Considering that Albany has been a one-newspaper city for more than 20  years (with some fringe elements clinging stubbornly to the superior quality of the Daily Gazette or the Sound-Off column of the Troy Record), it’s amazing to think of all the decades when the city had anywhere between five and eight daily papers,…

I have some doubts as to whether this 1857 view of John Taylor & Sons’ brewery operations, where they made Albany Imperial XX Ales, was from Albany or perhaps their New York or Boston depots, both of which were also on the waterfront. The brewery was at Broadway and Arch Streets, but the back…

A little less nifty looking than the Ransom & Rathbone Stove-Works, the Eagle Air Furnace also made stoves and other iron castings somewhere on Beaver Street. Like its competitor, The Temperance Furnace, the Eagle was a temperance furnace. In 1832, the New York State Temperance Society championed the Eagle’s anti-drink stance and clearly connected…

Albany and Troy were once the stove capitals of the United States. The growth of iron works and the ability to transport goods by river, canal and, later, rail positioned the cities perfectly for the time when growing wealth in the expanding nation meant more and more homes heated and cooked with stoves rather…

In the 1840s, Albany was the ninth most populous city in the nation. Its position at the terminus of the Erie Canal made it a vital connection between the growing west and the cities of the Eastern seaboard. Local politicians played an outsized role in national policy, and as has been noted before, there…

Conveniently located opposite the bath house, Joseph Gall (J.G. to his continental friends) was another merchant of the “respectfully informing” school. Now I would expect that an optician of the day would, as indicated, have on hand gold and silver spectacles, and that he would attend to repair every optical instrument, and that he…