The Making of the Mall

All credit for finding this gem goes to Julie O’Connor over at the Albany… The Way It Was page on Facebook, and all thanks go to whoever found it and posted it to YouTube. Not entirely sure what year it was from, but it appears to have been the work of Helen C. Welsh, a school librarian, library studies instructor, and serious amateur filmmaker whose other gems, such as the story of the Tulip Festival, we can only hope to uncover. She lived to the ripe old age of 102, passing away not so long ago in 2009. Here’s hoping we can find some more of her work, but in the meantime, stop what you are doing and look at this amazing documentation of Albany just before the Empire State Plaza, and the construction phase that followed.