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” one of the most notorious bank robbers of his age, Maximilian Shinburn. It’s a tale of safe-cracking, safe-blowing-up, and possibly of love with a…

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, and you may choose to believe it, or not. The headline was “An Albany Bride in the Soup. / The Expression Is Here Used…

We wanted to finish up our survey of Albany piano makers. We covered John and Horace Meacham, Francis P. Burns, Marshall and Wendell, McCammon, and of course Boardman and Gray. There were others, and there were also some ancillary industries, like the specialists who only built the actions for the pianos. Afred Dolge, in…

Did ya think we were done with the Albany piano makers? Not quite. For one thing, there were quite a lot more – various offshoots and apprentices going off on their own from the established makers that kept Albany a vital pianomaking center for decades. And there was another huge piano maker that we…

We’ve already talked about a number of Albany piano makers (Marshall and Wendell, Francis P. Burns, John and Horace Meacham), and there are a number of others hardly worth mentioning. But by far the longest-established, mostly highly regarded and best remembered of all the piano makers was Boardman & Gray. Sources all seem to…

When we talk about long-standing Albany piano makers, the name of Boardman and Gray comes up the most frequently. But there was another piano maker that lasted for about a century that hardly gets any attention at all, even though to this day their pianos are loved, played and sold – Marshall and Wendell.…