Pirie MacDonald may have been the most famous photographer Albany ever produced. He was born in Chicago in 1867, but his parents moved to Troy. In 1883 he apprenticed in Hudson with Frank Forshew for six years,  and then opened a studio in Albany in 1890. This ad was in the 1894 guide to…

Henry Mayell & Son was established sometime in the 1850s, and by 1894 proclaimed itself Albany’s headquarters for rubber goods, located at the corner of State and Broadway, its curved building shown here at Douw’s Corner. Mayell not only sold rubber goods, but had at least one patent “for use in the making of…

John Skinner was an Albany bookseller active around the turn of those other centuries (this is from the 1894 guide to Albany’s public schools). Beyond that, all we know is the fact that he wrote up a catalogue of the library of Mr. and Mrs. John V.L Pruyn, that he dealt in books published…

We’ve been reviewing Albany’s numerous schools from 1894. Each of those schools had anywhere from seven to 18 teachers. To fill teaching slots today, we have strict educational requirements, civil service and hiring lists. But before all that, there was the Albany Teachers’ Agency, which “provides schools of all grades with competent teachers” and…

This lovely ad from 1894 is for Van Gaasbeek’s carpet store on North Pearl Street, opposite the Kenmore Hotel. Cuyler Reynolds, in the 1911 “Hudson-Mohawk Genealogical and Family Memoirs,” told us this about Alexander Van Gaasbeek: “Alexander Boyd [Gaasbeek], son of Dr. Jacobus and Helen (Boyd) Van Gaasbeek, was born in Middleburg, New York,…

(Part One, which covered Schools One through Eight, is here; Part Two, Schools Nine through 21, is here.) Some time ago, we provided StreetViews of the school sites as they appear today; that’s here. So, more of the souvenir guide to Albany’s schools as they stood in 1894, with no further insight into why…

(Part One, which covered Schools One through Eight, is here.) So we were working our way through “The Public Schools of Albany, N.Y.,” a souvenir volume from 1894. For reasons known only to the compilers, a few of the schools that existed at the time are entirely skipped over, including School No. 9, whose…

Some time back, we took a look at the inventory of Albany schools as they stood in 1922, along with some pictures of the ones that still stood in 2013. We’ve just found a guide to Albany schools from 1894 that provides pictures along with more detailed information about each school that was in…