Author: Carl Johnson

Invariably, it seems that any discussion of the current New York State Museum engenders moans and wails from those who miss the “old” museum in the State Education Building, now nearly forty years gone, a magical place of dioramas, mastodon bones, and endless varieties of arrowheads. Well, there were earlier generations who may have…

We’ve talked about some of the other popular newspapers from when Albany was awash in newspapers, but we’ve rarely mentioned The Country Gentleman. At one time, The Country Gentleman was one of the leading publications for the agricultural world, published in Albany. Luther Tucker was a Vermonter, born in 1802, who apprenticed as a…

This Hopkins map from 1876 features the Albany County Alms-house (center left), which stood out in the wilds past Snipe Street. You’ll recognize the curving road (then a plank road) as today’s New Scotland Avenue (then Road), running between Snipe and Perry and then beyond. Snipe is gone today, and Perry is South Lake.…

As we’ve noted before, this beauty of a high school, Albany’s first built for that purpose, was designed by architect Edward Ogden and opened in 1876. By 1909, however, it was deemed woefully inadequate to handle the number of students, and the Board of Education was looking for a new building. On March 30,…

Perusing the petitions before the Albany Common Council in 1909, we find this petition from a Barbara Andres, city resident, who wished to respectfully show: “That, on or about the 6th day of January, 1909, at about seventy-thirty [sic] or eight o’clock in the evening of that day, your petitioner was walking down the…

Researching the Dey Ermand paint company, we came across the interesting information that Hugh Dey Ermand, head of the company around the turn of the century, lived at 248 Hudson but also owned a string of residential properties on the near north side of the city. Specifically, he owned 13 residential buildings known as…

Yesterday this never-before-seen photo was posted over on the “Albany…The Way it Was” Facebook page. Most noticeable is the old location of R.B. Wing, ships’ chandlers and dealers in every kind of oil imaginable, apparently. R.B. Wing survived into modern times as a construction supplier in one of the landmark buildings of Broadway, but…

In researching the homes built by Edward Ogden, we ran across one he built in 1890 that was named for Bainbridge Burdick at 935 Madison Ave. in Albany. A moniker like “Bainbridge Burdick” is always worth another look, and this search didn’t disappoint, as we turned up the case of “Bainbridge W. Burdick v.…