So while the Main Streets of many small upstate cities are gap-toothed and crumbling, Corning's main drag is a five-block stretch of trim brick buildings and wooden benches, American flags and flower pots.
After the flood, the fourth Amory Houghton to lead the company promised the community that Corning Inc would stay put (unlike, say, Xerox, which in the 1970s moved its executives from Rochester, New York, to Stamford, Connecticut).
Today, Corning executives like to say that theirs is the biggest global corporation in the smallest town in the world.
But at the same time, the company was expanding, across the US and around the world. Less manufacturing was done in Corning itself. Membership in the American Flint Glass Workers Union began to dwindle, from a high of 7,000, to 3,200 in the 1980s and 1,500 in the early 1990s. (Today it stands at 3,700 because of the photonics plant.) And the company began jettisoning its old businesses: lighting in 1989, medical testing in 1996, housewares in 1998.
What it turned to was high-tech telecommunications, specifically fiber optics, the glass threads that are replacing copper telephone wires.
Demand for optical fiber and the equipment that went with it seemed to be limitless; Corning's telecommunications sales surged 38 percent in 1999, to US$3 billion, and 73 percent last year, to US$5.1 billion, or 70 percent of the company's total revenues.
The company snapped up other manufacturers, and spent lavishly on research and development. Scientists were lured to Corning from Boston and Austin, from Silicon Valley, of course, and from overseas.
The company's work force in the area jumped to 8,200. About 1,700 of them worked at the new photonics plant just outside of town, according to the union.
And then came the brick wall. The telecommunications bubble burst, the national economic slowdown took root and Corning was one of the high-tech companies, like Lucent and Nortel, to suffer.
Sales of photonics, which the company had predicted early this year would would grow an additional 75 percent, will be down 35 percent compared with last year, said John Loose, the company's chief executive.
The company realizes that few other jobs are available in and around Corning, and it has taken steps to limit the damage here, Loose said. Many of the jobs cut by the company this year were in metropolitan areas where there are more employment opportunities.
But that's not a lot of comfort to the workers here who have lost their jobs.
"There's been a lot of tears, a lot of blowing off steam, some screaming and hollering," said Stephen Mandell Sr, president of Local 1000 of the glass workers' union. Even those who still work at Corning are upset, and some of them boycotted parties the company had at some plants Friday to celebrate its 150th anniversary.
Most people in this company town express confidence in Corning's management and its future. "Corning Inc has really picked a new path that I believe will take them through the 21st century," said Mayor Alan Lewis Sr, whose mother and brother both worked for the company for decades.
It is possible that some people who moved to Corning for jobs will leave to find work, but Mandell, the union president, thinks many will stick around in the hope of being called back.
That's what Ellen Baker, the furloughed photonics worker, plans to do. Both her father and her brother have been laid off by Corning in the past, "and with struggles both of them made it," she said. "But that doesn't make it any easier when it happens to you."
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