Another advertisement from the 1858 Albany City Directory, this one for Johnson & Offenheiser at the bottom of State Street, where they dealt in foreign and domestic fruit, eggs, poultry, […]

From 1858, an ad for the Marble Pillar Restaurant, ironically using a typeface meant to resemble wooden logs, not marble. “This old and popular House has recently undergone thorough repairs; […]

Ignatius Jones’s “Random Recollections of Albany” included strong and yet confusing praise for a figure I hadn’t heard of before, one Solomon Southwick. Southwick was born into a Newport, Rhode […]

English: An etching of Dutch-style rowhouses in Albany, New York, United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Continuing with Ignatius Jones’s 1850 recollections of Albany before it had grown into a mid-19th […]

In 1850, one Ignatius Jones published the second edition of his “Random Recollections of Albany, from 1800 to 1808.” It’s interesting how many of his opinions of Albany would still […]

From 1858, an ad for Joel Munsell’s steam printing house. I’ve mentioned Munsell a few hundred times before, and even visited his grave. His Annals of Albany, mentioned here, is […]

John Wesley Hyatt was born in Starkey, New York, on the west side of Seneca Lake on November 28, 1837. When he was sixteen, he went to Illinois and became […]

English: Black-and-white bust portrait of Thurlow Weed, Republican political boss (Photo credit: Wikipedia) He should be remembered just for his name: Thurlow Weed. He should be remembered just for the […]

I suppose that Albany residents could be forgiven for not knowing that the man who figured out how to create an electromagnet, by winding wire around a magnet and running […]

President Arthur’s Grave (Photo credit: carljohnson) Last week Marc McGuire at the Times-Union posted an article titled “Our Rich and Famous,” which included a poll for voting on the biggest […]