All Over Albany

Streetviewing Ironweed

Fun/literary/nerdy: A map/pictorial-of-what's-there-now of locations in Albany mentioned in William Kennedy's Ironweed, as compiled by artist Dorothy Gambrell at her Very Small Array site.

That's a small clip on the right.

The novel is set during the Depression, so the walk through (streetview through?) makes use of this 1877 (and pre-787) overlay of Albany streets.

[via the mysterious Albany Bagel Co.]

Full circle after three generations

In the latest episode of Duncan Crary's A Small American City podcast, William Kennedy talks about growing up in North Albany, how the city changed, how his family ended up in the suburbs -- and about his grandkids living in... a city.

I never wanted to do that, you know. I always resisted the idea of moving any part of my life to the suburbs, and especially because of how strongly I loved the city, the center of the city. Albany was a vital, vital city. I mean, it was just full of people all the time, everyday, lunch hour you couldn't walk on the sidewalks. And Thursday nights everybody's shopping, and the weekends everybody's at the movies. There were seven movies downtown: it was the Palace, the Strand, and the Grand, and the Ritz, and the Leland, and the Royal ... the Paramount ...

And all that vital life, there was departments stores, and bowling alleys, and social clubs. And everything started in the late 40s/early 50s to close down. The federal tax on nightclubs, and they went bust. And then television came in, and everybody stayed home, they didn't go to the movies. And the movies went crazy trying to figure out how to ... get people to come back to the movies. But the movies were everything for us -- 3,000 people at 11 o'clock at night outside the Palace, coming out of these various theaters ... And they'd go all over the place ... The place was full of night clubs, great restaurants -- all night restaurants -- and pool rooms. (laughs) I was especially fond of the pool rooms because my uncle and my father, he was a good pool player...

Anyway, but that whole urban environment was in decline in the years when I was just coming into manhood and starting to work at the Times Union at my first reporting job on the city side of the news ... and then suddenly the city just sort of imploded, you know. And the '60s came...

I went away in the middle '50s... I went to Puerto Rico to work on a newspaper. I was bored with the town. It was boring. There wasn't enough action.

While in Puerto Rico, Kennedy met his wife and got married, moved to Miami, moved back to San Juan. And they came back to Albany in 1963.

(there's more)

He wrote that in... Albany?!

Local writer Marion Roach was on the public radio program Studio 360 this past Friday talking about how reading William Kennedy's Legs helped bring her to Albany:

Roach was enthralled, then shocked to discover that Kennedy lived and worked in Albany, a city she only knew from grumbling Times reporters. "No one ever who worked covering the legislature wanted to spend an extra second in Albany," she remembers. "It was one of those places that people talked about as being completely moribund."

Kennedy's achievement, far from the centers of literary glamor, planted a seed for Roach. "I think that we are so sure that most serious artists live in New York, Paris, London," she says, "that I needed to be told, that art is here, art is everywhere. Write from where you are, or go where you want to write." When Roach was assigned her first big article [in 1983], she went to upstate New York to do the work. She stayed, and lives today near Albany.

The audio segment is embedded after the jump. In it she mentions the guy "she kind of met halfway" and married. As you probably know, he's Rex Smith, the editor of the Times Union.

Marion Roach teaches a series of very popular classes on writing at the Arts Center of the Capital Region. One of them starts this Wednesday.

(there's more)

Andy Rooney and charcoaled peaches

Andy Rooney's last commentary on 60 Minutes, this past October.

From 1995, here's a clip from aWilliam Kennedy introduction of Andy Rooney:

On page 14 of his new book, My War, Andy Rooney writes this sentence. "One of my dominating characteristics has always been that I'm not strange." Now that's a lie. Andy Rooney is as strange as charcoaled peaches or potato ice cream, which he invented. Oh sure, he looks normal, and you can understand every word he says and he's a Giants fan. When I first met him I never suspected he was strange. We were at a dinner party in the penthouse of the Wellington Hotel, looking out at the South Mall, which was under construction, and we began swapping memories of Albany and the blues men we knew and we realized we could carry on with these stories for years to come, and so we have. We've become friends. I have several strange friends.

Some of the things Andy and I had in common were Hagaman's and Freihofer's, the two most famous bakeries in Albany years ago. He didn't like Hagaman's much, and neither did I. We both liked Freihofer's. We both went to a public school, he to School 14, which fell down, and I to School 20, which is still standing. We both remember our Albany childhoods vividly; he on Partridge Street in an upscale neighborhood that's come to be called The Pine Hills and me in North Albany, which has always been called "The North End." He remembers jumping from garage roof to garage roof when he was a kid. I remember jumping from box car to box car. We both grew to resent the mispronunciation of our city by outlanders. In his essay celebrating Albany's tricentennial, Andy wrote this: "It is my unhappy duty to report to you, Albanians, that Albany is not on the rest of the world's mind much. It has been my experience that at least half of those who have heard of the place pronounce it 'Albaynee.'" And he's absolutely correct. I've told people who perpetrate such pronunciation that if they repeat it, the police will escort them outside the city limits.

As you've no doubt heard, Rooney passed away this weekend. In the Times Union, Paul Grondahl wrote a good overview of Rooney's life, both here in Albany and everywhere else. As Grondahl remarked, "Kennedy, 83, and Rooney are the biggest literary talents Albany has produced in modern times."

Rooney still had a house in Rensselaerville. We heard a story many years ago that he could sometimes be seen out there "walking" his dog from a very slow moving car. It's one of the stories that's probably too weird to be true, but we always kind of hoped it was based in fact.

Of course, Rooney was most famous for his 60 Minutes commentaries. Here's one video list of "Andy Rooney's 10 Greatest Rants."