After a century in Ithaca, Bishop’s Carpet One will close its doors

Whether it was a snow shovel, hardware equipment, or flooring and tile, for 100 years the Ithaca community has simply gone to Bishop’s Carpet One.

On Jan. 31, the store located at 363 Elmira Rd. will be closing its doors for good.

Owner Dave Pirko said the decision has come after working for the company as a delivery-boy since 1966. The 76-year-old said that after the COVID-19 pandemic, hiring has become difficult, putting more work on him and his son, Tom Pirko.

“In general, we’re both looking forward to it,” Dave said. “At my age, I need to stop working, and the only way for that to happen is to close the store. The store, frankly, isn’t fun anymore. It’s not fun to run the business.”

Both Dave and Tom said that the decision was made because the family wanted to leave the business on its own terms. The decision wasn’t made for financial reasons.

“This is our 100^th anniversary and it’s time to move on to something else,” Tom said. “We’ve kind of reached that point where it’s a good time for everyone to move on.”

Even though the decision was made independently, it comes with mixed emotions for Dave and Tom. On his 14^th birthday, Tom started working at Bishop’s Carpet One, and Dave remembers when he first started working for the store in the 1960’s.

When he was in college, Dave covered a shift for a friend who wanted a Saturday off of work. He immediately fell in love with the retail business.

“I wanted to quit college, and (former owner) Stan (Goldberg) told me he didn’t have a job for me unless I finished college,” Dave said. “So I finished college and he offered me the exact same amount of money to expect with my degree.”

That amount was $7,500 a year in 1968, when he took his first full-time job.

From there, Dave worked his way up to the senior vice president. Under the leadership of former owner Stan Goldberg, the business expanded from one store at 430 W. State St. to three locations: The Bishop’s Small Mall on Cinema Drive in Northeast, and a location in Johnson City.

Both Dave and Tom credited Goldberg, who took over operations of the business in 1957 at 23-years-old after his father died, with being visionary in expanding the business beyond one store downtown to being an integral part of the Ithaca community as a full-service home improvement store.

“I don’t know what to say we were,” Dave said. “The hardware store is really a cornerstone of the community, we weren’t big, we were huge. It’s hard to explain how big we were in the hardware business.”

In 2003 the landscape of Ithaca began to change. Both Lowe’s and Home Dept. were positioned to come to town, which would cut into the Bishop’s customer base.

“We had been through that battle with mass merchants before and won, but he didn’t have the ambition to fight it again,” Dave said of Goldberg. “He offered to sell me the business and I didn’t want the whole thing.”

Goldberg ended up selling the business in two parts, the hardware store and the floor and window covering business in 2003. Dave bought the floor and window covering business, which stayed on West State Street.

The hardware store went out of business in 2007.

The business stayed on West State Street until 2020, when the building was bought and Bishop’s Carpet One was forced to move. The property on Elmira Road, which used to be a Aaron’s Rental Store, had come up for sale and the Pirko family made the move.

During the first week of March of 2020, Bishop’s Carpet One opened at its new location. Three weeks later, it and every non-essential business in the county was shut down due to the pandemic.

Tom had been a career firefighter and left to work for the business starting in March 2020. Before he could get comfortable with his new role, the store had to close.

Dave said that once the store opened again multiple months later, things were not the same. He remembered a time when people were lining up to apply to work at the store, after the reopening it seemed impossible to fill important roles.

“That’s where things fell apart,” he said. “In my history of business, you used to run a classified ad in the newspaper and you’d get 15 people come in and apply for your job, but we couldn’t get anyone to apply.”

That meant more hours for Dave and Tom, which started to wear on them quickly. Tom said that for a store of Bishop’s Carpet One’s size to operate efficiently, there need to be at least two full-time workers at the store. He said since the pandemic, the store has not had more than one full-time worker.

An increased workload, and a smaller customer-base due to larger stores moving in made the Pirko’s realize the time to step away was now.

It didn’t come without serious thought and consideration of history. The business has been an important part of the majority of both Tom and Dave’s lives, but they also know it has been a part of Ithaca resident’s lives.

“You’ll find that most people who remember the hardware store say that if you needed anything you went to the hardware store, because they had everything,” Tom said. “The older community of Ithaca, everyone is going to know Bishop’s. There’s a lot of history that goes back 100 years through the whole process of how the store has transitioned.”

“Bishop’s has had a lot of impact in the community for a long time,” Tom continued. “We still hear from customers who say ‘I remember when you needed a snow shovel during a snowstorm, you walked down to Bishop’s.’”

For Dave, the opportunity to relax is a new one. For more than half of the company’s history, Dave has been working to improve and expand the business.

He said he’s excited for some down time, but admits that he’ll miss being in the store every day.

“It’s going to be a new life,” he said. “I like coming in every day, so it’s going to be different, I’ll have to figure out what’s going to happen.”