with a grand revitalization project several years ago.
The former Doc’s space will continue to host private events.
“We’ve got dozens of special events, like corporate Christmas parties, taking place there in December,” Miller said.
The new Park & Elm Street restaurant will have many of the same menu highlights people enjoyed at Doc’s “with a few tricks up our sleeve we’re excited to share,” Miller said. “It’s the same team. We’ve got a great bartender (Ethan McKee) and executive chef (Matthew J. Delos). I manage the restaurant’s wine program. We’ve all been looking forward to this new dining room for almost two years now.”
The retail market and deli is open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., Tuesday to Saturday. Hot lunch foods will stop being served at 4 p.m., but “grab-and-go” items will be available until closing.
“I live at 14 Hudson,” Miller said. “There’s not really even a place to pick up a six-pack of beer downtown unless I want to walk to Stewart’s. All of those things are some of the needs I wanted to fill with this project. The more I started to talk with my management team we felt we could really add something to the fabric of Glens Falls.”
The 85-seat restaurant opens at 5 p.m. with final seatings at 9 p.m., Wednesday to Saturday. Starting next spring, an enclosed three-season patio area will have 65 more outdoor seats.
Plans call for keeping both the deli-market and restaurant open an additional day, about six months from now, Miller said.
Park & Elm also has 10 new second- and third-floor apartments over the restaurant and market. They are expected to be filled by the end of December, Miller said.
Retrofitting the old building, while both preserving and enhancing its character, was no easy task, especially with supply chain and material shortage issues stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. The job was done by Queensbury-based Cifone Construction Co., which also worked on the Park Theater building.
“This was a huge challenge,” Miller said. “There were five separate, narrow businesses on the ground floor. We had to completely re-imagine what this space would look like. There were columns and pillars to work around and utilize. This was an electrical warehouse at one time, so we have classical elements like exposed brick, industrial-type lighting and the new tin ceiling looks similar to what was here.
“It would have been way cheaper to knock the whole thing down and start from scratch, but we wouldn’t have this historic building to keep the character of Glens Falls.”