Category: Albany

The original Dutch Church sat at the foot of Albany’s State Street where it meets what is now Broadway. In fact, it sat in the middle of the street.  Every image of the exterior is based on the same original image, which was drawn from memory after the building was gone. Joel Munsell gives…

Another view, this one photographic, of the house built by the father of Col. Lansing at the corner of North Pearl and Columbia streets. Diana Waite says it was at the northeast corner, which would put it where the Bayou is in the Brewster Building today, and that it may have even predated the…

“Outside of the stockades north on the line with Pearl street, was erected in 1710, by the father of Col. Jacob Lansing of the revolution, the house still standing there, and known as the Pemberton house, on the corner of Columbia street. This house was so constructed that no two adjoining rooms were on…

In 1778, in the heat of the American Revolution, John Jay was New York’s Chief Justice of the Council of Safety, responsible for framing the Constitution of the State and for developing a new form of government to replace colonial rule. When the Legislature was going to be summoned to convene in Kingston that…

Portrait of John Jay (Photo credit: Wikipedia) New York State’s first Thanksgiving proclamation came about, not  in remembrance of the Pilgrims, but in relief over the passing of an epidemic of yellow fever. And it was controversial even then. John Jay was the first Chief Justice of the United States (among many other things),…

One of the defining parts of the Albany skyline for decades was dedicated on this day, Nov. 21, in 1852. Patrick C. Keely was the architect for the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, for which the cornerstone was laid July 4, 1848. Now somewhat overshadowed by the gargantuan architecture of the Empire State Plaza,…

The Municipal Telegraph and Stock Company, 1898. Telegraphs and stocks might make some sense together . . . after all, the early stock tickers were essentially telegraph devices. That this company also dealt in grain and provisions seems a bit odd. Just a few years after this, in 1903, the company would be involved…

From 1898, an assertion that was certainly not true in a town that had several daily newspapers. At that time, Beaver Street was a hotbed of publishing activity.

Beaver lunch (Photo credit: carljohnson) Again, Joel Munsell writing in 1876, this time of the creek known as the Rutten kill (as we’d spell kill today), which ran freely through what is now downtown Albany: “Going back again a hundred years before the times mentioned as having tried men’s souls, we find ourselves in…

It’s a shame that one of Albany’s oldest streets, Green Street, is barely known today. Other than the LaSerre restaurant, it is primarily a street of parking lots. It wasn’t always so. In fact, it was on Green Street, in the home of Gov. John Tayler, that Alexander Hamilton uttered words that gave rise…