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WGY Coin & Stamp
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We recently ran across this picture we took 10 years ago of a fading sign for parking for the WGY Coin & Stamp Company of Schenectady. This was affixed to the side of the building at the corner of State and South Ferry, now gone. WGY Coin and Stamp was long a fixture at…
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Fishing Is Dangerous!
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Ripley’s “Romance of a Great Factory” from 1919 gives us an unsurprisingly romantic view of the Schenectady General Electric works at that time. In addition to providing us with Charles Steinmetz’s private shorthand method, its appendix section (titled “Fragments”) gave a little recitation of industrial accident facts to show that life at GE was…
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How Dr. Steinmetz Writes
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Charles Ripley’s “Romance of a Great Factory” is a 1919 love letter to the Schenectady General Electric works, printed by the Gazette Press, and with an introduction by none other than Dr. Charles P. Steinmetz, the electrical wizard. In an afterword section titled “Fragments,” Ripley presented a short explanation of “How Dr. Steinmetz Writes,”…
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The Centennial Exhibition Awards Capital District Manufactures
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Last week we mentioned that Edgar Smith’s dry air refrigerator, a product of Albany manufacture, was featured at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, what was essentially the first world’s fair held in the United States and a celebration of the tremendous progress, particularly industrial and agricultural progress, the young country had…
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Amelia Earhart in Albany
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While we’re talking aviation and Albany: In 1935, Amelia Earhart was one of the most famous people in the world, a pioneer in aviation and women’s causes. She was well-known even before her 1932 solo flight across the Atlantic, but that act propelled her into the stratosphere, so to speak. She wrote a book,…
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Not A Good Time To Be Named “Union Station”
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While there was a great hue and cry over the loss of Albany’s Union Station, the demise and demolition of Schenectady’s Union Station, happening at the same time for the same reasons, seems to have been met with more of a sense of resignation. On the eve of the old station’s closure, on Friday,…
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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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Long Distance, Get Me Schenectady
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Yesterday we listed a number of public places, businesses, and private citizens in 1895 Albany who had telephones on the American Telephone & Telegraph long distance service. Even though the national directory of such subscribers only ran to about 480 pages, Albany was well-represented, as one of the larger cities in the country (about…
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Union College Alumni in the Civil War
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We ran across an interesting tome by the title of “Union College Alumni in the Civil War,” and thought we might try to give a little rundown of the alumni of the little Schenectady college, founded in 1795, who had served both the Union and the Confederacy. How much work could that be? As…
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William Bolles Has Something for Country Merchants
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While we’re stuck in 1855, let’s take a look at this ad from the Schenectady Cabinet for the shop of William F. Bolles. “Country merchants will find at 81 State-street, a large assortment of Paper Hangings, School Books, and Letter and Cap Paper, at New-York prices.” We can only presume that by advertising to…