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Percy Van Epps and the Historical Markers of Glenville
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Over on our Instagram account for signs and markers (called, with blinding directness, @signsandmarkers), we’ve been featuring a number of the historical markers that we grew up around. While anyone who grew up in Scotia, Glenville and Schenectady might think these historic markers are scattered just everywhere, that turns out not to be true…
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The Townsend Furnace – And Much Else
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Albany was once one heck of a foundry town. It’s well known that Albany and Troy were both prodigious producers of stoves of all types, and the old heating and cook stoves made in their foundries can be found all over the country to this day. But many other iron products came out of…
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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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No Coffin Sitters in Schenectady!
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In digging all this old stuff up, we run across all kinds of oddities that are fascinating, yet trivial. If we can’t figure out something more to say about a little snippet, can’t tell some of the story of the people, businesses or buildings involved, then we’re likely to just let it pass. But…
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The Last Ashman
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For many, many years, the biggest problem in waste disposal for cities wasn’t what we think of as garbage — there was hardly such a thing as packaging, what there was was biodegradable, and food waste was hardly an issue. No, the problem was the daily disposal of coal ash. Nearly every building was…
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Dayton Ball: First in Lasts
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While we were nosing around Pruyn Street through the miracle of StreetView, we noticed that while all the buildings that were occupied by The Embossing Company, National Bonsilate, and many more are long gone (and replaced by a Holiday Inn Express), one (really, two) of the ancient factory buildings across Pruyn Street still stands.…
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The Albany Embossing Company complex
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Last time we went over the history of John Wesley Hyatt’s many adventures in celluloid. When we first wrote that up several years back, we were absolutely baffled not only by the number of little companies that were formed to turn his plastic to practical use. But also by their actual locations. For instance,…
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Albany, Home of the First Plastic: Celluloid
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This was originally posted on my old blog back in 2010. This has some minor updates. For years I meant to get a picture of this marker, located next to a defunct Friendly’s restaurant not far from our old Albany neighborhood, where Southern Boulevard meets Delaware Avenue. The shopping plaza and the Friendly’s were…
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Senator Charles Stanford
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So we talked a little bit about the life of Leland Stanford (whose life could fill more than a volume or two) and father Josiah Stanford (about whom information is sadly scant). Today, we’ll talk about Leland’s brother, Charles, who despite having gone off to California with Leland, returned and made a lasting impression…
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Was Stanford University Actually Supposed to be in Albany?
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A long time ago, before Hoxsie even began, we told the story of how some local pettiness caused Leland Stanford to take the millions he intended for establishing a university in memory of his deceased son across the country, where he established Leland Stanford, Junior, University in Palo Alto, CA, instead of in Albany.…