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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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Albany Bicentennial Tablet No. 26 – Crailo
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Once again, one of Albany’s Bicentennial markers is missing – and this one wasn’t even in Albany. The Bicentennial Committee listed the following text on Tablet No. 26: Tablet No. 26 —Johannes Van RensselaerIn bronze, 7×16 inches, set in the wall of the original mansion on the Greenbush banks. Inscription: “This Manor House, Built…
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The Blue Factory
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One of our favorite road names in the Capital District (and a favorite road for cycling) is Blue Factory Road. It is named not for a factory that was blue, but for a factory that made blue. Before the age of synthetic colors (in which a Rensselaer factory played a significant role), colorants primarily…
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Now Is The Rail Station of Our Discontent
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We outlined how the original thought to move Albany’s railroad station to Rensselaer turned into a part of the overall plan to run the interstate along the river. Since the train station moved, the complaining about it has rarely stopped. Even now that the new facility is considerably better appointed than the old box…
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New York Central: We Gotta Get Out Of This Place
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Okay, admittedly, our headline from yesterday was a bit of hyperbole. Of course, the Penn Central Railroad didn’t ruin everything, although it didn’t help many things either. But a commenter noted that they were really just finishing the work the New York Central had started, in the face of the fairly catastrophic decline in…
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How Penn Central Ruined Everything, Railwise
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Those who remember Albany’s Union Station as a glorious destination in the ’50s and ’60s most likely benefit from the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. A 1969 column in the Knickerbocker News acknowledged that “In its dying days, Albany’s Union Station was an odiferous and dingy cavern, but still, if you looked hard, you could…
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The Volunteer Life Saving Corps
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In river towns, people would occasionally fall into the river and drown. So it only makes sense that in 1902, the newly consolidated city of Rensselaer proposed to have three life-saving stations along the riverfront, as outlined in the Albany Evening Journal of July 15: Rensselaer is soon to have three life saving stations.…
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The Morner House
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Checking through the Library of Congress collection on Flickr, we ran across this 1911 photo published by Bain News Service, marked “Morner House Near Albany.” If it looks like there was quite a hubbub going on at the Morner house, well, there was. For starters, “near Albany” is relative; Bain also described the house…
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The Barnet Family: Far From Shoddy
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While we were digging around the “Personal Pages” from a 1919 edition of Textile World, our curiosity was piqued by this note on the generosity of William Barnet, perhaps Rensselaer’s leading shoddy manufacturer. (Hoxsie will always find “shoddy manufacturer” funny, but if you don’t know, shoddy was a cheap fabric made of short-fibered reclaimed…
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Edmund Huyck: No Nostradamus
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As we were running down a little bit of information on Rensselaer’s Huyck Felt Mill, once one of the principal employers in that railroad town (other than the railroads, of course), we came across this little snippet from a 1919 edition of Textile World. A section called “The Personal Page” highlighted notable events in…