01.13.07

Four Corners buzzing with construction and small businesses

Diana Louise Carter
Staff writer

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(January 13, 2007) — PENFIELD — As brothers David and Earl Kitts watch television in their 18th-century home at Penfield's Four Corners, some 35,000 cars a day whiz by their windows.

Earl Kitts, 94, can remember knowing Civil War veterans among his neighbors when he was a child, and welcoming home the returning soldiers from World War I. And David Kitts, 84, recalls a tree-lined Penfield Road that looked very different from the four-lane state Route 441 that it has become in recent years.

"This was a two-lane highway when I was a kid. It had a macadam road with a high crown," David Kitts said. Today, pedestrians balk at crossing Penfield Road because even though the speed limit is 35 mph, the wide-open road and crush of traffic urges drivers to go much faster.

"We would like to see this come back as a village-type setting," said Jim Costello, Penfield's director of development services. That's a challenge, for most of the motorists passing through Four Corners, commuting between jobs in Rochester and their homes in eastern Monroe County and western Wayne county, the intersection is just a blur.

"When you have 35,000 cars go through an intersection, that's not the village feel," said Town Supervisor George C. Wiedemer. "But it's our core. There's some reason to hold onto some core things."

As daunting as the traffic can be, its existence is what has kept or drawn in plenty of Four Corners boutique businesses and restaurants, giving commuters reason to stop. The Four Corners has experienced a renaissance of business activity lately, attracting 49 new small businesses in five years. Other businesses that outgrew their spaces, Costello noted, successfully found other Four Corners locations.

Even more development is on the horizon:

# Matthew's East End Grill is hoping to open a second location near the southeast corner, formerly occupied by the Kam-Wah Chinese Restaurant.

# Relatives of the owners of Kam-Wah are planning to open a restaurant in a plaza behind Dunkin Donuts. When the plaza is ready, within months, another tenant will include a make-and-take ceramics shop.

# A small bakery has earned town clearance to open on the southwest corner.

# Mott's Lane, an access road that runs from Five Mile Line Road, south of Penfield Road, to Humphrey House Restaurant, will be extended farther, creating back-door access to even more offices and businesses.

That road, coupled with another just extended on the north side of Penfield Road, offers the businesses' customers alternate routes back to the major roads, or find a location where they can turn left more easily.

"I would like to think these access roads spur controlled economic growth," said Wiedemer.

Fewer than 3 percent of the 13,000 properties in Penfield are zoned for commercial use, Wiedemer said, and the bulk of them are in the Lloyds' Corners, Empire Boulevard and Panorama Plaza areas. So with most commercial properties that have visibility and parking in Four Corners already taken, a second ring of businesses behind them could offer more opportunities.

Luis Ribeiro, the owner of 16 Dunkin Donuts in the Rochester area, said he came to the Four Corners in 2005 to take advantage of the traffic flow. He demolished an old home and a small office building to create space for the drive-through business as well as one of the larger parking lots at Four Corners.

"The traffic pattern is there. It's the main funnel out to (Interstate) 490, the suburbs, Gananda," he said.

The price of the land, which he said was more than $750,000, motivated him to try to generate more revenue by building the 8,000-square-foot plaza that's under construction now.

A few months ago, developer Ben Kendig extended an access road through the lot and others on the northwest corner to allow customers to leave or enter the businesses that front on Penfield Road from Liberty Street or Five Mile Line Road.

Access roads were part of the master plan for the Four Corners the town devised several years ago. And while that plan — helped along by approximately $1 million in state grants — is nudging things along, local folks see several people or events as having boosted the Four Corners even further.

Costello says first among them was the introduction of Starbucks, which took over a Friendly's restaurant that had been vacant for some time. Another boost was Kendig's remake of the northwest corner — once a crumbling Penfield Inn, and now a Colonial-style building housing a Canandaigua National Bank branch.

Jeff Crane, co-owner of Mark's Pizzeria on Five Mile Line Road and several buildings in the area, was a catalyst for the neighborhood, too, Costello said. Sadly, for his family and the town, Crane died on Christmas Eve at age 45.

Crane's passing is "really going to hurt the Four Corners," Costello said.

It was in one of Crane's buildings — a former church on Five Mile Road near the northeast corner — that Eileen Wrona got her start running a gift shop and artisan co-op, the Enchanted Rose Garden, in 2003. In 2006, Wrona moved to 2200 Penfield Road, and business increased 30 percent to 40 percent.

"It's just been a banner year," she said. She's rehabbing a second building behind hers, hoping to find an antiques dealer to take it when it's completed in the next two months.

Wrona said she didn't want to move to another area when she decided to move out of the church building: "We have a really great, loyal following."

But what no one has much of is parking.

Ron Baroody, who has owned and maintained four commercial properties in Four Corners since 1978, said he hopes the parking problem can be resolved.

While town officials linked several lots on the southwest corner, they were unable to broker a private-public agreement to maintain a single, large lot.

"To me, the way to do it is to make it a true public parking lot," Baroody said, with the town responsible for maintenance.

"It's a really great location," Baroody said. "The key is to capture the traffic because it's a really good business area." He loves doing business there, he said, because it has a quaint, unique feel, unlike all the other commercial areas in town.

"The Four Corners is kind of like the heart of Penfield."

DCARTER@DemocratandChronicle.com 

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