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The first Greenbush Bridge
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It wasn’t until after years of bickering that a bridge across the Hudson River between Albany and Greenbush (now Rensselaer) was established. The Albany and Greenbush Bridge Company was chartered by the Legislature in 1872, and immediately hit roadblocks. The merchants of Troy were dead set against a bridge, viewing it as an intentional…
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R.V. Pasco, stove maker
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Haven’t been able to learn much about R.V. Pasco, whose 1863 ad appears here. He was one of many stove makers and dealers in the area at a time when the Capital District was the stove capital of the country. His was one of the few businesses in Greenbush (now Rensselaer) that advertised in…
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$10 down and $2 a week
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As we mentioned yesterday, in 1927 the suburbs of Albany were starting to boom. Veeder Realty was pushing two new developments, Birchwood Park and Hampton Manor. Birchwood Park was between stops 18 and 19 on the Schenectady Railway Company trolley line to Albany, somewhere in Colonie. As far as we can tell, Birchwood Park…
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Hampton Manor
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By the 1920s, Albany had pretty much filled out to its current extent; the wide open lands of Pine Hills had been built up in the 1890s, and the trolleys made it possible for people to live outside the city and still get to work. The sudden growth of the personal automobile also led…
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Dunn Memorial Bridge
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Always nice to see a view of the old Dunn Memorial Bridge, named in honor of posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Parker F. Dunn, Morton Avenue’s bravest son. But it’s also nice to see the kinds of messages people used to spend a penny to send: “Thats a railroad bridge that I go…
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Trolley disaster at Greenbush
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The 1890 railroad sabotage at Greenbush miraculously took no lives. But a 1901 trolley crash outside Greenbush (which is now part of the city of Rensselaer) was much more serious, killing at least seven people. It was May 26, 1901, and the trolleys were at the start of their summer runs. In those days,…
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The steam ferry comes to Albany
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Until the early 19th century, the only way to cross the Hudson at Albany was by batteau, rope ferry or the newly invented horse ferry. But as Howell notes in his “Bi-Centennial History of Albany,” “In 1827 the subject of procuring a steamboat for the South Ferry began to be agitated.” The horse-ferry lobby…
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Rensselaer, Rail Town
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Image by carljohnson via Flickr Today, Rensselaer is probably best known for being the home of the Albany Amtrak station. Since 1968, passengers have been unable to disembark on the capital city’s side of the river, but Rensselaer’s rail history goes way, way back, and once upon a time the rail yards were a…
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Bath-on-the-Hudson (on, not in)
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Arthur Weise has one of the few descriptions I’ve found of the former village of Bath-on-the-Hudson: “Bath-on-the-Hudson, the first station on the Troy and Greenbush Railroad, three miles south of the city [of Troy]. It derived its name from several mineral springs, discovered about the close of the last century, near the village. John…
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Airway Motors
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I don’t remember ever hearing of Airway Motors, and a search turns up very little, but in 1940 at least they were a going concern right in the heart of Rensselaer, just a short hop from the Dunn Bridge. The space where they were located was likely obliterated by the new Dunn Bridge ramp…