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Happy Fourth of July week
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When the Fourth of July falls in the middle of the week, America can’t decide which other days to take off, so pretty much the whole week is shot. Hoxsie has things to do this week, and is taking a couple of days off to get them done. In the meantime, the ladies of…
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The passing of Troy Savings Bank
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Weise’s 1886 “The City of Troy and its Vicinity” recounts the early history of the Troy Savings Bank, which was incorporated by law in 1823. The board of managers first met at Platt Titus’s inn on August 1 of that year. The by-laws provided that the bank “should be opened on every Saturday evening,…
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Lost and found, 1923
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In the age of Craigslist, the weird old charm of perusing the classified ads in the newspaper is gone. Once we depended on them to find jobs, apartments, cars, and weird odds and ends. And nothing was odder than the lost and found, where people paid to list items they had been parted from.…
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To the Manor born
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If you want to see the original walls and doors from the Van Rensselaer Manor house, the home of Stephen Van Rensselaer II, the eighth patroon of Rensselaerwyck, circa 1769, you’ll need to take a trip down to New Amsterdam (even old New York was once New Amsterdam) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,…
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Where there’s beaver, there’s beaver crime
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Munsell’s fourth volume of the “Annals of Albany” begins with various records from the Courts of Assize, generally a criminal court. In the early days of Beverwijck, when the fur-bearing mammal was the main item of trade, there was a considerable amount of beaver theft, unfair beaver trading, and sundry other beaver-related crimes, as…
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What’s going on, 1670
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Joel Munsell’s “Annals of Albany” was a ten-volume opus published during the 1850s that was a magnificent mixture of history, biography, and just plain copying of things that happened in Albany’s history. It’s the copying that’s of interest this week, as he took it upon himself to set down, verbatim, a number of records…
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Charter School, 1670
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English: Francis Lovelace (1621-1675) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) In 1670, Albany’s Schoolmaster Jan Jurians Beecker was having a hard time. Despite the fact that Colonial Governor Richard Nicolls had granted him the right to keep the Dutch school “for ye teaching of youth to read and wryte,” there were some freelance teachers horning in…
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Measure for measure
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Dutch roof line (Photo credit: carljohnson) In 1669, New York had been under British rule for five years, but the colony, her cities and her customs were no less Dutch (nor would they be, according to many reports, until the eve of the Revolution). As one way of establishing control, the British Governor…
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