Those of you for whom New Year’s Eve is an occasion for public drunken revelry (which in Albany appears to set it apart from almost no other holiday) may look away. For those of us who decided enough was enough as we embarked upon adulthood, let us consider that once upon a time there were hotels meant just for our type, known as temperance houses. A.C. Churchill opened the first one in Albany, Churchill’s Hudson Street Temperance House, in 1835, as this ad from 1847 attests. No less great a hotel than the Delavan House was also renowned for its temperance attitude.
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