A.L. Stevens, Schenectady’s Rooming House Keeper and Armless Driver
Paging through an old Schenectady Directory, an oddly worded series of advertisements led us to an interesting story – the story of the armless man who owned a group of […]
Man, Beast or Devil?
Okay, this one isn’t really history, and it’s barely Schenectady-related . . . but it’s fun. Readers who opened their copy of the Schenectady Gazette on January 31, 1921, were […]
Van Curler Opera House
Last time, we wrote about The Miles Theatre, a flash in the burlesque/vaudeville pan that existed pretty much within the confines of 1920 in Schenectady. Before that, it was a […]
The Miles Theatre Apologizes
It’s not often that a theater takes out an ad apologizing for a show it has booked. But apparently Arthur Ungar, manager of The Miles Theater in Schenectady, felt the […]
The Fire Record, 1887
Fire was recently in the news for taking a terrible toll on a city with the unthinkable destruction of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. But it was a loss […]
The Lorraine Block and a little more Stanford history
Once upon a time, the construction of a new office building really meant something – it was a point of pride for a community to know that a modern structure […]
The ‘Other’ Max Shinburn, Jail House Dog
Max Shinburn’s legend lived on in Albany, or at least in the Albany jail – in the form of a jailhouse dog, owned by Jake Fulder, which went by the […]
‘Count’ Max Shinburn, King of the Bank Burglars
We’ve written before about some of the prisoners of the Albany County Penitentiary, a rather legendary lockup. But the old city jail, on Maiden Lane just behind City Hall, “hosted” […]
An Albany Bride In the Soup
We present this particular story in the spirit of Ripley’s “Believe It or Not,” at least in this sense: This appeared in the Albany Morning Express on July 22, 1895, […]
The High Schools of Scotia
A while back in a Facebook group, someone commented on this old postcard of the original Scotia High School, which opened in 1905 on First Street, just about across from […]