I always used to love seeing this historical marker for “First Plastic,” way out on Albany’s Delaware Avenue. At the time there was a Friendly’s on the site of the old billiard ball factory, which I still vaguely remembered from before it was torn down in the ’80s. Then I finally went to take a picture of the marker, and it set me to wondering how it came to be that the first factory to manufacture celluloid was so very far from all other manufacturing in downtown Albany; this site was fairly remote farmland at the time. Wondering turned into research and research revealed that the marker is telling LIES! Lies, I tell you! Not about what happened, but where it happened. So much more on the story in this pre-Hoxsie post from 2010.
In other plastics news: Dr. Edith Boldebuck!