• No women flatfoots for Albany, see?

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    Carl Johnson

    In the newspaper world, there’s a thing called “burying the lede,” where you gloss over what is actually the most newsworthy part of the story because you’re focused on something else. Well, in my excitement yesterday over the possibility of a Hawk Street Viaduct elevator, I kinda buried the lead on the actual story…

  • The Hawk Street Viaduct Elevator

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    Carl Johnson

    Every now and then we get on the topic of the Hawk Street Viaduct, the once graceful structure that connected Clinton Avenue to Elk across Sheridan Hollow. But I don’t believe we’ve ever before run across the idea that the viaduct should have had an elevator. The Albany Evening Journal of April 11, 1914…

  • The Plan for the Downtown

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    Carl Johnson

    So the Temporary State Commission on the Capital City had a whole bunch of recommendations, plans, schemes and dreams, all meant to further the goal of creating a new center of government (then called the South Mall, a little confusing as the word “mall” was then increasingly being applied to those newfangled enclosed shopping…

  • The Retail Core Project

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    Carl Johnson

    There were many, many recommendations by the Temporary State Commission on the Capital City back in early 1963. On their face, they mostly made sense, and if they had all come together in concert with the development of the Empire State Plaza, it really might have been a wondrous thing. But very few of…

  • Temporary State Commission on the Capital City

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    Carl Johnson

    Since last week we had a good look at what went on during the construction of the Empire State Plaza, we thought we’d take a look at some of the planning leading up to that, which fell under the purview of the Temporary State Commission on the Capital City. The Commission, chaired by Lt.…

  • “It has not yet been done.”

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    Carl Johnson

    The Albany Hand-book of 1884 noted that General Washington visited Albany on August 4, 1783 (not his only visit to the area), when he said that, “While I contemplate with inexpressible pleasure the future tranquility and glory of our common country, I cannot but take particular interest in the anticipation of the increase in…

  • From Crane Street to Burma

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    Carl Johnson

    While we’re having a little local video festival this week, take a gander at this scene from “Objective, Burma!” If you’re the impatient type, you can jump ahead to about 1:10, where Lt. Jacobs (played by Nichols, NY native and Cornell graduate William Prince) explains the place he’d rather be than Burma: Cannonball Island,…

  • The Making of the Mall

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    Carl Johnson

    All credit for finding this gem goes to Julie O’Connor over at the Albany… The Way It Was page on Facebook, and all thanks go to whoever found it and posted it to YouTube. Not entirely sure what year it was from, but it appears to have been the work of Helen C. Welsh,…

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