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Lurie’s: No More Stamps for 1925
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Lurie’s was a little remembered Schenectady department store at the corner of State and Ferry, which would have put it right in the vicinity of Barney’s. (It’s possible it was related to the M. Lurie Company of Amsterdam, and it’s possible it wasn’t.) They sold all kinds of clothing and fabrics, and gave away…
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Downtown Schenectady, Then and (almost) Now
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An odd departure, but I always have a hard time remembering what little stores were where in the downtown Schenectady of my youth, and it’s harder now that this (fortunately preserved) section of State Street is being rehabbed. So, above, a lousy picture I took on a cold, dreary afternoon in 1978; below, a…
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What’s up in the publishing world, 1919
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Ran across an edition of “The American Printer” from August, 1919, which featured a series of short blurbs informative of what was going on with printers and publishers in New York State that summer. Among them: The Schenectady Union-Star has changed its mechanical equipment to print an eight column, 12½ em page, instead of…
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The Schenectady Massacre Sign
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I love this sign at the entrance to Schenectady at the Western Gateway Bridge. Love it so much. Because where else will you find a metal silhouette of a massacre? The sign itself should be a national landmark. It says, “Welcome to our city! People were once brutally murdered here!” The only thing this…
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Promoting Downtown
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It’s been some time now that newspapers have been trying to promote city downtowns, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the Schenectady Union-Star, before it abandoned Schenectady entirely, sponsored a big shopping promotion called “Suburban Day,” which they described as “A united endeavor on the part of the Union-Star and the leading retailers of…
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An old-time newspaperman
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While perusing old editions of Editor and Publisher, we came across this little reminder that in the old days, there tended to be two kinds of newspapermen: the ones who were lifers at a single publication, and the ones who worked all over the place. Here’s the obituary of one of the latter type…
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From Crane Street to Burma
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While we’re having a little local video festival this week, take a gander at this scene from “Objective, Burma!” If you’re the impatient type, you can jump ahead to about 1:10, where Lt. Jacobs (played by Nichols, NY native and Cornell graduate William Prince) explains the place he’d rather be than Burma: Cannonball Island,…
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Schenectady’s Nonagenarian Industry
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You just don’t get to use the term “nonagenarian” often enough. But in 1938, Schenectady’s Chamber of Commerce set aside a special day for celebration of the 90th anniversary of the locomotive industry in “The City That Lights and Hauls the World.” On the afternoon of December 13, 1938, “before a large assemblage gathered…
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The origins of Kolf
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Clyde D. Wagoner, chairman of the Kermis committee that brought an ancient Dutch celebration to Schenectady as part of its charter sesquicentennial celebration in 1948, wasn’t just an organizer of gay events, but also a revisionist historian who was willing to speak truth to the power. Or at least to claim that golf originated…
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The Kermis: think of it as cosplaying the Dutch
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So yesterday we started to describe the excitement around the first Kermis to be held in America, which was put on in Schenectady in 1948 as part of its sesquicentennial anniversary noting its chartering as a city. The rest of the article from the Altamont Enterprise is well worth perusing, especially if you wonder…