So where did J.B. Lyon move to?

At some point, J.B. Lyon’s massive printing operation  (“the largest complete printing plant between New York and Chicago”) left its downtown location at Beaver and Daniel (among others) for the open spaces of North Broadway; I’m not sure when this happened, but by 1940, this was what their plant looked like. In all their ads and directory listings, they used an address of “North Broadway, Albany,” which didn’t quite exist then and doesn’t now. What does exist is Broadway, north of the city, in Menands. Even then, this massive structure was a little tricky to track down, because the building I suspected of being Lyon’s, doesn’t look quite like this: the abandoned Williams Press building in Menands has a central entrance similar to that shown above, but it steps in from the wings, rather than jutting out.

That is, it steps in on the Broadway side.

 

But if you look at it from the east, as this Google aerial view clearly shows, you’ll see the facade from the ad.

And if I needed more proof, I found a Williams Press ad from 1953 – using the same artwork as the Lyon ad above, also claiming to be “Printers since 1876.” So at some point the J.B. Lyon name went away, and Williams took over.