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Dropping Pamphlets for Diphtheria
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It’s 1927, and you need to get the word out about vaccination for diphtheria. There’s no social media to speak of, so you have limited options. Newspapers, of course. Direct mail, though mass mailings are expensive and computerized mailing lists don’t exist. Radio, but although radio has exploded in just a few years, it’s…
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A Matter of Decorum
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Ah, the glorious days of yesteryear, when all the men were gentlemen, all the ladies ladies, and society knew how to behave. The lowliest laborer wore a suit, f’cryin’ out loud. Not like today! That must be why, in 1898, the Albany city board of health was most perplexed at the failure of the…
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The Rice Mansion
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When we began our career in Albany not quite 30 years ago, a group of young and hungry (literally) Senate Fellows sometimes found lunchtime solace with a touch of imagined elegance in the quiet confines of the Rice Gallery of the Albany Institute of History and Art. Every now and then we wondered how…
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The Father of the Singing Towers
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Last time we detailed the celebration around the installation of the Albany City Hall carillon in 1927, and noted that one of the prime movers behind that was William Gorham Rice, who was an interesting character in Albany history. Rice (nearly always referred to by his full name in the newspapers of the day)…
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The City Hall Carillon
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One of the things Hoxsie misses about downtown Albany is the sound of the City Hall carillon ringing out at lunchtime. But while H.H. Richardson’s City Hall building was equipped with a tower when it opened in 1883, it had no bells. They didn’t come until 1927, in a major effort by two newspapers,…
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For Whom the Bells Toll
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Soon we’ll have much more on the installation of Albany’s City Hall carillon – it was quite the endeavor – but for now, this interesting little snippet from the Albany Evening News of August 23, 1927: Proud City Hall Pigeons Worried by Strange Operations in Their Home With Cuyler Reynolds Away and Food also…
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Mme. Curie Regrets She’s Unable to Lunch Today
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Marie Sklodowska Curie, born in the Kingdom of Poland and later a citizen of France, became world famous for her research on radioactivity and the discovery of polonium and radium. She disproved the theory that the atom was indivisible, and led the way to modern physics. She was the first woman to win a…
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Perhaps the Boys Will Be Inspired
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Permit us a rare excursion from our pretty strict focus on the history of the Capital District of New York to note an odd little bit that we ran across while doing some research on General Electric in Schenectady. In 1933, Owen D. Young was the Chairman of the General Electric Corporation. Young was…
