Jessica Pasko at All Over Albany wrote last year about how Albany is the home of rolled, perforated toilet paper. She didn’t, however, investigate whether our hometown was also the pioneer in toilet paper holders, but it seems likely. Now you’ve got a roll where you used to have a pile of papers; it couldn’t …
You don’t hear the word “bedstead” much anymore, which could be why Albany is so shamefully bereft of bedstead factories. Not so in 1862. But when you Google “bedstead,” one of the top entries is from the Albany Institute of History and Art, which features a magnificent example that belonged to Stephen Van Rensselaer IV. …
Look for the symbol of the Troy Restaurant Association, your assurance that your food is properly selected and properly prepared. I mean it, just look for it – you won’t find it. You won’t find a lot of “lunch systems” anymore either, and I’m not sure we aren’t the poorer for it. But you will …
“Beck’s Pocket Guides are distributed each year to every Policeman and Fireman in the city, all offices in the Court House, City Hall, Jail, Troopers, Post Office Employees, Bus Drivers, Aldermen, Supervisors, Bank Employees, School Teachers and Business Houses in the City.” In 1935, Fred A. Beck’s Pocket Guide of Troy, N.Y. had grown to …
Sometime in the late 1950s, for a very brief time, my grandfather ran a drive-in restaurant on Aqueduct Road in Schenectady, not far from the Aqueduct (Route 146) bridge, and now the site of an auto junkyard. A lot of his receipts from that business were saved. In this age when everything is computer-inventoried and …
In case you wondered, Schenectady residents of 1862, yes, Francis Calo is still running a baggage wagon to every part of the city. And he continues the business of carman (which under one definition would be the same as running a baggage wagon). And he hangs out across the street from Lyon’s. (Imagine a modern …
In only 150 years, we have completely forgotten the most popular flour merchant in the world. That this may have been an exaggeration I cannot accept.
In 1862, S.J.Thompson & Co. was making photographs, daguerreotypes, and ambrotypes at 478 Broadway, in a now-lost building somewhere on the north side between State Street and Maiden Lane. Daguerrotype was the first commercial photographic process. Ambrotype was a positive image on glass, using a collodion solution (and such collodion, it is said, played a …
In case anyone needs more (and you know you do) on the relationship between Ticonderoga and the pencil that bears its name, here’s a little note from “Graphite,” a publication promoting the billions of wonders produced by the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company of Jersey City, New Jersey. In case you wondered where to get plumbago for …
I could put in a phenomenal amount of effort to explain what was going on in the northern New York graphite mines, what sort of a stranglehold Joseph Dixon & Co. was holding over its competitors, and how he who controlled pencil leads held the fate of a free press in his hands. Or I …