Category: Albany

Over on the “Albany…The Way It Was” Facebook page, a participant posted a picture of a waterfront park I’d never seen before, from Herkimer to South Lansing. On the site of a former coal yard and cement plant, tucked in by the boiler works. I was curious about the surrounding industries, since the names…

The Sheridan Avenue steam plant, at somewhere north of 100 years in service, is one of the older bits of civil infrastructure around. @willwaldron from the Times-Union posted a photo of the original dynamos inside the plant, with the notation that they were DC, which led to conjecture that perhaps they were used solely…

Some time ago, Hoxsie came to the possibly supported conclusion (well, been wrong before) that the oldest remaining business in Albany is The Woodward Company, which currently sells fasteners way out in Colonie , but which began its lengthy life as a saddle and harness supplier. Originally founded by Nathaniel Wright in 1819, it…

Some time ago I said “It’s not possible to be interested in Albany history and not to owe a debt of gratitude to Joel Munsell.” He was a fine printer and one of the most important chroniclers of Albany’s early history. Not a native Albanian, Munsell was born in 1808 in Northfield, Massachusetts. At…

Well, we just had to find out a little bit more about Pirie MacDonald, the celebrated photographer of men who was raised in Troy, apprenticed in Hudson, and got his professional start in Albany.  These are the excerpts from a sketch in The Photographic Journal of America, Vol. 31, from October, 1894, which in…

Pirie MacDonald may have been the most famous photographer Albany ever produced. He was born in Chicago in 1867, but his parents moved to Troy. In 1883 he apprenticed in Hudson with Frank Forshew for six years,  and then opened a studio in Albany in 1890. This ad was in the 1894 guide to…

Henry Mayell & Son was established sometime in the 1850s, and by 1894 proclaimed itself Albany’s headquarters for rubber goods, located at the corner of State and Broadway, its curved building shown here at Douw’s Corner. Mayell not only sold rubber goods, but had at least one patent “for use in the making of…

John Skinner was an Albany bookseller active around the turn of those other centuries (this is from the 1894 guide to Albany’s public schools). Beyond that, all we know is the fact that he wrote up a catalogue of the library of Mr. and Mrs. John V.L Pruyn, that he dealt in books published…

We’ve been reviewing Albany’s numerous schools from 1894. Each of those schools had anywhere from seven to 18 teachers. To fill teaching slots today, we have strict educational requirements, civil service and hiring lists. But before all that, there was the Albany Teachers’ Agency, which “provides schools of all grades with competent teachers” and…

This lovely ad from 1894 is for Van Gaasbeek’s carpet store on North Pearl Street, opposite the Kenmore Hotel. Cuyler Reynolds, in the 1911 “Hudson-Mohawk Genealogical and Family Memoirs,” told us this about Alexander Van Gaasbeek: “Alexander Boyd [Gaasbeek], son of Dr. Jacobus and Helen (Boyd) Van Gaasbeek, was born in Middleburg, New York,…