In writing about Albany’s prospects in 1815, a writer for the “American Magazine” (credited only as “A.B.”) saw fit to try to enumerate some of the improvements the city had seen, including the efforts of his publisher, Mr. John Cook, to dispense mineral waters from Saratoga and Ballston here in the City Without a…

In 1815 John Cook and Charles Holt established the American Magazine in Albany, under the editorship of Horatio Gates Spafford. In the second number, Spafford wondered, “What will be the condition of Albany in 200 years more? If we may reason from the extraordinary rapidity of the improvements of late years, and if indeed…

I’ve posted this before. I will post it again. The manner in which the inhabitants of the town [of Albany] celebrate New Year’s Day: I had travelled far enough in the day to hope for a quiet sleep, but, at four in the morning, I was awakened by a musquet fired close to my…

Those of you for whom New Year’s Eve is an occasion for public drunken revelry (which in Albany appears to set it apart from almost no other holiday) may look away. For those of us who decided enough was enough as we embarked upon adulthood, let us consider that once upon a time there…

We ran across an “Application and Experience Statement for State and County Service” from  the NYS Civil Service Commission in 1907. It’s depressingly familiar, for the most part, though there are some questions that we’re not sure you’d find, at least not phrased this way, on an application form today: Have you any defect…

Hoxsie’s taking the week off. But there’s plenty that you’ve missed. For instance, do you know which of the many places named Albany (“Albanies”?) in the U.S. are named after our fair city? A while back I dug up the answer and posted it at All Over Albany: “The Other Albanies”

I was just a little kid when Colonie Center opened in 1966, so I don’t remember a lot about it except that it was a big deal. As someone whose mother had bundled him up in a baby carriage and rolled him across the Western Gateway to shop in downtown Schenectady, the idea that…

Normally, we can excuse commercial hyperbole. And the 1966 opening of the first full-scale enclosed mall in the region was certainly the kind of excitement that would lead its sponsors to, perhaps, exaggerate its qualities a bit. We understand, really we do. But, seriously? “The motif of Colonie Center Mall is reminiscent of the…