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The Bridge that Preceded It
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In its 1915 report, the Great Western Gateway Commission gave a little bit of history of the various bridges that had connected Schenectady to Scotia across the Mohawk River. Despite having been settled in 1661, the first permanent bridge to be built didn’t come about until 1808. It was authorized in 1800 in the…
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The Great Western Gateway Bridge: The Life of the Citizen is at Stake
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At the 1915 hearing on the need to build the Great Western Gateway Bridge between Schenectady and Scotia (and beyond), the Honorable Fred W. Cameron, Chairman of the Saratoga Reservation Commission (various commissions were forerunners of the State Parks system) came down to Schenectady to argue for the need for the bridge. First, he…
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The Great Western Gateway: There Will Be Speechifying
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As Schenectady grew into an industrial powerhouse and State Street grew into a thriving commercial district, and as automobiles began to become an important form of transportation, it became clear that the old bridge across the Mohawk, an iron trestle affair that carried trolleys across between Washington Avenue and the end of the dike…
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The Sheridan Avenue Steam (and Electricity) Plant
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The Sheridan Avenue steam plant, at somewhere north of 100 years in service, is one of the older bits of civil infrastructure around. @willwaldron from the Times-Union posted a photo of the original dynamos inside the plant, with the notation that they were DC, which led to conjecture that perhaps they were used solely…
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Albany’s Oldest Business Builds a New Warehouse
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Some time ago, Hoxsie came to the possibly supported conclusion (well, been wrong before) that the oldest remaining business in Albany is The Woodward Company, which currently sells fasteners way out in Colonie , but which began its lengthy life as a saddle and harness supplier. Originally founded by Nathaniel Wright in 1819, it…
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Joel Munsell, Albany publisher extraordinaire
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Some time ago I said “It’s not possible to be interested in Albany history and not to owe a debt of gratitude to Joel Munsell.” He was a fine printer and one of the most important chroniclers of Albany’s early history. Not a native Albanian, Munsell was born in 1808 in Northfield, Massachusetts. At…
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Phoenixville Phriday: Phoenixville Bridge Works
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In a non-regular feature that we will not be calling “Phoenixville Phriday,” Hoxsie is going to step away from chronicling historical trivia of its ancestral lands and momentarily turn its attention to the history of its new hometown, Phoenixville, PA. Phoenixville was a small steel town that also cranked out finished bridges; if you…
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How Pirie MacDonald Came to be a Photographer of Men
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Well, we just had to find out a little bit more about Pirie MacDonald, the celebrated photographer of men who was raised in Troy, apprenticed in Hudson, and got his professional start in Albany. These are the excerpts from a sketch in The Photographic Journal of America, Vol. 31, from October, 1894, which in…
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