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Amelia Earhart in Albany
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While we’re talking aviation and Albany: In 1935, Amelia Earhart was one of the most famous people in the world, a pioneer in aviation and women’s causes. She was well-known even before her 1932 solo flight across the Atlantic, but that act propelled her into the stratosphere, so to speak. She wrote a book,…
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Albany to New York by Dirigible!
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Glenn Curtiss and Beryl Kendrick helped put Albany on the map for motorized aviation with their record-setting (or attempted, anyway) flights from Van Rensselaer Island and the Hudson River. But just a little before that, there was another kind of aviation planned for Albany, and it was meant to be more than a novelty.…
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The Arthur-Albany Connection
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The things you run across when you’re looking for something else … it’s a wonder Hoxsie ever completes a thought. In this case, it started with a simple question on Facebook – the question of why Chester A. Arthur, the President who is probably the most famous burial in Albany Rural Cemetery, is buried…
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Another Attempt at Aviation History Takes Off from Albany
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Turns out Glenn Curtiss wasn’t the only early aviator to take off from Albany for points, well, not unknown, but a long way away, and it was Curtiss himself who inspired it. He had branched into both building airplanes and teaching pilots how to fly. He built on his ideas for enabling water landings…
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When Glenn Curtiss Needs Gasoline, Servants are Dispatched
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On May 29, 1910, the day finally came when Glenn Curtiss found the weather favorable, got into his aeroplane, took off from Van Rensselaer Island (now part of the Port of Albany) and flew on (with two stops) to Governors Island in New York City, meeting the challenge set by the New York World…
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Glenn Curtiss Waits For the Wind to Blow the Right Way in Albany
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On May 26, 1910, inventor/aviator Glenn Curtiss was in Albany (we wrote about it here), alternating between his hotel room at the Ten Eyck and Van Rensselaer Island, where there was a two-poled tent that covered his flying machine, a cloth-winged biplane with a V-8 engine of 50 horsepower driving a wooden rear propeller.…
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Glenn Curtiss and the Albany Flyer
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The Wright Brothers first achieved sustained, powered, heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in December 1903. Their first flight was 120 feet for 12 seconds; their fourth and final flight of that day covered 850 feet in 59 seconds. However famous that is now, the flight was barely noticed at the time. Their…
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Phoenixville Phriday: The Pennypacker Tragedy
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Last week we made mention of a railroad tragedy on the Pickering Valley Railroad, where a cow on the tracks led to the death of an engineer. But an 1877 storm led to a much bigger disaster, at the time the most fatal train wreck in Chester County history. On Oct. 4, 1877, a…
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Maps to Swear By, Not At
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Hoxsie is at the age where he has probably forgotten more than he currently knows. And then he’ll run across an old article and the light will go off: “Hey, I used to know that!” For instance, this article from the Schenectady Gazette in 1970 was a reminder that local television personality Jim Fisk,…
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Mann and Anker
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We aren’t very familiar with Mann & Anker (or Mann, Waldman & Co., for that matter), but can only imagine what their store was like in 1898 when Fashion’s Queen held court there and gave her devotees the opportunity to pay her homage. In 1899, both Mann & Anker, “makers of ladies’ garments,” and…