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What to do with Union Station?
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Of course, as soon as Penn Central was allowed/required to abandon Albany’s Union Station, there had to be plans, debates, and schemes about what to do with the venerable, but run-down, facility. Designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, it had opened in 1900 but had seen better days by the time it closed in…
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Now Is The Rail Station of Our Discontent
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We outlined how the original thought to move Albany’s railroad station to Rensselaer turned into a part of the overall plan to run the interstate along the river. Since the train station moved, the complaining about it has rarely stopped. Even now that the new facility is considerably better appointed than the old box…
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New York Central: We Gotta Get Out Of This Place
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Okay, admittedly, our headline from yesterday was a bit of hyperbole. Of course, the Penn Central Railroad didn’t ruin everything, although it didn’t help many things either. But a commenter noted that they were really just finishing the work the New York Central had started, in the face of the fairly catastrophic decline in…
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How Penn Central Ruined Everything, Railwise
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Those who remember Albany’s Union Station as a glorious destination in the ’50s and ’60s most likely benefit from the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. A 1969 column in the Knickerbocker News acknowledged that “In its dying days, Albany’s Union Station was an odiferous and dingy cavern, but still, if you looked hard, you could…
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The Volunteer Life Saving Corps
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In river towns, people would occasionally fall into the river and drown. So it only makes sense that in 1902, the newly consolidated city of Rensselaer proposed to have three life-saving stations along the riverfront, as outlined in the Albany Evening Journal of July 15: Rensselaer is soon to have three life saving stations.…
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Long Distance, Get Me Schenectady
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Yesterday we listed a number of public places, businesses, and private citizens in 1895 Albany who had telephones on the American Telephone & Telegraph long distance service. Even though the national directory of such subscribers only ran to about 480 pages, Albany was well-represented, as one of the larger cities in the country (about…
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With Lips As Close As Possible To The Mouthpiece: Albany Telephones, 1895
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Telephone service dates to the 1870s, with the National Bell Telephone Company being formed in 1879, and a long-distance operation by the name of American Telephone and Telegraph formed in 1885. Even as late as 1895, telephone service was rare enough that AT&T was able to publish a national telephone directory, listing all the…
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The Albany Brush Company
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We know that way back when, the Albany Penitentiary was supposed to be a model reformatory, one where prisoners were expected to be silent and work for their keep. In fact, From the time of its opening in 1846 on a plot of land behind what is now Hackett Middle School, the Penitentiary, a…
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Union College Alumni in the Civil War
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We ran across an interesting tome by the title of “Union College Alumni in the Civil War,” and thought we might try to give a little rundown of the alumni of the little Schenectady college, founded in 1795, who had served both the Union and the Confederacy. How much work could that be? As…
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A Cabin in the Woods, and a Little Family History
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After years of good intentions but poor execution, of being somewhat nearby but never quite in the right area, I finally made it to the land of my ancestors last week. It’s a little tucked-away corner of the north central Adirondacks, far from any roads in the 1860s and not terribly close to any…