All Over Albany

Paul Grondahl on the O'Connell-Corning Machine

"Uncle Dan" was a South End native.

Journalist/author/historian Paul Grondahl will be at the Albany Public Library's Howe Library April 21 for a talk titled "The O'Connell-Corning Machine: How it Controlled the South End to Uptown for Decades." The event is a fundraiser for the South End Improvement Corporation -- tickets are $25.

Grondahl is, of course, Albany-famous for his work with the Times Union. He also literally wrote the book on Erastus Corning II. Here's a clip from Grondahl's Mayor Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma about machine boss Dan O'Connell and one of the ways he exerted influence:

... Whatever slim thread of independence remained in the citizenry of Albany was co-opted by the machine. Dan O'Connell always said he wanted a thousand little jobs instead of a few big commissioner-level patronage positions. Everyone in Albany, it seemed, got a little slice of the patronage pie or was related to somebody who did. there were all the old fellas raking leaves in the park, the lift operators running automatic elevators in City Hall, the surfeit of janitors in the city's buildings, the plethora of laborers on county road crews, the scores of clerical workers tucked away in forgotten cubbyhole offices in city and county agencies. Freedman in his book The Inheritance recounts what has come to be seen as a classic symbol of machine payroll padding and patronage corruption: that Dan's Albany County courthouse required seventy-two janitors for six floors while the Empire State Building employed just sixty for its 102 floors. One estimate put the number of full- and part-time city and county jobs controlled by the machine at about 5,000 -- perhaps as high as fifteen percent of the county's entire adult workforce -- attesting to Dan's philosophy of spreading the patronage broadly. ...

The event at the Howe Library starts at 6:30 pm on Tuesday, April 21. You can get tickets online at the first link above.