“Having that many jobs in town definitely impacts the community, as far as I’m concerned you tend to shop where you work.
Marcia Jaque, owner of Gino’s Restaurant at 49 Church St., said she relocated her family-run business from Sharon Springs to Canajoharie shortly before Beech-Nut closed.
It hit hard, and the fact that it’s been shut down for so many years, so many broken promises of people coming in and supposedly purchasing it, and we would get excited because anything that is closed down is not good.
“When one big business goes down, the rest of the town’s businesses have to make up the difference,” she said.
in 2012, in part because the pizza business that had been located there shut down, she said, likely in part due to fewer customers after the plant closed.
“The windows have been blowing out, regularly, and a lot of them have plywood in them.
Irrespective of the fate of the E29 Labs project, Montgomery County will retain ownership of the western office-space portion of the old plant.
Janice Dillenbeck, director of the Canajoharie Youth Center, said her organization operates an after-school program for children from the ages of eight to 12, and has been in operation since the 1940s, when it first offered supervision for the children of Beech-Nut factory workers.
“I think that would be great if it were accessible to the public.