CENTRAL'S HISTORY & MISSION
The History of Central Plumbing & Heating Supply and Central Kitchen & Bath Showroom, Schenectady New York, Since 1950
A SOLDER COMES HOME
The story starts with a young man in an Army uniform.
John J. Sennett Jr. came home from service to a Schenectady still humming with General Electric and the American Locomotive Works, a city where houses were going up faster than anyone could plumb them. He married Ann Pastore, and in 1950 he opened a plumbing and heating supply house in Scotia with a counter, a stock of fittings, and a conviction that has outlasted him by three quarters of a century: sell a contractor the right part, tell him the truth about it, and he’ll come back for thirty years.
He was right. Central Plumbing & Heating Supply Co. was built almost entirely on word of mouth, the currency of a trade where reputations travel from job site to job site faster than any advertisement ever could.
Photo caption: John J. Sennett Jr. and Ann (Pastore) Sennett on their wedding day. The company he founded is now in its third generation.
THE SECOND GENERATION
John Joseph Sennett III grew up inside the business. He graduated from Niskayuna High School in 1971, went on to Western New England College, and came back to the family counter where he worked his way from the floor to the front office and eventually became the proud owner.
In 1975 he married Linda. Together they raised Mark, Gregory, and Rebecca, and John ran the company the way his father had taught him: thoughtful, ethical, honest. Those weren’t marketing words. They were the terms of business. Contractors who dealt with John for decades still describe being treated with respect and sent home with the right product, the kind of thing that keeps an independent wholesaler alive in an era of national chains.
Under his leadership the company grew from a neighborhood supply house into one of the largest independent plumbing and heating suppliers in Upstate New York. He was a member of the Schenectady Home Builders Association and the Edison Club, and, being a natural handyman, was rarely without a project of his own.
2007: Building Behind the Building
For more than fifty years, one brick building on Freemans Bridge Road held everything; the trade counter, the showroom, the sales offices. By the early 2000s it simply couldn’t hold any more.
Rather than renovate, the Sennetts made a decision that says a great deal about how this family thinks: they would build an entirely new facility, from the ground up, behind the old one so that not a single day of business would be lost. Contractors kept pulling in. The counter kept ringing. Three years of planning and construction went on in the back lot while the front door stayed open.
In the fall of 2007 the doors opened on the new building. The original was demolished. What emerged was a facility unlike anything else in the region: an expanded parts counter, dramatically increased warehouse capacity, and one of the largest bath showrooms in the Northeast.
THE THIRD GENERATION
Driven by the previous generations: Mark and Greg Sennett
Today Mark and Greg Sennett run the company their grandfather founded…the third generation of Sennetts behind the same name.
They inherited more than a warehouse. They inherited a position: the independent, in the age of the big box. It’s a position they’ve chosen to defend rather than retreat from. Where national chains compete on volume, Central competes on the things a chain structurally cannot offer which is a deep inventory that’s actually in stock, fast local delivery, and a counter staffed by people who have been doing this long enough to diagnose your problem before you finish describing it.
The brothers have also brought the company into the present without diluting what it is: a modernized digital presence, an educational approach to customers, and a continuously reinvested facility which is today, a 10,000 s.f. showroom backed by roughly 40,000 square feet of warehouse. The largest in Upstate New York
Central Plumbing & Heating Supply | Central Kitchen and Bath Showroom
141 Freemans Bridge Road, Schenectady, NY 12302 | 518-372-3208
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