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The cure may be worse than the disease
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Or not, because look at that disease. I’ve posted this image from an 1860-something Albany directory before over on My Non-Urban Life, but it deserves a second look. I don’t know what’s wrong withthe eye on the right, but I’ll say this: I don’t want it. Also, whateverthe surgical cure would have been in…
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Walker’s – for everything
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In the 19th century, Schenectady’s main business district was all concentrated west of the canal. And it would seem that most things that were for sale were concentrated in James Walker & Co., wholesale and retail dealers in groceries, agricultural implements, house furnishing goods, wood and willow ware, rope, twine and cordage, coal oils…
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Again with the steam
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Oh, steam! Is there nothing you don’t make better? I’m not sure exactly what they actually milled – perhaps just coffee and spices – at Eureka Steam Mills, which was at Broadway and Division Streets (possibly where the defunct Adirondack Trailways terminal is), but they were one of a number of dealers in coffee,…
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They didn’t call it the Collar City for nothing. . .
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In 1895, you couldn’t swing a cat in Troy without hitting a collar factory.
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Bears in the news
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Bears in the news? Nothing new. The Cohoes Cataract, 1849, reported on a resolution of the trustees of the village of Cohoes: “Complaint having been made that Wm. H. Bortell has a bear near his house which is not safely secured, therefore Resolved: That the police constable be, and he is hereby ordered to…
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Mmmm . . . steam crackers . . .
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As I’ve said before, if you wanted to show that your product was the height of modernity in the 19th century, it had to be made by steam. Witness Fred Carr & Son’s Greenbush Steam Cracker and Biscuit Manufactory. It had previously been J. Whiting’s cracker factory, at Second Avenue and Washington in what…
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Where the Erie Canal met the Hudson
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Once, it might have been the most important transportation intersection in the United States: the spot where the Erie Canal opened into the Hudson River. Here, barges carrying grain and hundreds of other products from the Great Lakes region had to be lifted from mule-drawn packet boats the plied the canal and moved onto…
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The Albany-Rensselaer Bridge
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I don’t have a date for this postcard, which features the first Dunn Memorial Bridge, a lift bridge dedicated August 19, 1933, replacing the Greenbush Bridge. By the opening of the Dunn, Greenbush was a memory, consolidated along with Bath-on-Hudson and East Albany into the City of Rensselaer. This is the approach to the…
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We’re proud of our shoddy work!
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Not surprisingly, in its heyday the Collar City (and neighboring Cohoes, the Spindle City) generated a lot of waste fabric. But in 1895, very little waste was allowed to go to waste, and the cast-off cotton and wool of the collar and shirt bosom industries was collected up for a variety of uses. Paper,…