Pemberton’s grocery

Pemberton’s Corner

Another view, this one photographic, of the house built by the father of Col. Lansing at the corner of North Pearl and Columbia streets. Diana Waite says it was at the northeast corner, which would put it where the Bayou is in the Brewster Building today, and that it may have even predated the Lansings. Jacob Lansing was a baker and a silversmith who may have done his smithing in this building. (Waite has another excellent photo of it from the Columbia Street side.) In 1824 Lansing’s great grandson sold it to Ebenezer Pemberton, who ran it as a grocery store.

George Rogers Howell says that “the antique building on the corner of Columbia and North Pearl streets, which was built in 1710, was occupied by a Mr. McPherson as a grocery store prior to 1818, when it was sold to the Pemberton Brothers — Eben, Henry S. and John — and shortly after opened by them as a grocery store. The business established by these brothers, then mere boys, was continued until 1830, when only Eben and John were interested in it. In 1859 Eben died, from which time it was conducted by John Pemberton, who died in 1885, and at the time of his death was the oldest merchant in Albany in active business.” The building survived until 1893, when it was torn down for an expansion of the Albany Business College, in what is labeled the Brewster Building (but at the time of its construction around 1887 was called the Pemberton Building, and was owned by Widow Pemberton).

Waite gives some excellent architectural detail: “The parapet gable facade on Columbia Street had fleur-de-lis iron beam anchors that held the brick wall to a timber frame. The brick, laid in Dutch cross bond, formed a zigzag pattern called vlechtwerk (wicker work) along the upper edges of the gable.”

Joel Munsell also placed the house on that corner, and ascribed it to Chancellor Lansing, “who was mayor of Albany from 1786 to 1790.” Originally just outside the city gate, “it was especially distinguished as the lodging place for the Indians when they came to Albany for the purpose of trading their furs, too often for rum and worthless ornaments. There many stirring scenes transpired, when the Indians held their powwows, and became uproarious under the influence of strong drink. The house has survived the general sweep of so called improvement. It is now [1867] owned by John Pemberton, and is occupied as a grocery and provision store.”

Thanks to the “Albany…The Way It Was” Facebook group for an 1886 letter to the editor: “It is probable that in a few years the Pemberton…corner will succumb to the march of improvement, and the searchers after the ‘Crow feet Gables’ and antique houses and half doors will look in vain for a single representative left. Something should be done to restore, reproduce or rebuild for the generations to follow these fast disappearing relics of the past.”

Years after this was originally posted, we wrote up a much more extensive history of the Lansing House/Pemberton Corner.

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