Items tagged with 'history'
Running on Albany time
The first Dudley Observatory, in north Albany.
In our global civilization, we're accustomed to dealing with time zones and standard definitions -- Greenwich Time, Eastern Time, Daylight Savings Time.
If one plan from before the Civil War had succeeded, the Northeast might have been on Albany Time.
It started in 1851, with the founding of the Dudley Observatory.
Albany bashing has a long history
Was Pearl Street dead back in the day?
The recent item proclaiming Albany to be one of America's 10 dead cities was just the latest in a long tradition of bashing our capital city.
Who knows when Albany-bashing began, but I found evidence of it that dates back to 1789, and is a kind of reminder that in all criticism, you have to consider the source.
The Street Academy
Check out this 1977 documentary Chuck reconstructed about the former Street Academy, an alternative high school in Albany. The former slide-and-cassette show (beep!) has quite the funky musical intro:
Chuck's an alumnus of the school. He's been collecting documents and memorabilia related to its history. It opened in 1970 and was eventually renamed Harriet Gibbons High School. The Albany school board recently voted to close the program.
The Normanskill's Norman
Delaware Ave above, the Normanskill below.
Around Albany, many of our most familiar place and street names come from notable local figures.
Louis Menand was a noted horticulturist of his time; Daniel Manning published the Albany Argus and became US Secretary of the Treasury. Slingerlands was named for farmer Teunis Slingerland.
So, who was the "Norman" of the Normanskill?
Dead non-presidents
Former NY Governor DeWitt Clinton shared space with Columbus on the $1000 U.S. note.
Some politicians get streets or courthouses named after them. Some get a statue in the park. A very few exceptional public figures are memorialized on our coins and currency -- and Albany can lay claim to four famous figures whose portraits have appeared on our money.
After the jump, a few of the Albany pols. who were (or are) on the money:
Block by block, Washington Place is back together
The new/old street -- level again.
How do you rebuild a street? In the case of Troy's Washington Place, the answer is: one stone at a time.
The street -- which runs along the picturesque (and private) Washington Park in Troy -- is made up of Belgian block pavers (sort of like cobblestones, but square and a regular size), that were first laid during the 1800s. About 35,000 pavers. And reconstruction of the road required every one of the pavers to be removed and then re-installed -- by hand, like installing a giant patio.
When the street got to be in such bad shape that it was nearly impassable (undulating would have been a kind word), the Washington Park Association rallied support to preserve the pavers -- and the historic look of the streetscape. Now the association reports the job is finished. The official ribbon cutting will be August 3.
WPA reports that the job cost $200k, and a handful of organization contributed services -- including the City of Albany, which donated 8,000 pavers to replace blocks that had broken.
Here's a photoset covering the reconstruction project.
photo courtesy of TAP, Inc via Duncan Crary Communications
Siena ranking: Roosevelts top two US presidents
We're fans of Teddy, but he ranks higher than Lincoln or Washington?
The Siena Research Institute released its ranking of the American presidents today, based on a poll of presidential experts. The top 10 from this most recent poll, along with previous years' rankings, are above.
Barack Obama ranked #15 in this latest poll. George W. Bush was #39 (that's fifth from the bottom). Here are the full rankings.
The presidents were scored on 20 criteria, ranging from "background" to "luck" to "leadership ability." (A bit more about the methodology is after the jump.)
Earlier on AOA:
+ New York presidents pop quiz
+ Teddy Roosevelt: badass
Inside the Central Avenue Trolley Power Station
The second floor at Knighton's. We kind of want to live here.
A lot of people were interested in yesterday's post about the restored trolley power station on Central Avenue -- and a few folks mentioned wanting a tour.
The owner, John Knighton, gave us a tour of the place when we there and we've posted a few more pictures after the jump.
Powering the Troy-Schenectady Railway
The mystery of 1830 Central Avenue, finally solved.
So, for about as long as we can remember, every time we drive past this building at 1830 Central Ave (near Kohl's) we look up and ask ourselves "What the heck was that?"
The building has looked vacant for the longest time... but it's really kind of cool looking and we guessed it might have been an old theater of some kind. We guessed wrong.
The other day we saw an open sign hanging in the window. So we did a little happy dance and detoured into the parking lot.
Where Menands got its name
What do exotic flowers have to do with this Albany County village?
If you live in the Capital District, you hear the name Menands on a regular basis. You may live there, drive through the Albany County villiage, or just hear it on the news and in conversation.
So what is a Menand?
Well, the question really is who was Menand?
For the answer, you'd have to look back to the late 1800s, when everyone from well-to-do collectors of exotic flora, to prosperous homeowners with gardens, to cemetery visitors who wanted to pay tribute to a loved one -- would go to Menand's.
A short tour of Albany's historic stained glass
From a window at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.
One of the things I love most about Albany is the rich and storied religious architecture that peaks above more modern buildings in the downtown area.
While many of the churches are open only during Sunday mass, I stopped by five historic churches before service to snap photos of some world-famous stained glass windows.
The Boulevard Cafeteria: ticket to lunch
The old Boulevard Cafeteria, where Albany met for lunch.
So far, Lunch Week has been all about where to go to lunch now. But it got us thinking about where people used to eat "back in the day."
Restaurants are about more than just food -- they're about atmosphere and character and clientele. They're gathering places full of stories.
From the late 1920's through the 1950's, one of the more interesting places people gathered in Albany was a 24 hour, semi-self-serve joint at the corner of Central Ave and Robin St. called The Boulevard Cafeteria.
Today it houses Ristorante Paradiso, owned by Matt Daskalakis. Matt used to eat at the Boulevard when he came to Albany to play for the Albany Senators in the 1950s. He gave us the tour of the old place, which is virtually untouched except for a movie makeover in the 1980s.
Be sure to scroll down to check out the menus (with prices) from the 1930s and 1940s.
Al-Tro Park: the Capital Region getaway in Menands
Al-Tro Park: "Pleasure Island" in Menands.
A century ago, Albanians looking for summertime fun didn't get in the car and drive for hours to a Six Flags or a water-park.
They got on board a trolley car or steamship and headed to Menands to find the finest in 19th-century entertainment.
Where's the fire?
Via Carl comes this film clip of the Albany Fire Department from 1901. From the Library of Congress' American Memory page for the clip: "A sidewalk crowd on a main street of Albany, N.Y., watches as fourteen pieces of horse-drawn fire equipment quickly pass by."
There's no sound (of course), but we can imagine the rumble and racket there must have been -- all those horses and wagon wheels clack-clack-clacking as they rushed along the paving stones.
The clip is credited to Thomas A. Edison, Inc.
(Thanks, Carl!)
The voice of Edison via shaking light sound
Dead or near-dead media formats: wax cylinders, 8-tracks, cassettes, floppy discs, CDs (almost) and... the pallophotophone.
The pallophotowhat?
From the GE Reports blog:
A pile of dusty film canisters in the basement of the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium has yielded some of the world's oldest surviving radio broadcasts. The 20 shows were first heard on Schenectady radio station WGY between 1929 and 1931. One features a talk by GE founder Thomas Edison in a broadcast celebrating the 50th anniversary of the incandescent light bulb. Another is a portion of a high school basketball game that's believed to be the second oldest surviving sports broadcast.
They were recorded on a long forgotten machine that GE developed in 1922 called a pallophotophone -- after the Greek words for "shaking light sound" -- in one of the earliest attempts to record sound on film. But there was only one catch with the great find: There weren't any known pallophotophones in existence to play back the lost pieces of history.
Enter the museum's curator, Chris Hunter, and GE's engineers, who together cracked the pallophotophone code.
How? The engineers built a whole new machine out of modern parts to read the media.
The post includes a photo of the new machine and audio from one of the Edison recordings.
Earlier on AOA: The new old Daily Gazette
photo: Schenectady Museum via GE Reports
The Piano City
A decorative Boardman & Gray
In the mid 1800s, as a single collar factory in Troy blossomed into dozens, Albany became famous for manufacturing a product of its own -- pianos.
In an age when people made their own music, the growing middle class felt no home was complete without a piano. So when J. & H. Meacham began manufacturing pianos around 1829, it set off a boom that could have given Albany fair claim to the nickname of "Piano City."
Troy's paper boats
One of the joys of living near the Hudson River is seeing the rowing clubs plying their sleek craft across the water at dusk and dawn. The Hudson has long been a favorite of rowers, and for a few decades after the Civil War, it was home to a race-winning curiosity: the paper boat -- created in Troy.
A tour of the Shaker settlement in Colonie
America's first permanent Shaker settlement was founded in what was once Watervliet, and is now Colonie.
You might be familiar with the well-preserved and historic landmark Hancock Shaker Village in Western Massachusetts (not to mention its cute baby animals), but you might be surprised to find out the first American Shaker settlement was built right here in the Capital Region.
The Watervliet Shaker National Historical District, settled in 1776, is a stone's throw from Albany International Airport (it's right across Albany Shaker Road). Some of the site's buildings and the museum are open for self-guided tours, but lucky for me the Historic Albany Foundation and Shaker Heritage Society let me tag along on a recent and seldom-conducted guided tour.
Lincoln Park -- from beer, bricks and beavers
A plan for Beaver Park from 1914
Sure, the Washington Park has the Olmstead pedigree, the stately splendor, and a spooky rep as a former graveyard. But the land that became Albany's Lincoln Park has the more interesting history -- a history that includes beer, bricks, borrowing and... the beaver.
Thacher Park's namesake
The Indian Ladder Trail at Thacher Park
Lately we've heard a lot about Thacher Park -- because of the potential closing, the protests and now the possible reprieve. And in all this coverage, you've probably heard the park called by its full name "John Boyd Thacher Park."
So, who was John Boyd Thacher? And why did they name a park for him?
Toilet paper was invented in... Albany
Modern toilet paper got its start here. Wipe proudly.
Now, I'm not exactly one for toilet humor, but I stumbled upon a fun factoid recently and it was too good to resist. I had to investigate.
And it turns out that, yes, Albany is the birthplace of perforated (rolled) toilet paper as we know it.
Really.
Are you smarter than an Albany 8th grader (circa 1882)?
Albany public school quizzes from 1882
A recent trip to the Albany County Hall of Records netted us this interesting score: a book filled with public school exam questions from 1882 through the early 1900s.
We got a real kick out of these, so we picked out a handful from the 8th grade and put together a little quiz...
The new old Daily Gazette
There should be more stories about giant blimps.
This is cool: Google is digitizing the Daily Gazette's microfilm -- and it's indexing the archives using optical character recognition (that's software that can "read" the text in images).
Google has already indexed 7.6 million Gazette articles, according to the newspaper's site. The current index stretches back to the 1920s, but paper the archive will eventually include articles from 1897 forward.
The archive is fun to do through. You can search for a topic, read the article (and link to it), zoom out to see page on which the article originally appeared, shuffle through adjacent pages and click on headlines to zoom back in. For example, here's an article from 1922 about Thomas Edison's return to Schenectady. As far as we can tell, you don't have to be a subscriber to use the archive.
Google has working with newspapers to digitize archives since 2008 (and few major papers before that). It shares ad revenue from the archives with the papers.
screen grab: Daily Gazette
Presidents Day
TR
In honor of Presidents Day, here are a bunch of old vintage AOA posts related to the presidency:
New York Presidents Pop Quiz
How well do you know the presidents from New York?
President Obama at HVCC
The newest president's visit to the Capital Region last fall.
Air Fore One landing at ALB
President Obama didn't take Amtrak.
How the Capital Region voted for president
Obama won each of the four counties in the Capital Region -- though it was close in Saratoga.
Happy Birthday, Martin
The story of Martin Van Buren, in 7 minutes.
Chester A. Arthur's grave
It's in the Albany Rural Cemetery.
Teddy Roosevelt: badass
Hard to argue with that distinction.
A pet befitting a badass president
It was an ornery little fella.
AOA's back on its regular schedule Tuesday.
Saratoga's Pompeia
The vintage photo blog Shorpy featured a 1901 photo today from a home on Broadway in Saratoga Springs -- a building that included a replica of a home from ancient Pompeii. It's a beautiful scene (be sure to click through for a larger view).
Blogging Pompeii -- a Pompeii blog -- dug into the history of the building last year (and found a bunch of photos):
The Pompeia was built in 1889 by Boston hardware merchant and architect, Franklin Webster Smith, once dubbed 'Reconstruction Smith'. He had already built the Villa Zorayda in St Augustine, Florida (a Moorish Palace) and the Casa Monica Hotel, also in St. Augustine (another Moorish castle but on what seems a far larger scale; the website contains historical images of the hotel, which are amazing). Smith was described as 'a man of vision and foresight' who wanted both to enhance Saratoga's prosperity and her cultural and intellectual standing. Apparently he had a personal distaste for horse-racing and gambling, for which Saratoga was famous.
According to Blogging Pompei, the building has had a string of different owners and mishaps over its lifetime (apparently there was an incident involving smoldering mummies). The building still stands today -- though not as a house. It's now the offices of Palio, an advertising firm.
(Thanks, CJ!)
photo: Shorpy
... said Anonymous about The Albany metro area is "brainy"