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Open an account, get a . . . free wig?
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Way back when, it was quite usual for banks to offer some kind of incentive for opening a new account. Premiums like toasters, golf umbrellas, pen and pencil sets were frequently offered. That’s less common now, as the incentives are more likely to be straight up cash or gift cards, but our little local…
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Dining on the Night Line
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Thanks again to the Culinary Institute of America’s digital menu collection, we have this incredible (but undated) menu from the Hudson River Night Line. The last night boat ran in 1941, and the line had lost considerable glamor in the Depression years, so we’re going to guess this was from the 1920s or earlier.…
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A Meal at the Van Curler Hotel
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By complete accident of algorithm, I recently discovered that the Hudson Valley’s Culinary Institute of America has a website featuring historic menus, and happily some of them are from local institutions. So here’s one, unfortunately without a specific date, from Schenectady’s Van Curler Hotel. When the Van Curler was opened in 1925, it was…
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Beautiful Details from Schenectady, 1834
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I was going through my ideas files when I ran across an 1834 map with details about the Erie Canal from various local communities. It turned out I had already written about the maps themselves for Albany, Watervliet, and Schenectady – but that’s okay, because what I really wanted to emphasize was the incredible, simple…
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The Schenectady Gazette: Available Everywhere!
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In 1925, Schenectady and the tri-cities area weren’t the only places you could pick up a copy of the Schenectady Gazette. It was available all over upstate New York, apparently, and even in such far-flung locations as Boston, New York City, Hartford, Philadelphia, Detroit, and even Miami. Though Miami was certainly a stretch, the…
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Carl’s Peaches and Cream, and Radios
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While we’re talking about Carl Company ephemera, I ran across a trademark issued to the Carl Company – for the mark “Peaches and Cream,” as applied to “cotton piece goods, linen piece goods, and toweling.” I mean, when I think “linen,” I think “peaches and cream,” right? Perhaps not. This isn’t anything I remember,…
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The Carl Company
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What started this new approach to Hoxsie was when I found this receipt from The Carl Company in one of my folders the other day, and just decided to share it on Instagram. No big back story, no comprehensive history of Schenectady’s most fondly remembered local department store – just a paper cash register…
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A Safe, Sane Way
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Hoxsie started as a simple exercise in sharing tiny bits of history, often without much by way of explanation, under the banner of an old advertisement featuring a rooster crying out “Hoxsie!” 13 years ago I started this site (under the editorial “we”) as an extension of my old personal blog, with a simple…
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The Drislane Building
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or: Where Did Pine Street Come From? An odd little tidbit in a newspaper from 1928 made us realize we had never written about a building and establishment that practically defined a section of North Pearl Street in Albany for nearly 140 years, and that seems to have been forgotten almost as soon as…
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Hope Eden To Do Her Shopping In Albany Stores
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While working on the history of Albany’s airports, we were struck by the role celebrity played in bringing attention to the promise of air travel so early on. It wasn’t just the daring early aviators who captured the public’s attention – though many of them, with names largely now forgotten, figured in the early…