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The Van Rensselaer Skating (and Curling) Park
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Stare at an old map long enough, and eventually you’ll be faced with a mystery you have to solve. We’ve stared at the Hopkins map of Albany from 1876 more than a sane person should admit, and every now and then a little detail jumped out at us, calling for attention. We ignored it…
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Let’s Look at the Record
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This panel is from a comic book called “Cliff Merritt Sets the Record Straight,” a production of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen from 1965 extolling the safety benefits the BRT brought to both workers and society. The fictional Cliff was being honored by the BRT for his years of service, and in conversation with…
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Curious Accident
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A singular accident happened on the Hudson River Railroad on Friday evening. The Express train which left this city on the above evening for New York, had not proceeded more than three or four miles below Greenbush, before the Engineer discovered that one of the immense driving wheels of the engine was gone. The…
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Victor Rickard is Fashion Forward
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We recently mentioned Schenectady’s aviation pioneer Victor A. Rickard, who not only managed the airport but gave flying demonstrations and lessons all over the area. But we missed that he was also involved in a fashion first, combining promotion for the nascent Schenectady Airport at Thomas Corners in Glenville with an air express shipment…
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The Remarkable Darkness of Sept. 6, 1881
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The remarkable darkness of Tuesday morning, September 6th, 1881, was phenomenal. A heavy yellowish mist obscured objects a hundred feet distant from persons out of doors, and dimmed to a pale-blue brilliancy the burning gas-lights within doors. The children in some of the public schools were dismissed and the operatives in a number of…
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The Marshall Sanitarium
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Again, poking around an old Sampson, Davenport map of Troy, say 1873 (they didn’t change much from year to year, and as we noted yesterday, sometimes included buildings that were never built). Again, finding something we had never known about before. This time what caught our eye was a pair of complexes near Mount…
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The College That Never Was
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Imagine our surprise when we were looking at an old map of Troy (as we do) and suddenly saw something there we’d never seen before, and had never even heard of: St. Peter’s College. And it turns out there was a reason we hadn’t heard of it – it just didn’t last long. In…
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Schenectady’s Premier Aviator, Victor Rickard
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Sometimes we run across a name from local history and have to wonder how it’s possible that the person in question isn’t better known. And then we get vexed by trying to know them better, at the remove of a century or so. Such is the case of Victor Rickard. While Albany had an…
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The Mohawk Overall Company
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Saw this old postcard posted on the “Schenectady History – Photos and Discussions” Facebook group the other day, and it set us to wondering why we had never heard of the Mohawk Overall Company. It turns out it wasn’t around very long. The Mohawk Overall Company opened up in Schenectady in 1909, with a…
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