Farnham’s Red Lion

Many of us of a certain age remember a restaurant on Lark Street that went by the name of Farnham’s Larkin, popular with legislators of an even more certain age. Well, before Farnham’s Larkin, there was Farnham’s Red Lion.

An article in the August 26, 1959 Knickerbocker News, headlined “English Pub Ideas Put to Use in Albany,” told the story:

A six-month pub crawl around England gave Mrs. Gladys Burroughs of Albany, not a thick head, but some ideas.

Those ideas will be on view this weekend when the restaurant at 79 Chapel St. [corner of Maiden Lane, now buried under the Hilton Hotel and courtyard complex] which she bought recently, reopens after decoration under the name, Farnham’s Red Lion.

Mrs. Burroughs and two architects, Francis Wood and Robert F. Winne, both design teachers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, set out to reproduce as much as they could of the atmosphere of an English pub.

Then there’s some banter about how Woods also admitted to visiting a pub or two, and how fortunate it is that it’s not really in England where it could only be open at lunchtime and in the evening until 11 p.m.

Oaken booths, old English prints, valuable English china, Pickwickian murals and prime meat will join with modern air-conditioning, cocktails and cigarets [sic] from a machine to give the best of both worlds, hopes Mrs. Burroughs . . . A room at the back, to be known as the Wedgewood Room, has not yet been completed. It will be used for parties and banquets.

The redecorated restaurant will hold 80 customers.

Cigarettes from a machine: swanky.

(You youngsters may not know that actually swanky joints had something called cigarette girls. They walked around nightclubs and higher end restaurants, often in some form of skimpy attire, hawking cigarettes from a tray that hung from a strap around their necks. You could look it up.)

There are many mentions of the restaurant in the newspapers in its inaugural year, but not a lot after that. It was being picketed by Local 471 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employes Union in 1963, at the same time as an action against the Schine-Ten Eyck Hotel across the street., which noted that the Red Lion was under new management, which wanted to put off contract discussions while they performed renovations. After that, we find nary a mention.

After initially posting this, we were reminded that the “Albany…The Way It Was” Facebook group has photos of the old Farnham Hotel (from which the Farnham part of the name came) in its archives: