Drawing: Hidden City House & Garden Tour / Crisan

center square garden tour 2014

Drawing's closed! Winner's been emailed!

The Historic Albany/Center Square Association Hidden City House and Garden Tour is this Thursday night in Albany's Center Square neighborhood. It's a self-guided tour of some beautiful historic homes and gardens. Here's a little more info.

AOA has a pair of tickets to give away, and just to make it sweeter, we're throwing in a $20 gift certificate to Crisan on Lark Street.

To enter, just answer the question below in the comment section of this post:

What is your favorite piece of Capital Region history?

Maybe it's a story, maybe it's a building, maybe it's a place -- just something/someone that has been a part of the Capital Region's history that you enjoy thinking about or sharing with other people.

The Hidden City House and Garden Tour starts at 5 pm on Thursday, July 26. There are twelve total sites in the Center Square, Hudson Park & Washington Park Neighborhoods. Tickets are $20 adults / $10 for children.

This year the Audubon Society of the Capital Region and Audubon New York worked with several of the homeowners on the tour to create bird-friendly backyards. The Audubon Society of the Capital Region will also be decorating seed packets and demonstrating how nesting boxes are built in Hudson-Jay Park -- a family-friendly activity.

Important: All comments must be submitted by 5 pm on Tuesday, June 24, 2014 to be entered in the drawing. You must answer the question to be part of the drawing. (Normal commenting guidelines apply.) One entry per person, please. You must enter a valid email address (that you check regularly) with your comment. The winner will be notified via email by 10 pm Tuesday, and must respond by 5 pm on Wednesday, June 25.

HAF advertises on AOA.

photo: Center Square Assocation

Comments

To me, the greatest "piece" of Capital Region history is its beautiful and (often) well-preserved brownstones. Take a walk down any Center Square street and you'll see examples of lovely homes. I always enjoy learning a little about when/why/for whom each home was built by reading the small placard near the doors!

St Marys Church downtown albany It is beautiful

That detachable collars were invented in Troy, influencing a whole era of men's clothing designs.

I've never had to deal with this, but my mother grew up with the idea that you send all shirts to be dry cleaned and never wash them at home, which I discovered was because my grandmother had soon grown so tired of having to starch my grandfather's shirts and collars that she'd decided to never deal with them again and regularly sent them out for dry cleaning. The first time I heard how a woman in Troy invented detachable collars because she was tired of washing her husband's shirts constantly, I was reminded of my own grandmother. History's great in that it never really changes.

I love the old pictures looking up State Street from Broadway where you can see the Capitol in the distance and the bustle of a city where people lived, worked, and shopped. The old storefronts, the trolley cars. I wish I had known that Albany!

The old brick school houses that have been turned into condos. I love them so much I bought one last year! What other city has so many lovingly restored buildings from the 1800s?

One of my favorite things is the million dollar staircase. I love that among the famous historic leaders are the faces of the stone carvers' loved ones.

Washington Park. A true gem

For whatever reason, the fact that GE's zipcode is 12345 is a fun fact that I often share with non-native capital district folks. Growing up in the area, it is easy to forget the influence GE has had on the area (and that they get their own easy to remember zip code!)

I love walking through Center Square and admiring the architecture.

Washington Park!

Uncle Sam!

That the escarpment in Thatcher Park used to be the shoreline of the post Ice Age period Lake Albany.

Rensselaer being the home of Yankee Doodle!

Oakwood Cemetery - a walk there is always a lesson in history and funerary art!

Tie between Uncle Sam lore and the potato chip's birth in Saratoga.

broadway, for all it used to be and could

Pinhead Susan

My favorite part of Capital Region history is it's architecture; I love walking around looking at the buildings and taking pictures.

My favorite part of Albany's history is the Democratic political machine of O'Connell and Corning. And the Egg.

Lately, I've become really interested in the ghost signs in Troy and Albany. They're little glimpses into what every day city life once was.

The Troy Public library has fascinated me since I was a little girl. More than five decades later I still marvel at the narrow stairwell leading to the glass floors of the upper levels. I was just there this week and still love browsing the stacks for books!!!

I love that we found the missing link in our genealogy right here in Albany. I found the biography matching a picture of a couple and an elegant home that accompanied my great grandfather Loren Hamilton Slade's typewritten notes in a book at the State Library. The story http://theusgenweb.org/ny/otsego/bios/237a.htm and picture were of James Slade and his wife Samantha Ford who settled in Oneonta. James was the brother of my great great great grandfather Chauncey B. Slade.

From there we were able to trace the original 17th century immigrant ancestors (Slade, Holmes, Eddy among others) from Massachusetts and Rhode Island (William Slade and Sarah Holmes; John Slade and Jemima Eddy of Swansea) to Westerlo where my great, great, great, great grandparents James Slade and Lois Barber helped start the first Baptist church and a school. We found Slade Hill Road, the little family cemetery by a stream, and fascinating snippits about life in the hill towns following the Revolution.

From there my ancestors (Chauncey and his son Sardis Van Rensselaer Slade) pressed westward well beyond Oneonta to Schoolcraft Michigan and Black Hawk County Iowa where they were also involved in starting new Baptist churches. My great grandparents settled on a farm in Oregon but we don't see any suggestion that they were Baptists in that state.

The names Van Rensselaer and Hamilton appear in our family with some frequency due to our local genealogical and land connections to Alexander Hamilton and the West Manor or Rennselaerwyck.

And, most interesting of all, Abe Lincoln and I are long lost cousins! We share grandparents from way back: The Rev. Obadiah Holmes and his wife Katherine (Hyde). Rev. Holmes too was a Baptist who was persecuted, jailed, fined, publicly whipped and banished for his religious beliefs. Fascinating life: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obadiah_Holmes

So...I love local genealogy and connecting the dots through a long history!

My husband and I moved to Albany from NJ in 2002 after coming to Albany in 1999 to meet with our wedding caterer on Hamilton Street.

I was so enamored with the quality of the housing stock and the smaller, livable urban landscape - it reminded me of Greenwich Village, without the sticker shock! Three years later, we happily uprooted ourselves from NJ and transplanted ourselves into an 1871 brownstone on State Street.

I've come to love each and every building in our walkable downtown neighborhoods - for each has an authentic patina...one that cannot be reproduced and merely 'applied' or installed in new construction.

Lives were lived in these homes - there were celebrations (marriages, birth, holidays and life's milestones) and there were sad times (wars, the Great Depression, deaths, etc.).

We consider ourselves stewards of our home - and we hope that future generations (another 143 years worth, plus) will love and honor the opportunity to call one of these historic gems 'home'.

I love taking ppl to Oakwood Cemetery and showing them the unmarked mausoleum of Russell Sage. The story I was told was that he didn't believe in the higher education of women, so when he died, his wife, Olivia Slocum Sage, founded a women's college with her inheritance and left his grave unmarked, a kind of poetic justice. She was extremely philanthropic with the inheritance, he was known as miserly.

Albany beef.

The story of White Feather Church in Easton, NY. This incident happened during the Revolutionary War, about two years before the Battle of Saratoga. A great telling of the tale can be found here: http://www.qis.net/~daruma/feathers.html

The original stockade and ongoing evolution of the Hudson River waterfront!

Old architecture in downtown Albany.

I really enjoy walking through the Center Square neighborhood and seeing the plaques on the houses that show when they were built and who they were built for. It gives you an idea how the first neighborhoods in downtown Albany were structured, who was important enough to have the nicer houses and how much Albany has developed through the centuries. It's surprising to see just how old some of the brownstones are, and what houses existed before those! I love the cobblestreets (as difficult as they can be to navigate!) too, it's like a window into Albany's past.

I have always liked the story of Leland Stanford and the Albany Rural Cemetery.

The State Capital.

I love the historic one-room train station in my hometown of Amsterdam, NY!

All the underground railroad history. A friend had an apartment over in pine hills, and in these basement was a hidden room that was part of the underground r.r.

The Quackenbush House

My favorite part of albany history is we elected the first female mayor this year!

I missed the contest, but obviously the invention of steamed hams is Albany's everlasting claim to fame.


Principal Skinner: Superintendent, I hope you're ready for mouth-watering hamburgers.
Superintendant Chalmers: I thought we were having steamed clams.
Principal Skinner: Oh, no, I said, "steamed hams." That's what I call hamburgers.
Superintendant Chalmers: You call hamburgers steamed hams.
Principal Skinner: Yes, it's a regional dialect.
Superintendant Chalmers: Uh-huh. What region?
Principal Skinner: Uh, upstate New York.
Superintendant Chalmers: Really. Well, I'm from Utica and I never heard anyone the phrase, "steamed hams."
Principal Skinner: Oh, not in Utica, no; it's an Albany expression.

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