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Dining on the Night Line
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Thanks again to the Culinary Institute of America’s digital menu collection, we have this incredible (but undated) menu from the Hudson River Night Line. The last night boat ran in 1941, and the line had lost considerable glamor in the Depression years, so we’re going to guess this was from the 1920s or earlier.…
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A Meal at the Van Curler Hotel
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By complete accident of algorithm, I recently discovered that the Hudson Valley’s Culinary Institute of America has a website featuring historic menus, and happily some of them are from local institutions. So here’s one, unfortunately without a specific date, from Schenectady’s Van Curler Hotel. When the Van Curler was opened in 1925, it was…
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“She’s honest and all right”
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Just a little snippet from the old hometown, way back in 1933, when a “medium” from Hampton Manor was accused of swindling an Albany widower – a widower who, it must be said, really wasn’t hard to swindle. Whether it was age, grief or simple stupidity, the news accounts of the day give no…
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Beautiful Details from Schenectady, 1834
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I was going through my ideas files when I ran across an 1834 map with details about the Erie Canal from various local communities. It turned out I had already written about the maps themselves for Albany, Watervliet, and Schenectady – but that’s okay, because what I really wanted to emphasize was the incredible, simple…
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The Schenectady Gazette: Available Everywhere!
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In 1925, Schenectady and the tri-cities area weren’t the only places you could pick up a copy of the Schenectady Gazette. It was available all over upstate New York, apparently, and even in such far-flung locations as Boston, New York City, Hartford, Philadelphia, Detroit, and even Miami. Though Miami was certainly a stretch, the…
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Carl’s Peaches and Cream, and Radios
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While we’re talking about Carl Company ephemera, I ran across a trademark issued to the Carl Company – for the mark “Peaches and Cream,” as applied to “cotton piece goods, linen piece goods, and toweling.” I mean, when I think “linen,” I think “peaches and cream,” right? Perhaps not. This isn’t anything I remember,…
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The Carl Company
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What started this new approach to Hoxsie was when I found this receipt from The Carl Company in one of my folders the other day, and just decided to share it on Instagram. No big back story, no comprehensive history of Schenectady’s most fondly remembered local department store – just a paper cash register…
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A Safe, Sane Way
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Hoxsie started as a simple exercise in sharing tiny bits of history, often without much by way of explanation, under the banner of an old advertisement featuring a rooster crying out “Hoxsie!” 13 years ago I started this site (under the editorial “we”) as an extension of my old personal blog, with a simple…
