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At Present Only Girls Are Needed
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For those of you not old enough to have searched through newspaper classifieds looking for work, you probably wouldn’t know that the Help Wanted sections were strictly divided by sex. From 1946, this help wanted ad wasn’t in any way unusual for the time, from Huyck’s Mill in Rensselaer, advertising any number of positions…
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Murdering the Electrician
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Most things on Hoxsie are found when we’re looking for other things. This is one of those things: while searching for some background on the Albany and Hudson Railroad, we came across a brief mention in the San Francisco Call of May 17, 1907 of the murder of the railroad’s chief electrician, Alonzo Hewitt.…
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Tragedies on the Trolleys
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The Albany and Hudson Railway, which provided trolley service from Hudson to Rensselaer and into Albany, only lasted under that name from 1899 to 1903. In addition to running the trolleys, the company ran a resort called “Electric Park” at Kinderhook Lake. A round-trip ticket from Albany to Electric Park cost forty cents. Extra…
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The Albany & Hudson & Kinderhook & Greenbush Railway Gas Electric Bridge Company
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Remember when street railways also owned hydropower dams and provided electricity and gas service? Yeah, we never heard of that before, either. But turns out it happened, at least with one local streetcar company. To get to the formation of the Albany and Hudson Railway and Power Company, which was incorporated in 1899 under…
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Tolls Across the Hudson
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For the longest time, it’s been said that the Dunn Memorial Bridge is the southernmost toll-free crossing of the Hudson River (which is saying something, being that it’s 145 miles from Albany to the Battery). But that wasn’t always the case. Its predecessor, the Greenbush Bridge, was constructed as a private project in 1882…
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The Albany-Greenbush Tunnel
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Yesterday, in talking about plans to replace the old Greenbush Bridge, we noted the somewhat odd comments of Holland Tunnel designer Fred Williams, who had come to Albany to talk about how you should always think about a tunnel, but lamented that “This isn’t tunnel day.” Well, that wasn’t as random as it sounded…
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Time for a new bridge to Greenbush – or maybe not.
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Is anything ever simple around here? No, it is not. So, while it took years to get agreement to build the first bridge between Albany and Greenbush, the only bridge that carried automobiles across the river below Troy, you would think that when it came time to replace it, it would be relatively simple.…
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The Bayer Factory
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Again from the Fairchild Aerial Surveys collection of the New York State Archives. This time, a 1946 view of what is described as the Bayer Aspirin Factory, Riverside Avenue, Rensselaer. But what we’re actually looking at may be a little more complicated than that. A paper by Leander Ricard, posted at ColorantsHistory.org, gives the…
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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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The Proposed River Bridge
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Yesterday we had an artist’s rendering from 1886 of the then-new Albany Greenbush bridge. It looks like it was built pretty much according to this plan, which was laid out in the charter of the Albany Greenbush Bridge Company, which gave these specifications: Wrought Iron Bridge. The company contemplates erecting a bridge of wrought…