Category: Schenectady

  • William Bolles Has Something for Country Merchants

    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…

  • Possibly Painless Dentistry

    From an 1855 edition of the Schenectady Cabinet, an advertisement for B. Stickles, surgical and mechanical dentist. Let’s take “mechanical” to mean that he could create things like false teeth and bridges, not that he was a wind-up automaton. All branches of the profession carried on, and all work warranted. Chloroform or Ether administered…

  • The Rota-Ray Map and a Blinger of a Campaign

    Some time ago, the folks at All Over Albany stumbled on this great little scrolling map device, posted at the David Rumsey Map Collection. Not only is it possibly the coolest motoring map device we’ve ever seen, but it appears to have generated quite a bit of excitement in those early days of motoring…

  • Barringer & Co., The New York Store!

    Back in 1855, one of the finest stores in Schenectady, New York, was Barringer & Co. (“The New-York Store!”), at 87 State Street. In this ad, they proclaimed that they were now receiving, and offering for sale (a good move, business-model-wise), a complete assortment of British, French and German staple and fancy dry goods,…

  • Look for the Name “Joe”

    While digging up the dirt on Spiro Agnew’s father’s Hygienic Lunches, we ran across many, many ads by this character, Joe Green, whose menswear store was at 412 State Street in Schenectady, over the Hygienic Lunch (some years after Agnew had decamped for Baltimore). Many of the ads exhort the reader to Look for…

  • The Woolworth’s That Wasn’t A Woolworth’s

    Everybody remembers the old Woolworth’s in Schenectady. But what they don’t remember is that it wasn’t a Woolworth’s, at least not originally – it was a W.H. Moore’s. William H. Moore was a native of Saratoga Springs, born in 1841; his family moved to Watertown as his father found work with the Rome, Watertown…

  • True crime, 1914: Armed robbery, carjacking, murder

    While digging up info on Schenectady’s Hygienic Lunch, we ran across this charming tale of armed robbery, carjacking, and the death of a dentist. Here’s the story from the Schenectady Gazette of August 18, 1914: Cashier Swears Conway Robbed Electric Lunch George Volk and Hygienic Lunch Man, However, Say Prisoner Is Not the Man…

  • The Hygienic Lunch, and the Father of the Veep

    File this under: How did we not know this? Hoxsie grew up hard by Schenectady in the 1970s and was perhaps more tuned than your average teenager to both politics and local history. And yet, until this week, we had no idea that the father of Vice President Spiro Agnew, one Theodore Agnew (originally…

  • Organizing Schenectady’s Restaurants, 1922

    Hoxsie was perusing some back numbers of “The Mixer & Server,” the official journal of the Hotel and Restaurant Employes [sic] International Alliance and the Bartenders International League of America (as one does) and came across this September 26, 1922 report by A. Martel, International Organizer, under the banner of “What Our Organizers Are…

  • The Ornamental Hair Store

    Hey, Schenectady! Need ornamental hair? You’re in luck. In 1840, John Xavier opened a new ornamental hair store at 92 State Street, three doors west of the post office. Everlasting curls, plain and curled frizetts, puffs, everlasting and curled ringlets . . . he had it all, kept constantly on hand or supplied at…