All Over Albany

Walking Myrtle Ave, end to end

Where Myrtle Ave starts at Grand Street.

One of the best ways to get to know a city is to walk it. That's true for cities in which you've just arrived -- and cities in which you've lived for years. It'll change how you see a place.

And to have the chance to walk across a city, mile after mile, at a leisurely pace, taking in what's around you? That is a rare opportunity. You might even consider it a luxury in a time-crunched world.

One morning during AOA's recent summer break, I had a block of blessedly free hours. So I got together some friends and we walked Myrtle Ave in Albany -- one end all the way to the other.

Why Myrtle? It's not "famous" like Pearl Street. It doesn't have the grandeur of State Street. It's not even a major artery, though it does see its share of traffic.

But in a city of streets that have been broken into all sorts of segments over the decades, Myrtle is an exception: It runs (almost) continuously more than 2.5 miles through the city, across multiple neighborhoods and local historical eras.

Traveling along Myrtle Ave is like taking a cross section of the city of Albany. It's a chance to see how the various shapes of parcels and buildings fit together. How neighborhoods suffering from poverty are connected to areas where wealth is common. It's another way of experiencing this place and mapping it in your head.

The 1794 Simeon De Witt map. The street that would later be called Myrtle is the farthest one running vertically on the left. / via Wikipedia

Myrtle is one of the city's oldest streets, dating back to the late 1700s. Portions of it show up on Simeon De Witt's 1794 grid map of the city, though it was called Mink Street then. It was called Monckton before that and would later spend some years as West Ferry Street before being named Myrtle.

So it's fitting that Myrtle begins in one of the oldest sections of the city, at Grand Street in what we now know as the Mansion neighborhood, and makes its way up the hill past stately old row homes that date to the mid 1850s. One Myrtle Ave was built in 1860 (or thereabout) when the city's economy was going through a boom time. And the neighborhood has provided homes for successions of immigrant populations.

The last half century hasn't been smooth. The construction of the Empire State Plaza cut off the neighborhood from downtown. The symptoms of disinvestment and poverty have taken their toll. Multiple buildings are stuck with the infamous red X.

The latest Census estimates figure the median household income for the tract that includes this section of Myrtle is about $28,477 -- $57,708 for family households. More than 40 percent of the people in living this tract are estimated to be below the poverty level -- including almost 75 percent of the kids here. And city tax assessments peg the value of residential buildings in the low to mid 100,000s (though there are certainly some exceptions, both higher and lower).

But like other Albany neighborhoods -- and neighborhoods elsewhere -- if you just stick to the major thoroughfares, skirting their borders, you're not getting the full picture. Walk up Myrtle through the Mansion neighborhood and there's life. Neighbors talking on stoops. Kids playing. Little pocket gardens. Delightfully maintained buildings. And obvious pride in the neighborhood.

At the top of the hill is the the one break in Myrtle, at Eagle Street, where it runs into a mansion of a different sort.

Myrtle once ran alongside what was called Beaver Park -- it's now Lincoln Park. But the construction of the ESP -- specifically the area around State Museum -- took a bite out of it. But we can follow the aptly-named Park Ave along the park to the other side.

Myrtle picks back up again at Swan Street, which marks a different architectural style and era. The street is now lined mostly by two-story homes that don't stand right next to each other. They date to the 1910s.

That brick complex on the corner -- with the late 19th century stable building -- is set to be converted into apartments.

Gardening along the sidewalk.

When Myrtle meets Delaware it passes between Market 32 -- one of two neighborhood-size supermarkets run by the company that sit more or less along Myrtle's length -- and the grand building that houses Hackett Middle School, which was built in 1926. (It's named after William Hackett, Albany's 67th mayor. He died in office in 1926 in a car crash in Cuba.)

Crossing another major artery at Delaware means heading into more new architectural styles as the blocks get longer. Two-family homes that date to the 1920s line up opposite the Stratton VA Medical Center parcel. And a little farther up, after the intersection with the end of Knox Street, there are these cozy-looking connected row homes.

And as Myrtle approaches New Scotland Ave it arrives at Albany Med and the rising neighborhood urban center there. The addition of all the new buildings over the last decade has made that corridor feel denser and taller -- and also more uniform.

Past Albany Med the strings of two-family homes grow more prominent, and Myrtle runs along the Capital District Psychiatric Center near South Lake.

The large parcels on the south side of the street in this stretch have been institutional for a long time. The old penitentiary once occupied the space from Delaware to New Scotland, the Alms House -- and its hospital -- from New Scotland to Lake. And once perched near Myrtle Ave at South Lake: the second Dudley Observatory.

From an 1895 map of the city. Myrtle is the street running along the edge of the alms house property. / via Wikipedia.

Cross over South Lake and the feel of the street changes again. There are no more large institutional parcels. The structure of the neighborhood doesn't feel so tightly wound. It's homes along both sides.

Myrtle and South Lake

There are a few surprises along the streetscape -- like this building at Ontario Street. It's an old plumber's association hall -- as the building-wrapping mural indicates -- that's been repurposed as living space.

The Pine Hills blocks of Myrtle are full of those classic Albany two-family homes -- like these near Ridgefield Park -- that date to a building boom in the 1910s and 1920s.

Having once lived in these sorts of homes, I think they're underrated. (I still sometimes miss our old second-floor apartment.) Two flats of 1,100-1,200 square feet, each with enough room for a few people. Buy one of the houses, live in one of the flats, and you can mostly cover the mortgage by renting out the other. Or that second flat could be space for other generations in the same family to live close by. These homes are all over the city and they make up an important part of the residential fabric of this place.

But every so often along Myrtle there's also the odd apartment building -- like this 21-unit building at South Main that dates to the 1930s.

As you head farther up Myrtle, the mix shifts more toward single-family homes that date to the 1920s. Many of them are classic, beautiful city neighborhood homes.

The streetscape continues to relax as you continue west. I always like to gawk at what's growing in this garden near South Allen.

And the trees start to assert themselves more on the streetscape, like at the intersection with South Pine.

After Pine, the houses start to stand even farther apart, suggesting the upcoming transition to a more suburban layout of the adjacent neighborhood, which was once the outer reaches of the city. This is one of the last two homes with a Myrtle address. It dates to 1933.

And then Myrtle literally hits a roadblock before it meets Marion Ave. I suspect the barrier was placed here to keep drivers from cutting around the corner at Western and Manning (which people would certainly do if they could to avoid the light). But I've also thought there's some unintentional symbolism to the barrier as well -- an actual physical dividing line between the small-lot, mid-priced neighborhoods of the city's mid-section, and the large-lot homes on Marion, which might be Albany's toniest residential street.

And that's where Myrtle ends, on a boulevard-format street with homes valued at more than $300k in a tract with an estimated median household income of more than $60,000 (and more than $90k for families).

It can seem like a completely different place from where the street started. But it's not. It's the same city, and the two points are directly connected by a thread that runs an almost continuous straight line between them. It's one thing to know that, to see it on a map -- it's another to walk it, to feel the distance isn't really that far, that you can cover the ground on foot in an hour or so.

Greg Dahlmann is one of the editors of AOA.