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Dining on the Night Line
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Thanks again to the Culinary Institute of America’s digital menu collection, we have this incredible (but undated) menu from the Hudson River Night Line. The last night boat ran in 1941, and the line had lost considerable glamor in the Depression years, so we’re going to guess this was from the 1920s or earlier.…
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“She’s honest and all right”
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Just a little snippet from the old hometown, way back in 1933, when a “medium” from Hampton Manor was accused of swindling an Albany widower – a widower who, it must be said, really wasn’t hard to swindle. Whether it was age, grief or simple stupidity, the news accounts of the day give no…
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A Safe, Sane Way
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Hoxsie started as a simple exercise in sharing tiny bits of history, often without much by way of explanation, under the banner of an old advertisement featuring a rooster crying out “Hoxsie!” 13 years ago I started this site (under the editorial “we”) as an extension of my old personal blog, with a simple…
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The Drislane Building
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or: Where Did Pine Street Come From? An odd little tidbit in a newspaper from 1928 made us realize we had never written about a building and establishment that practically defined a section of North Pearl Street in Albany for nearly 140 years, and that seems to have been forgotten almost as soon as…
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Hope Eden To Do Her Shopping In Albany Stores
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While working on the history of Albany’s airports, we were struck by the role celebrity played in bringing attention to the promise of air travel so early on. It wasn’t just the daring early aviators who captured the public’s attention – though many of them, with names largely now forgotten, figured in the early…
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Albany’s Airports
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One of the landmark events in aviation, Glenn Curtiss’s record-setting long distance flight to New York City, started from Albany – specifically Westerlo Island (sometimes also called Van Rensselaer Island, but it was one of several by that name). But contrary to many reports since that flight, what he took off from was not…
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Peloubet’s Balloon
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While researching the Albany Bicentennial tablets, we tripped on the most curious little snippet in Joel Munsell’s Annals of Albany, in an article dated April 26, 1819: “A Mr. Peloubet gave notice that he would ascend in a balloon from the Capitol. The expenses he would attempt to raise by collection from the audience…
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There Was More to Kate Than We Knew
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Taking a little break from the bicentennial markers to do some cleanup, but they’ll be back soon. Years back now, we wrote a post about the incredible embroidery of Catherine Hewitt Pfordt. At Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition in 1876, her embroidery was recognized “for great taste in design and workmanship, displaying extraordinary skill.” Catherine Pfordt…
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Bones, Fire and a Weathercock
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Last time we wrote about the Albany Bicentennial Tablet commemorating the first church in Albany, and we noted that in addition to the two successive church structures that sat in the middle of State Street at Broadway, there had been a burial ground around (and perhaps within) the church. At the time we said…
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What Happened to the Burdett-Coutts Marker?
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Two notes: One, throughout this article there are variable spellings of Burdett-Coutts, and when quoting, I’ve reflected the spelling used in the source I’m quoting at the time. Two, of course the source materials use racial terms that are no longer acceptable, but as they were not intended as offensive I have copied those…