Well, if we’re going to mention Professor DuMouchel, long a key part of the (sacred) music scene in Albany, we’re going to have to mention someone who, after performing with DuMouchel very early in her career, carried the name of the city into international fame. She was Marie Louise Emma Cécile Lajeunesse, in Chambly,…

When we first learned of the old Albany character of Dr. DuMouchel, about all we knew about him was that he was the organist at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, and favored a frock coat and top hat which gained him a comparison to Dr. Mary Walker. Well, Dr. DuMouchel was much more…

When we were telling the tale of Dr. Dodge, one of old Albany’s well-known characters, we ran across the names of a number of other characters of the type that either don’t exist any more or just don’t get known. Perhaps it goes back to a time when the city was smaller (or more…

Does Albany still have characters? The old Dutch town used to be awash in them. One such character, way back when, was Dr. Dodge, a pitchman familiar to thousands who walked State Street hill. The Times-Union on Sept. 6, 1934, warned on its front page that “Dr. Dodge, Famed for Hat Collection, Seriously Ill.”…

Last time we talked about how Albany developed its first “cosmopolitan” high school, Philip Schuyler, which opened in 1934. But we hadn’t gotten to the bottom of how it came to be in the old Public School 14, instead of in a new high school building. Confusing, because in all the years leading up…

We will admit, before working on this story, we’d never before heard of the term “cosmopolitan high school.” But in Albany in the ‘30s, it was a term everyone would have been familiar with, as the future of schools was being debated and the city tried to deal with an ever-growing young population. A…