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Scotia Plans Insane Fourth
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From 1912, we ran across this article impugning the sanity of our original hometown and have just been waiting for it to be seasonal and/or timely again. So here we are. The article from the Schenectady Gazette is headed, “Scotia Plans Insane Fourth.” Schenectady is to have a safe and sane Fourth – in…
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The High Schools of Scotia
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A while back in a Facebook group, someone commented on this old postcard of the original Scotia High School, which opened in 1905 on First Street, just about across from where Center Street comes in. Anyone of a certain vintage knows this was later the junior high school, and, for an even certainer vintage,…
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Sacandaga Road and the Battle of Beukendaal
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Where else do you get a triple threat, two NYS Education Department historical markers and a monumental plaque, and with it the story of an ambush and a corpse tethered to a crow? The first: SACANDAGA ROAD CUT THROUGH THE PRIMITIVE FOREST BY EARLY SETTLERS, ALONG AN INDIAN TRAIL LEADING TO THE SACANDAGA REGION…
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Scotia’s Most Famous Composer
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One would think that if a composer of incredibly famous songs had once lived just a few blocks from one’s childhood home, one would have heard about it, no? But we didn’t know until this historic marker went up, sometime after 2000, that the composer Robert Allen (full name Robert Allen Deitcher) lived for…
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The Science Fiction Writer Next Door: P. Schuyler Miller
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Growing up, my family lived next to a four-unit apartment house in Scotia, one of those places that was oddly transient on a street of homes where people generally lived for decades. There were young couples just starting out, divorcees figuring out their next steps, old people at the end. An interesting mix. And…
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The Little Village That Could
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Hoxsie is nothing but rail talk these days, and combine that with news about the old hometown and it’s not possible to skip this one. What is now the Village of Scotia is actually one of the oldest places in the area, with Alexander Lindsay building a home there in 1658, three years before…
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The Great Western Gateway Exposition
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The grand opening of the Great Western Gateway Bridge, a decade in the planning, was a very big deal indeed. The bridge itself opened in December of 1925, but of course December in Schenectady is not a propitious time for celebrating, so it was some months before the great Gateway Exposition took place. In…
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Construction of the Great Western Gateway Bridge
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“Successful Methods,” a civil engineering magazine from around about a century ago, took the time in November 1920 to detail how work on the Great Western Gateway Bridge was progressing: A FOUR CONTRACT JOB Work on Great Western Gateway at Schenectady, N.Y., is Divided Into Four Units Work is well under way on the…
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The Great Western Gateway Bridge: The Life of the Citizen is at Stake
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At the 1915 hearing on the need to build the Great Western Gateway Bridge between Schenectady and Scotia (and beyond), the Honorable Fred W. Cameron, Chairman of the Saratoga Reservation Commission (various commissions were forerunners of the State Parks system) came down to Schenectady to argue for the need for the bridge. First, he…
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The Great Western Gateway: There Will Be Speechifying
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As Schenectady grew into an industrial powerhouse and State Street grew into a thriving commercial district, and as automobiles began to become an important form of transportation, it became clear that the old bridge across the Mohawk, an iron trestle affair that carried trolleys across between Washington Avenue and the end of the dike…