Category: Albany

We present this particular story in the spirit of Ripley’s “Believe It or Not,” at least in this sense: This appeared in the Albany Morning Express on July 22, 1895, and you may choose to believe it, or not. The headline was “An Albany Bride in the Soup. / The Expression Is Here Used…

We wanted to finish up our survey of Albany piano makers. We covered John and Horace Meacham, Francis P. Burns, Marshall and Wendell, McCammon, and of course Boardman and Gray. There were others, and there were also some ancillary industries, like the specialists who only built the actions for the pianos. Afred Dolge, in…

Did ya think we were done with the Albany piano makers? Not quite. For one thing, there were quite a lot more – various offshoots and apprentices going off on their own from the established makers that kept Albany a vital pianomaking center for decades. And there was another huge piano maker that we…

We’ve already talked about a number of Albany piano makers (Marshall and Wendell, Francis P. Burns, John and Horace Meacham), and there are a number of others hardly worth mentioning. But by far the longest-established, mostly highly regarded and best remembered of all the piano makers was Boardman & Gray. Sources all seem to…

When we talk about long-standing Albany piano makers, the name of Boardman and Gray comes up the most frequently. But there was another piano maker that lasted for about a century that hardly gets any attention at all, even though to this day their pianos are loved, played and sold – Marshall and Wendell.…

As we have mentioned, Albany had a very, very rich history of piano manufacture. There are many little rabbit holes to go down, but a lot of the names are at least a little familiar. So we were surprised to find one we didn’t know, prominently featured in “Pianos and Their Makers – Men…

Someone recently responded to an old article we wrote about all the pianos that were once manufactured in Albany. While the Boardman & Gray pianos are probably the best known of the Albany manufactured instruments, they were asking about pianos by John and Horace Meacham, who started it all around 1829. Pianos had just…

Albany was once one heck of a foundry town. It’s well known that Albany and Troy were both prodigious producers of stoves of all types, and the old heating and cook stoves made in their foundries can be found all over the country to this day. But many other iron products came out of…

For many, many years, the biggest problem in waste disposal for cities wasn’t what we think of as garbage — there was hardly such a thing as packaging, what there was was biodegradable, and food waste was hardly an issue. No, the problem was the daily disposal of coal ash. Nearly every building was…

While we were nosing around Pruyn Street through the miracle of StreetView, we noticed that while all the buildings that were occupied by The Embossing Company, National Bonsilate, and many more are long gone (and replaced by a Holiday Inn Express), one (really, two) of the ancient factory buildings across Pruyn Street still stands.…