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The Bab-O Factory and Beyond
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The New York State Archives digital collection includes a great number of aerial photographs of New York State locations from the ’40s and ’50s, including this shot that centers on the factory of B.T. Babbitt, Inc., makers of Bab-O. This was taken on June 12, 1952, before just about everything in the picture changed.…
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Railroads on both sides of the river
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Amtrak knows you have choices in rail travel and appreciates … oh, wait, no you don’t. If you want to travel by rail in this country in 2015, other than commuter rail, you’ve got precisely one option. In 1863 Albany, things were very different. Remember that the Livingston Avenue Bridge, the first bridge across…
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19th Century Railroads: Unsafe at Any Speed
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In 1865, every railroad in the state made a report to the railroad commissioners of the State of New York. There are lots of facts and figures about capital stock, funded debt, length of road laid, numbers of passenger cars and snow plows, etc. They even give the average rate of speed and the…
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Early Railroads of New York
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For the year ending Sept. 30, 1865, the Railroad Commissioners of the State of New York offered the following statistics for a year in which steam and horse railroads were both still operating: New York that year had 3089.84 miles of steam roads, with 962 engines, 820 first class passenger cars, and 181 second…
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How the Livingston Avenue Bridge Changed Everything
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The Hudson River Bridge Company built the first structure to cross the Hudson at Albany. When it opened in 1866, it was simply the Hudson River Bridge. Once the Maiden Lane Bridge opened at the end of 1871, the older bridge was often called the North Bridge. Eventually, it picked up the moniker of…
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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Livingston Avenue Bridge
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The New York State Engineer and Surveyor’s report from 1864 contains an extensive history of The Hudson River Bridge Company, the operation that built Albany’s iconic Livingston Avenue Bridge. The report contains a huge amount of detail, some of which we’re reproducing here because a huge amount of detail on these old structures is…
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The Dudley Observatory Moves Next to the Almshouse
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After a shaky start, the Dudley Observatory got up and running and in fact became a fairly important observatory in the latter part of the 19th century, one of Albany’s many claims to scientific fame. However, after a few decades, it appears that the site on Dudley Heights proved less than satisfactory. The precise…
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The Dudley Observatory Buys Shutters and A Computer
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In the middle of the 19th century, the highly respected scientific advisor to Albany’s nascent observatory went on a spending spree of epic proportions. Even in Albany, rarely has so much been spent for so little result. That even some of what was purchased was eventually actually acquired and put into use should be…
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The Observatory’s New Clothes
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So as we noted previously, the original Dudley Observatory, located on Dudley Heights in Arbor Hill in Albany, was created in a fit of local scientific boosterism that took advantage of the fact that Blandina Dudley had wads of her deceased husband’s cash, a wish to have him memorialized, and apparently couldn’t say no…
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The Floor Plan of the Dudley Observatory
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The Annals of the Dudley Observatory, Vol. I, published by Weed, Parsons in 1866, provides a handy ground plan of Blandina Dudley’s dream observatory, which was formally inaugurated in 1856. The space marked a was the front entrance and piazza. Immediately inside, b, was the base of the equatorial pier, essentially the permanent mounting…