Why is there a concert stage floating behind Holiday Harbor with nowhere to perform?
If you've walked the marina docks on Avon Avenue this summer, you've probably seen it: a flat, water-borne platform tied off near the boat slips, doing nothing in particular. It used to host the Chautauqua Lake Pops in Bemus Point, then followed the show to Mayville when that venue changed. When the concerts ended for good, the stage had no home left, so it drifted to Celoron and settled in behind Holiday Harbor. Now it's less a stage than a structure, and this spring the village's code enforcement officer told the Village Board that people have been building things on it. Mayor Scott Schrecengost has reached out to the state Department of Environmental Conservation about safety, according to reporting from the Post-Journal in June.
That one small object sitting in the water says more about how Celoron operates right now than any single event on the calendar. This is a village of about 1,250 people with just over 2,000 feet of public lakefront, and it is currently negotiating three separate things at once: a stranded piece of infrastructure nobody wants to claim, a vacant lot it can't seem to unload, and a water rate fight with a neighbor four times its size. Understanding which of these moves fast and which one doesn't tells you something true about living here that the postcard version skips entirely.
A village that moves fast on what's free
Start with the good news, because it's real and it's close to the water. Village officials this spring approved a request from resident Adam Howard to build a walking entrance connecting Lucille Ball Memorial Park directly to Ready About Sailing, the ship store and marina at 32 Venice Avenue that's been outfitting Chautauqua Lake boaters for years. The village isn't funding any part of it. Howard is covering the costs himself, and the board simply said yes.
That's the pattern worth noticing: when a project costs the village nothing, Celoron approves it quickly. The new path will let anyone standing at the boardwalk or near the Celoron Lighthouse walk straight over to a working marina instead of looping around by car, which matters more than it sounds like it should in a village this size, where most errands and evenings happen within a few blocks of each other.
A village that moves slowly on what costs money
Now the harder threads. The former Chautauqua Lake Auto property, a lot the village picked up from Chautauqua County back in 2023 for $2,000 plus a cut of any future sale, is back on the market for redevelopment proposals. County officials had described the site as being in rough shape before the old garage and office building came down and village crews cleared out the abandoned cars. A developer was interested once. That deal fell apart, and the lot has sat empty since, prompting the board to re-advertise it this year.
Three years from acquisition to a second attempt at finding a buyer is not neglect. It's what happens when a village this size takes on a project like this without a large staff or budget to push it forward on a set timeline. If you've been driving past that lot wondering what's supposed to happen there, the honest answer right now is: still figuring it out.
Then there's water, which is the one that actually reaches into a household budget instead of just a view. Celoron buys its water through the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities, and residents already pay a 50 percent premium over what Jamestown residents pay for the same water. The BPU is now seeking to double that premium, which would mean Celoron households paying twice what their neighbors in Jamestown pay for an identical utility. Schrecengost raised the issue in a newsletter to residents, and the village is continuing to negotiate a new contract rather than accept the increase outright.
Here's the shape of it in plain terms:
| Who | What they pay relative to Jamestown baseline |
|---|---|
| Jamestown resident | 100% (baseline rate) |
| Celoron resident, current | 150% |
| Celoron resident, if BPU proposal stands | 200% |
That's not a hypothetical line item. It's a live negotiation happening this year, and it's the kind of thing that shapes a household's actual carrying cost for a home here in a way that has nothing to do with the lake view and everything to do with which side of a municipal border the water main crosses.
What the stage, the lot, and the water bill have in common
None of these three things are emergencies. None of them are secret. But they share a single explanation: Celoron is a small village trying to hold its own at three different negotiating tables at once, with Albany over the stage, with a prospective buyer over the lot, and with Jamestown over water, and a village this size only has so much staff time and leverage to spend. The free thing, the walking path, got approved in a board meeting. The expensive things are all still open.
If you live here, that's useful to know just so the pace makes sense. The lot isn't being ignored. The water rate fight isn't going to resolve itself quietly. And the stage behind Holiday Harbor will probably be there a while longer, because moving it involves the state, not just the village.
What still works, and works well
None of this changes what actually draws people down to the water most evenings. Lucille Ball Memorial Park, the seven-acre park that anchors the village's public lakefront, still has its boat launch, its bandshell, its playground, and its boardwalk running along the shoreline toward the Celoron Lighthouse, a small working replica that's become the spot everyone in the village eventually brings a camera to at sunset. Two statues of Lucille Ball stand in the park honoring the village's most famous former resident, who spent her teenage years a few blocks away.
Just this month, the park hosted its annual Dragon Boat Festival on August 8, the kind of community fundraiser that fills the shoreline with paddlers and spectators for a single Saturday and then goes quiet again. A short walk from there, at the Chautauqua Harbor Hotel on Dunham Avenue, the Lakehouse Tap & Grille and its Carousel Bar sit out on a small peninsula connected by a footbridge, with firepits along the water and brick oven pizza that pairs with whatever regional craft beer is on tap that week. It's a genuinely good spot to watch the sun go down over the lake, stage or no stage.
Out on the water itself, the Chautauqua Lake Partnership treated nuisance plant growth near the Celoron marinas this summer, part of the ongoing lake management work that keeps the channels clear for the boats docking at Holiday Harbor and Ready About Sailing. It's unglamorous maintenance, but it's the same category of quiet, necessary work as everything else happening in the village right now. Most of it doesn't make for a good photo. All of it is why the good photo still works.
Celoron isn't waiting on any of this to feel like a real place to live. It already is one. But if you're the kind of resident who notices a stalled lot or wonders why your water bill looks different than your cousin's in Jamestown, the answer isn't indifference. It's a village doing what it can, in the order it can afford to do it.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a property here, whether you're already living on one of these blocks or thinking about it, Hanna Briggs knows this stretch of shoreline well enough to walk you through it. Schedule a free consultation and get a straight answer instead of a guess.
