If you are standing in the town square looking towards Main Street, the street that heads west is called West Hughes Street. And if you walk up West Hughes about a quarter of a mile, on your left you will come across what used to be the Rail and Titsworth Canal Warehouse.
The Canal Warehouse is a bit broken down now, but in 1853 the warehouse, which was built in a Greek Revival style, served as an important town building where offices were provided for Erie Canal officials. The canal would be closed twenty-five years later due to the expenses it brought, and railroads coming to the forefront of the trading industry.
The canal warehouse was vacant, until in 1905 when an Italian immigrant named Mike DeCilio bought the canal warehouse and turned it into a hotel, which contained a bar downstairs and a brothel upstairs. Two years after the warehouse was turned into a hotel, two detectives named Joseph Dardano and Albert Mantica were investigating DeCilio’s establishment for tax evasion. The two detectives were shot and killed near the warehouse, and the killer, Giuseppe Sanducci, who was a worker for DeCilio, was found guilty of the murder of the two detectives. He was one of the first to be executed by electric chair in New York.
Only three years later, Constable Norman Chalker and Bruce Gleason were shot and killed during a brawl at the bar. Luigi Vicchiano, who was DeCilio’s son-in-law, was indicted for the killings, but he fled the state and was not detained until 32 years later, when he was discovered in Alabama. Vicchiano was never found guilty, based on a lack of evidence.
Recently, efforts have been made to restore the warehouse. There are plans of making it a museum, and thanks to our local Lions Club and former Town HIstorian Bill Heaney's efforts, it is finally ready because of the restoration project that they completed this fall.
-by Owen Heaney, Belfast Central School Class of 2024