Some old buildings just have distinctive shapes. I’ve biked past this long brick behemoth at 1201 Broadway for years and thought, “that looks like an old car barn.” Turns out, it’s an old car barn. This was one of three buildings erected by the Albany Railway Company around 1889 to house its brand-new electric trolley cars. It soon absorbed the Watervliet Railway and then, in 1899, the Troy lines. “The consolidation of the Albany and Troy systems will be followed by the absorption of the Troy and New England Road and the taking in of railways in Saratoga, Rensselaer, Washington and Warren counties, and in Vermont, which will give the consolidated company a monopoly of street car traffic from Albany to Lake George, on one side of the Hudson, and from Albany and Troy to Sand Lake, New York and Bennington, Vt., on the other.”
The street cars, by the way, were made the Gilbert Car Company works in Troy.
Successor company United Traction, which ran buses after the trolley tracks were torn up (or paved over – they do show through from time to time), continued to operate from this and the other buildings until construction of Interstate 90 eliminated the other buildings on the site.