Author: Carl Johnson

Albany has a history of digging up bodies and moving them around (as any old city does). Sometimes, that resulted in some surprises. In 1893, a transfer from one cemetery to another resulted in finding “A Human Body Turned to Stone,” although stone isn’t quite as good as another description. Albany had a Soap…

Somewhere around 1949, the Albany Yacht Club buildings were sold for use as a Naval Reserve Center, and the club started its move across the river to Rensselaer, with a temporary stop in the old Day Line facilities. In 1954, the old basin would finally be filled in as work began on the riverfront…

In writing about the rise and fall (or fill) of the Albany Basin, a major part of Albany’s waterfront history that is now buried under a tangle of roads and the Corning Preserve, we were a bit stymied in figuring out the role and location of the Albany Yacht Club, the surviving buildings of…

From the classified pages of the Times-Union in 1921, a pair of what seem (to our modern sensibilities, anyway) shockingly brusque headings for the paid listings for marriages and deaths: Altar and Tomb. In journalism school, they used to tell us that most people would only be mentioned in the newspaper when they got…

So, what befell the Albany Basin after the Dock Association dissolved in 1873? Business along the wharf continued, but declined. Its state as a nuisance was well documented in 1889. In 1892, both the Senate and the Assembly considered legislation to fill the Albany basin. “The upper portion of the basin had been abandoned,…

One of our favorite local fantasies is the fantasy that Albany once had a blissful, beautiful waterfront where Victorian ladies in hoop skirts carrying parasols enjoyed leisurely Sunday strolls with their dapper beaus. Urchins rolled hoops on their day off from working in the factories and scrambled down the banks with string and bent…

There was a time when Albany was very much a river town (and, for a brief century, a canal town). But just what the waterfront looked like in those days, where the passenger ships and cargo ships docked, is a subject of frequent discussion among some local history buffs because, at this remove, it…

Even before he developed the Wilson’s Albany strawberry that transformed the entire strawberry industry, James Wilson, nurseryman of Albany, was a very successful horticulturalist. His work figures prominently in the report of the Committee on Flowers at the Fair of the New York State Agricultural Society, which was held at Auburn in September 1846.…

  Once upon a time, nearly every strawberry in the United States was an Albany strawberry. First cultivated by James Wilson at his nursery, “situated at the head of Lydius-street, within three-quarters of a mile of the City Hall,” his strawberry became the dominant breed for decades. For details, we turn to Stevenson Whitcomb…