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The Rice Mansion
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When we began our career in Albany not quite 30 years ago, a group of young and hungry (literally) Senate Fellows sometimes found lunchtime solace with a touch of imagined elegance in the quiet confines of the Rice Gallery of the Albany Institute of History and Art. Every now and then we wondered how…
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The Father of the Singing Towers
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Last time we detailed the celebration around the installation of the Albany City Hall carillon in 1927, and noted that one of the prime movers behind that was William Gorham Rice, who was an interesting character in Albany history. Rice (nearly always referred to by his full name in the newspapers of the day)…
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The City Hall Carillon
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One of the things Hoxsie misses about downtown Albany is the sound of the City Hall carillon ringing out at lunchtime. But while H.H. Richardson’s City Hall building was equipped with a tower when it opened in 1883, it had no bells. They didn’t come until 1927, in a major effort by two newspapers,…
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For Whom the Bells Toll
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Soon we’ll have much more on the installation of Albany’s City Hall carillon – it was quite the endeavor – but for now, this interesting little snippet from the Albany Evening News of August 23, 1927: Proud City Hall Pigeons Worried by Strange Operations in Their Home With Cuyler Reynolds Away and Food also…
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Mme. Curie Regrets She’s Unable to Lunch Today
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Marie Sklodowska Curie, born in the Kingdom of Poland and later a citizen of France, became world famous for her research on radioactivity and the discovery of polonium and radium. She disproved the theory that the atom was indivisible, and led the way to modern physics. She was the first woman to win a…
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Perhaps the Boys Will Be Inspired
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Permit us a rare excursion from our pretty strict focus on the history of the Capital District of New York to note an odd little bit that we ran across while doing some research on General Electric in Schenectady. In 1933, Owen D. Young was the Chairman of the General Electric Corporation. Young was…
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All the New Lift Bridges Use GE Electric Motors
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We wrote about the Maiden Lane Bridge last week. Now a little bit of time for the Dunn, or at least what would become the Dunn. While we don’t know who built the motors that operated the swing bridge of the Maiden Lane span, the electric motors that raised the lift bridge that replaced…
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The Detailed Specifications of the Maiden Lane Bridge
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We’ve written before about the Maiden Lane Bridge, giving some of the history of what was the second bridge built across the Hudson at Albany. In that story, we included a number of specifications that were published when the contract to build the bridge was awarded to Charles Newman of Hudson in 1870. Now…
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Schenectady’s Earlier Hotels
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Yesterday we talked a little bit about Schenectady’s Edison Hotel, and its predecessor, the Givens Hotel. In researching that, we tripped upon an article from the Gazette back in 1936 that gave a brief account of a number of even earlier hotels in Schenectady, so we thought we’d pass that along. Pearson’s “A History…
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The Edison Hotel
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Our recent post on the founding of the Edison Machine Works in Schenectady led to a number of questions about the Edison Hotel, long gone from the downtown scene but once one of the Electric City’s most important public spaces. The site, just east of Erie Boulevard on the north side of State Street,…