Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Ben Westcott, Chronicle Staff Writer
Time Served, the bar & grill in Comstock across from Great Meadow, held a “Prison Funeral” last Wednesday, the correctional facility’s final day, so people could “come have a drink and share some stories.”
Shortly after the “funeral” started at 3 p.m. the inside of the bar and the outside patio area were packed.
“The reason we’re holding this is to talk about how this is impacting our communities,” Mrs. Straub said at the event. “We have several families that the husband or wife has been displaced, and [now having to work] several hours from here. So it’s making it difficult for them to be a family unit, like when they worked here.”
“There’s several families that live in Granville, and being displaced puts them at a disadvantage, because they’ve got to figure out what they’re going to do, whether they’re going to move, take their kids out of school that just started up.”
Leroy Catone, a corrections officer originally from Hudson Falls, lives in Granville. He said he came to the Time Served event “to support all my fellow law enforcement, all my COs, everybody that worked in there. Just to make sure that they know that they’ve still got a backing, from the local community and everybody else.”
Mr. Catone said he worked at Great Meadow for 10 years, but now that it’s closing he’s switching careers.
“They moved me two and a half hours away. I couldn’t do that,” he said. “A single dad, full custody, I can’t do that.”
He called it an “extremely hard” decision, “being that it was a good career and I worked with some great people.”
“Now I’ve got to figure it out,” he said. “I’m 40 years old and I’ve got to start my career over again.”
Mr. Catone said his transfer option was Adirondack Correctional Facility in Ray Brook and that it took him about a month and a half to decide what to do.
“After housing and all the cost of transportation and everything, it would cost me more to do that than it would to get a different job,” he concluded.
Now, he says he’s going to start driving a truck. “It’s a huge pay cut, but I’ll be home every night.”
“They were the biggest business, so to speak, in the area,” she said of Great Meadow.
Mrs. Straub said Time Served had already been negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, when it had to shut down. She said the pool leagues dissipated, and business post-pandemic has not come back as strongly as hoped.
Mrs. Straub says they have a quarter of the business they had pre-pandemic.
“There’s a lot of factors to that, it’s not just the closing of the jail,” Mrs. Straub said. “Some people say it’s the economy. A lot of people would rather drink at home.”
Mr. Straub said, “Business has just dropped down to nothing almost. Before, it was thriving.”
With the prison closing, he thinks his business is going to “fold.”
“Either that or I’ve got to think of something different to do,” he said.
He has a 70 by 34 foot building behind the bar and says he’s going to try to put a business in there, or lease it.
“My daughter was thinking about a daycare,” he said.
He said Comstock, the hamlet in the Town of Fort Ann, is “gonna fold” too. Patrons at his bar think the prison closure is “going to make this a ghost town,” he said. “Everybody’s complaining that there’s nothing here, no industry.”
“I think they’re idiots for closing it,” Mr. Straub said of the state. “If they closed Sing Sing [Correctional Facility, in Ossining] they could have sold that property for billions of dollars. It’s right on the freaking Hudson. And the jail’s falling apart.”
By contrast, he said, “This one, they just refurbished the whole thing, and they’re here for two more years refurbishing. They’ve got contracts.”
For years the Straubs rented rooms on the Time Served property to people coming to train at Great Meadow. They usually housed 12 to 16 people, Mrs. Straub said, but now they’re down to one renter who works at the state’s remaining medium security Washington Correctional Facility, across from Great Meadow.
Another effect of the closure is that “They’re talking about knocking all the houses down up the street,” Mr. Straub said. “It used to be that COs stayed in them. Now there’s only like five of them that are occupied. All the rest are empty.”
Time Served was far from empty on Great Meadow’s final day. Mrs. Straub said the bar would remain open that evening as long as people wanted to stay.
“Everybody knows everybody, pretty much,” Mr. Straub said.
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