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Going to the poor house will cost ya extra
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From the 1905 Directory of the cities of Albany and Rensselaer, a detailed description of what were then called “hack fares,” the equivalent of taxi fares today, which applied to hackney coaches, cabs or other carriages for conveying passengers therein.. For each passenger for any distance, within the paved streets, notexceeding one mile, fifty…
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Rensselaer, Rail Town
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Image by carljohnson via Flickr Today, Rensselaer is probably best known for being the home of the Albany Amtrak station. Since 1968, passengers have been unable to disembark on the capital city’s side of the river, but Rensselaer’s rail history goes way, way back, and once upon a time the rail yards were a…
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You young printers don’t even tread pelts!
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“My first employment as an apprentice, beside cutting wood and making fires in the printing-office, was in ‘treading pelts,’ a duty of which the present generation of printers is growing up in ignorance. The balls, which have been succeeded by rollers, were made of green sheepskins, which had to undergo a sort of tanning…
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Dying ain’t getting any cheaper, either
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While we’re plowing through piles of bills, receipts and credit cards, let’s have a look at this invoice for my great grandfather’s funeral expenses. Today the Baxter Funeral Home is part of a chain, but in 1963 it was still being run by Eugene Baxter. Why did they choose Baxter when my great grandfather…
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Whatcha gonna do when the rent comes round?
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My grandfather once, for a very short time, ran a drive-in restaurant on Aqueduct Road outside of Schenectady. it was right about where the bike path crosses Aqueduct Road, where there is now an auto parts business. His landlord (Ken Williams?) didn’t know how to spell my grandfather’s last name (he wasn’t the only…
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Need your receipt?
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For you youngsters out there who may never have seen one, this is what receipts used to look like. If they were to have any detail at all, they were handwritten, usually duplicated using a sheet of carbon paper tucked into the receipt pad. This one from Schenectady’s gone but not forgotten Wallace Armer…
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Time’s devouring hand
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Worst metaphor ever. Hands don’t devour. Considering the huge reputation of Thurlow Weed, publisher, kingmaker, party boss, whoever wrote this ad for his publishing firm (in 1905, years after his death in 1888) should have his hand slapped with a pica pole. Devour that. The Weed-Parsons Printing Co. building still stands, as home of…
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How do you make a Venetian blind?
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Well, the makers of “Albany” Venetian Blinds may have been blind to the implications of unnecessary quotation marks, but at least they were fairly consistent in calling into question where their blinds were actually made. And this is another delightful example of old-school understatement and the mildest persuasion. “Perhaps you may want some for…
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