Continuing our slow march through the tablets placed in honor of the bicentennial of Albany’s charter as a city, we have a marker that denoted the site of what was for many years the most important house in Rensselaerswyck – the manor house of the patroon.
Tablet No. 25 — Manor House, Albany
Bronze tablet, 11×23 inches, set in granite, same as No. 7, near the present business office of the Van Rensselaers, west side Troy road, or Broadway, at that point. Inscription :
“Opposite Van Rensselaer Manor House. Erected, 1765. Residence of the Patroons. This Spot is the Site of the First Manor House.”
This marker was undisturbed in 1914, when the Albany Argus published an article on the conditions of the markers, but disappeared sometime after, presumably during construction as the area turned fully industrial.
In 1925, a Knickerbocker Press article on the 1765 manor house noted that the site was then occupied by “the McDonald gas meter works, one of the largest meter factories in the world.” You would recognize that today as 991 Broadway, the Arnoff Building — where Nipper lives. In 1946, Edgar Van Olinda wrote “The exact site of the [1765] manor house would now be difficult to locate, since there is no historical marker to indicate the spot where it stood. Many older Albanians will recall the offices of the Van Rensselaers which stood across the street in Broadway where the Niskayuna road turns west to join the Loudonville highway.” In 1959, when the great grandson of the last patroon died in Boston, Ellen Scott wrote in the Times-Union, “Somewhere on Broadway, Albany, they say there’s a marker, but no one knows just where.”
In fact, the 1876 Hopkins map shows where the office was, very nicely. Just when the marker went missing is very hard to say, but it’s been gone a long time. In fact, since Van Olinda wrote about a number of the other historical markers, it’s odd that he seemed unaware that this one should have been there when he was writing in 1946.
The history of the Van Rensselaer manor houses can be found elsewhere, and we’ve already written quite a bit about the concept of a patroon. The reason the Patroon Creek, also known as the Fifth Creek, was so named is that it flowed past the patroon’s manor house.
The original building on this site was completed about 1668, constructed by Jeremias Van Rensselaer, director of the colony of Rensselaerswyck, to replace a farmstead that had been destroyed in a flood in 1666. That served as the Rensselaerwyck manor house until 1765, and was torn down in 1839. It is the site of that house that the bicentennial plaque’s placement was intended to mark. It was near to JVR’s grist mill and brewery, and he wrote that it was “only straight and plain, of two rooms, but the cellar built of stone and further with a stone foundation.” (This information all taken from the invaluable “Albany Architecture,” edited by Diana S. Waite.)
The new manor house, built by Stephen van Rensselaer II, the patroon, was a grander affair – that is the house that survived being adjacent to the Erie Canal and a growing lumber and industrial district until late in the 19th century, when, fresh out of patroons, there was considerable concern the old manor house would simply rot. It was Albany’s most prominent architect of the era, Marcus T. Reynolds, who saw to it that the bulk of the house was transported to Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where it was reconstructed into the Sigma Phi fraternity house in 1893. Woodwork, wallpaper and other furnishings were also donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, becoming part of the Van Rensselaer room.
The office building mentioned, which was across Broadway near Tivoli, shown here with a lovely residence next to it, was built sometime around 1666 and survived until about 1917, when the International Harvester building expanded. (That’s not the IH building that currently houses a tire center – it’s the one further south that currently has a ghost sign for Rodgers Liquor Co., Inc.) The business office was where tenants of the patroon – which was nearly everyone in Rensselaerswyck – paid rent to the Van Rensselaers.
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