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More bridges of Schenectady County
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Hoxsie could put in a lot of time and effort into making a survey of all the bridges that cross the Mohawk in and around Schenectady. Or, Hoxsie could give you a link to work that Johns Gara and Garver did at Union College that amounts to the same thing. Hoxsie is lazy today.…
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The bridges of Schenectady County
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While we’re looking at bridges across the Mohawk, here’s a glimpse of the railroad bridge that sits just downriver from the Western Gateway bridge. I’m not entirely sure when it was built, but as work was being done on it in the summer of 1978, it caught fire and the creosote-soaked railroad ties made…
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Another view of the Mohawk River bridge
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Found among my great grandmother’s keepsakes. I don’t know how old I was, maybe 8 or 9, when I wrote this card. I had tried to fit my message on the postcard but was unsuccessful, so I made another card and mailed them to her together. I don’t remember her answer as to whether…
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The Old Mohawk River bridge
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Schenectady and what is now the village of Scotia were populated at almost the same time, back around 1662. In fact, Alexander Lindsay Glen held an even earlier grant to the lands on the north bank of the Mohawk where the Glen-Sanders Mansion now sits. So from the earliest times, crossing the river was…
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Tragedy on the Mohawk
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One last look at long-gone Glenotia Park, and a tragedy that happened there on July 4, 1915. Adolph Held, owner of the Guarantee Bed Spring Company and the Guarantee Polishing and Plating Company, drowned in the river near the swimming school diving tower, right at the mouth of the Sanders inlet, which is right…
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Boy Scouts at Glenotia Park
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People often ask why the papers don’t print the good things that happen in the community (or they did when they still read newspapers). Well, here we have an excellent example of the paper printing good news, and the story it tells is excruciatingly dull. From the July 3, 1915 Schenectady Gazette, a detailed…
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Mohawk Swimming School, Glenotia Park
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News came this week that “Glenotia Island” is up for sale (for a mere $91,000). Growing up in Scotia, I never heard it called “Glenotia” — if anyone had a name for it, it was Isle of the Mohawks, and it appeared as such on maps of the time. Maps from around 1905 failed…
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Old School Week: Grout Park School
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The Library of Congress’s American Memory Collection has a number of photos (unfortunately not high-resolution) of Schenectady’s Grout Park School. When it opened, it was a marvel of modernism, designed by the famous architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who also designed Idlewild Airport (you now know it as LaGuardia), the Sears Tower,…
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Old School Week: Elmer Avenue School, Schenectady
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The Library of Congress’s American Memory collection has a number of photos of Schenectady schools, including a series taken by photographer Philip Bonn in June, 1943, at the Elmer Avenue School. These photos were made for either the Farm Security Administration, or the Office of War Information, or both – the catalog is confusing.…
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Old School Week: Riverside School, Schenectady
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This photo is from sometime in the early to mid-1940s. Would you say they look like second or third grade? In the middle row, third from right, in the overalls, is my father. The school is still there, remade into apartments, looking lovelier than ever.