Recently in albany Category

Tilley ladders 1940, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

When I moved back to the Capital District, I was always pleased when I could buy something from a local manufacturer, a difficult enough task at the time. In the twenty years since, even more local manufacturers have gone by the wayside. One of them was Tilley Ladders of Watervliet, a nationally known maker of ladders that was in business from 1855 right up until 2004, when they called it quits. Unlike so many that have been driven out by cheap foreign competition and the evils of big box retail, Tilley was done in by insurance costs. Unfortunately, people fall off ladders, and even though Tilley didn't get sued much, their insurance costs did them in.

Albany Fire Department 1901 from All Over Albany on Vimeo.

Boardman and Gray 1905, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

Some may have noticed that I've been guest-blogging on history over at my favorite local website, All Over Albany. This week's article: the piano-making boom of Albany.

First Church, Albany, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

First Church, the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany, dates to 1642, making it the oldest church in upstate and one of the very oldest in the country. This building dates to 1799, when the congregation moved from the stone church at Broadway and State Street to the outskirts of town, at Clinton and Pearl.

Mimeographing 1940, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

Mimeographing services. For decades, mimeographing reigned supreme as the cheap, easy way to make quality copies of printed materials, and every office of any size had one. A typist would set up a stencil, which would then be attached to a spinning drum. Ink would be squeezed through the stencil and onto the sheet of paper. They're now often confused in our nostalgic minds with dittos, the fragrant medium of school tests that also went by the name of "spirit duplicators." Dittos worked more like offset, with a mirror-image wax-coated master that printed where the wax wasn't, usually in a purple ink. Both technologies suffered a bit from the rise of the Xerox-style photocopier, but were truly put to death by personal computers and printers. They are still in use in the developing world, apparently because they don't require electricity.

You don't see a lot of typewriting services, either. And the bottom dropped right out of the multigraphing market.

Albany Savings Bank 1940, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

Of all the buildings that Albany has lost over the years, this one, which I never got to see, may break my heart the most. The plaque from this 1899 marvel still exists on an inside wall between the Starbucks and the Citizens Bank.