The story of the world’s first business incubator begins, more or less, with 80,000 square feet of surplus chickens. The early 1960s was a good time for poultry, and the Mount Hope Hatchery of Rochester, New York needed some buildings for overflow coops. They found them in Batavia, a small city about 35 miles west of Rochester, where a former hardware store manager named Joe Mancuso was leasing a variety of irregular spaces carved out of a vast, decommissioned harvester factory.

For decades, the factory had been occupied by the Massey-Harris company, which made farm machinery and employed thousands of Batavia residents. But Massey-Harris decided to close the plant in 1957, leaving behind an empty space and 18 percent local unemployment. This was bad for Batavia—and what was bad for Batavia was bad for the Mancuso family.

The Mancusos were one of Batavia’s most prosperous families—as author and Batavia native Bill Kauffman once put it, the name Mancuso “says ‘Batavia’ as strongly as ‘Adams’ says ‘Boston’”—and their fortunes were inextricably tied to those of the town. The five Mancuso brothers had built a business empire unprecedented in Batavia’s history, and the loss of Massey-Harris threatened to hit them hard. After all, a jobless man was unlikely to eat at Mancuso’s Restaurant, patronize the Mancuso Theater, or buy a new car from the family dealership.

So the Mancusos bought the old factory, plucked Joe—son of the eldest Mancuso brother—out of the family hardware store, and put him in charge of filling the vacated space. But attracting tenants to the facility was hard work, and Joe—called “Little Joe” to distinguish him from his uncle, “Big Joe,” who was smaller than him—was having a hard time of it. Initially, he’d hoped to lure a large manufacturer to lease the entire complex. “It wasn’t a practical idea,” admits Tom Mancuso, Joe’s son. “Because if you needed 1,000,000 square feet, even in 1959, why are you moving into an 80-year-old building?”

So Joe Mancuso recalibrated, and instead set out to find a lot of smaller tenants. “I wrote letters and wore out two cars the first year,” he told a New York Times reporter in 1966. “I traveled 80,000 miles looking for tenants. I would go anyplace.”

In order to entice companies to set up shop in what he had dubbed the Batavia Industrial Center, Joe offered unusual perks: short-term leases, shared office supplies and equipment, business advice, and secretarial services. If your business needed a line of credit, Joe Mancuso would help arrange it with a local bank. If you needed 80,000 square feet of space in which to store baby chickens, Joe Mancuso would hook you up.

The similarities between his work and that of the chicken hatchery did not escape Joe Mancuso. In 1963—as family legend has it—Joe was leading a reporter on a tour of the complex. They stopped inside the Mount Hope coops, and it was there that he had his Eureka moment. “These guys are incubating chickens,” Joe told the reporter. “I guess we’re incubating businesses.”

Today, there are business incubators everywhere. The idea is now broadcast by famous Silicon Valley startup incubators, like Y Combinator, AngelPad, and Techstars. These places encourage their charges to seek and destroy inefficient local and regional businesses in their pursuit of innovation; to change the world and become historically rich in the process; to move fast and break things. Their business model values one brilliant startup success, like Airbnb, over a thousand serviceable smaller companies. The message is clear: Incubators disrupt places like Batavia.

But the world’s first business incubator cared less about disrupting the global economy than about resuscitating its local one. It still does, in fact. Fifty-eight years later, the Batavia Industrial Center still operates in the same locations and under the same defiantly local mandate. “Our job here is to help people create businesses and jobs in Batavia,” says Tom Mancuso, who now manages the facility.

Batavia is a city of about 15,000 people. Its small business district features a renowned chocolate shop, a peace garden commemorating the War of 1812, and an incongruous shopping mall that occupies half of Main Street. Author Bill Kauffman once observed that urban renewal had reduced his hometown to “Dresden with a grotesque mall sprouting from the rubble.” It is the sort of place where old men in VFW caps gather at Dunkin Donuts to argue about the weather. It is Everytown, USA.

The Batavia Industrial Center sits a few blocks outside of downtown on Harvester Avenue, across the street from a cemetery and down the block from Batavia’s original pizzeria, which is named Batavia’s Original Pizzeria. The complex is made up of 30 interconnected buildings in various states of cheery, functional decay. The inside is a warren of infinite hallways, mismatched interiors, and unmarked doors that muffle the sounds of tools being used. At night, it resembles the sort of place that would make a fine headquarters for a Batman villain.

I visited Batavia in early May to see the old factory and talk with Tom Mancuso and some of his tenants. Like his father, Tom has spent his life promoting the merits of local entrepreneurship as a tool to stabilize communities. Though the chickens are long gone, the center is still hatching local businesses, offering approximately 700,000 square feet of office and production spaces that help support ventures of all sorts, including a set-screw manufacturer, a community theater, a special-effects designer, and a CrossFit gym.

To the businesses of the Industrial Center, also known in town as the Harvester Center, Tom preaches an old-world style of work-life balance: Take vacations, take walks. Birthdays especially are big, he tells me. “If some business owner comes in and says ‘Oh, it’s my birthday today,’ we say ‘Why are you here? It’s your birthday! Take a flippin’ day off, man!’”

Tom Mancuso is trim and genial, and looks as if he might at any moment ask you to join him on a hike. Aside from his college years and a stint in California as a management trainee at a bank, he has spent his life in Batavia. His offices are located on the second floor of building one of the Batavia Industrial Center—for now. “Our office has been in 15 different places” in the complex, says Mancuso. “Somebody will walk in and say ‘You know, I need an office just like this,’ and we’ll rent our office and move it.”

The Batavia Industrial Center isn’t the only incubator in the region. The Mancuso family manages three other, similar facilities elsewhere upstate. The Genesee County Economic Development Center has spearheaded numerous initiatives to lure corporate investment, such as the Innovation Zone at MedTech Center, which describes itself as a “‘sandbox’ environment that enables high-tech entrepreneurs space and resources to innovate, collaborate, and accelerate new technologies.”

These initiatives don't always pan out. Take, for example, the Genesee Valley Agri-Business Park, where, in 2013, PepsiCo and German company Müller Dairy teamed up to open a $206 million yogurt plant. The plant closed in December 2015, and has been vacant ever since. “When you own the business, and your livelihood depends on it, [then if] things go wrong, you’re going to find a way to be creative to keep the doors open,” says Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian. “When you’re a big multi-conglomerate, you can just take the tax write-off when things go wrong.”

That ‘in it for keeps’ mentality has been a hallmark of the Mancuso management style since the Center first opened—and it’s a big reason why the incubator remains relevant today. “You say ‘incubator’ to 16 different people and you’ll get 24 different definitions of it,” Tom Mancuso says. “I think to this day what people say is they come here because it’s a place where we’ll help them.”

The very first tenant of the Batavia Industrial Center, back in 1959, was Ted Snell, a sign maker who built the large metal sign that still hangs outside the front door of building one. Snell was also a poet, and in his 1943 volume, Treasure Trove, he sang an ode to Batavia: “Here Industry employs and Labor thrives / And sweet content in living still survives / And humbly here the simple creed sustains / Of honest effort and its honest gains.”

Labor and industry have always been central to the Batavia economy, and the Center has long focused on encouraging and nourishing local manufacturers. The complex is filled with makers big and small: several artisan woodworkers, a precision glass company, a zinc and aluminum die caster, a screen-printing company, and a business that cuts tubes using lasers. The upshot is that the old harvester factory is still being used as a production facility—it’s just that its products have been diversified. Replacing lost manufacturing jobs with new manufacturing jobs hasn’t produced any massive companies like Massey-Harris, the kind of company that employs thousands of residents. But in the 1990s the Mancusos estimated that the BIC had, by then, generated about 5,000 local jobs. (“It seems fair to say we’ve added to that over the intervening 20 years,” Tom Mancuso adds.)

There are currently 72 tenants spread out across the Center’s 30 buildings. “We have people who started yesterday and people who’ve been in business 40 years,” says Mancuso. Though the tenants enjoy complaining about the building’s deficiencies—the slow elevator, the inconsistent wifi and cell reception—they seem to do so more out of amusement than actual pique. “[Other people might] need a bright white and sparkly space. For what we do, we don’t,” says James Dillon, one of the Center’s current tenants.

Dillon, an engineer, dad, soccer coach, and serial entrepreneur who has started three separate businesses in the Center since the 1990s, currently runs a small makerspace on the ground floor of building two, across the hall from CrossFit Silver Fox. During Dillon's first stint in the complex, decades ago, Little Joe Mancuso would occasionally stop by his office unannounced to chat and watch him work on an old pen-plotter.

He opened the makerspace in February, in partnership with Tom Mancuso, and seems mildly amused by the fact that currently, much of his business comes from selling inexpensive fidget spinners to local children. (He prints them to order on a breadbox-sized 3D printer.) But a customer is a customer, and the child who buys a 3D printed spinner today is more likely to return to take a class tomorrow. “‘The only way to get started is to get started,’” he recalls being told by Tom Mancuso in the early days of the makerspace. “‘Even if it’s small. Even if it’s nothing to start.”

Three floors above Dillon, in a spacious studio with floor-to-ceiling windows, Matt and Michelle Cryer run Falcon Re Furnishings, a company that makes furniture and home decor from scrap materials salvaged from old shipping pallets and other unlikely sources. Matt Cryer spent decades in the military before his recent retirement. Michelle is a local artist. When asked if he has had a lifelong interest in woodworking, Matt flatly shakes his head. “I just wing it,” he says. “What’re you gonna do? You know, I was a soldier.”

They can afford to experiment. The Cryers scrounge their materials and have few overhead costs aside from their monthly rent. Their workshop is filled with projects in various stages of completion, and Matt Cryer admits that some of them are better than others. “I figure it usually takes me three things to finally get it right,” he says, shrugging. “I have time to do it. It doesn’t cost me anything.”

The Cryers have not yet had many sales, and only recently did they launch the Falcon Re Furnishings website. (The name of the business is a tribute to Michelle’s late brother, as well as a reference to an old GEICO commercial.) They’re not dissuaded by the uncertainty of whether their venture will be viable longterm. “When we decided to do this, we thought, well, you know, we’re gonna relax about it,” says Michelle Cryer. “If it works, it works. If not, ahh, go get a bartending job.”

Companies come and go from the BIC—tenants often seek their own dedicated spaces in the region once their businesses start to grow—and that’s fine; incubators are supposed to specialize in early-stage ventures whose fates have not yet been determined by the market. “That’s part of the idea of why [the Batavia Industrial Center] is here,” says Dillon. “You have the ability to make it over that hurdle of the growing pains, where most people would have to give up because they can’t afford to pay rent one more month downtown.”

And unlike most startup incubators, the BIC seems comfortable providing resources to anyone who wants to start a business, regardless of promise or disruptive potential. “We’ve seen enough to know that we’re not smart enough to figure out who the next best winner is,” says Tom Mancuso. “But we’re making bets on people, and we feel like if you help everybody, you know, the good ones will sort out.”

In his later years, Joe Mancuso became an apostle for incubators. To him, business incubators weren’t just places to build Fortune 500 companies: They were tools to ensure the future of small town America. He believed that every town should have an incubator, built to whatever size and resources were appropriate and available. So he traveled around New York State, teaching people how to recycle old buildings to create business incubators in their own towns. He would speak to any group that would listen. One set of Chinese entrepreneurs was so inspired by Joe Mancuso’s message that it erected a statue of him outside of its own incubator in Anshan, China, with an inscription dubbing him the father of the business incubator movement.

In 2019, it will be 60 years since the Center opened its doors. It’s hard to say that the Batavia Industrial Center has saved Batavia’s economy. As of May 2017, the Genesee County unemployment rate sat at 4.2 percent, just below the New York State average of 4.3 percent and just above the United States average of 4.1 percent. Other than schools, government, and hospitals, Batavia’s major employers today are a vacuum and heat-transfer product manufacturer, a dairy cooperative, and a company that makes compressed-air sprayers. All three companies pre-date the Batavia Industrial Center.

But I think it’s also safe to say that the Center has had significant positive effects on Batavia—effects that aren’t necessarily empirically quantifiable. For 60 years, the Center has offered Batavians a factory-sized reminder that you can try to make your own luck—and sometimes you succeed, and sometimes you don’t, but, either way, you tried. It's sent the message that rather than just sit and take the jobs that an out-of-town boss gives (or withholds from) you, with a little bit of effort you can be your own boss. “People that started here have become movers and shakers in the community,” notes Dillon, citing the success of T-Shirts Etc., a screen printing business that began in the BIC and now occupies its own building downtown. “I think there’s a metaphorical importance to this place, too,” says Owens. “If you look at Genesee County, the businesses that are still thriving here almost exclusively were founded here.”

In the conference room of his office suite, Tom Mancuso holds up a poster bearing photographs of former Batavia Industrial Center tenants that have “graduated” to their own spaces. None of them is a unicorn. None of them is a sexy software company. None of them would have likely made it as far as it did without the help of the BIC. “You see the amount of resources around the world that are spent on incubators, and it feels like a disproportionate amount of that goes to the sexy, high-tech, high-growth, explosive, we’re-going-to-go-venture-capital-and-take-over-the-world companies,” Mancuso says. “And, look, that’s cool. We need those people. But they will organically come around anyway. I mean, there’s innovation every place. It’s not just software. So we’re big fans of helping everybody.”