Things that you don't see anymore: a combined undertaker and furniture dealer. Well, of course, making cabinets and making caskets are pretty much the same thing, and it wasn't uncommon for craftsmen in the 19th century to expand their markets in this way. Still, I've seen plenty of furniture makers who also dealt in caskets, but I haven't before seen one who advertised himself as a full-service undertaker. This is from the 1859 Wallace's directory of Albany.
If the numbering is the same, 274 South Pearl Street is now the home of the Giffen Memorial School.
I do recall a store in downtown Schenectady that used to sell pianos and waterbeds. In the '70s, that seemed to make sense.
Circumstances -- a combination of wife's employment and elder daughter's education -- are leading us to spend a significant amount of time running north to Troy. Surprisingly, this is just not practical by bus. Even though we live 15 minutes south of the Collar City, all buses require us to cross the river to Albany, change buses at least once, and then travel up and across the river again, a trip that cannot take less than an hour by bus and sometimes takes longer. Our other options? Cross the river (twice), using I-787, or go the slow way up Route 4 on our side of the river. It's only about a 25-minute bike ride, by the way, but not really safe or practical for a teenager; too many high-speed interactions and then the maze of city streets in South Troy.
In 1850, the bicycle, bus and automobile hadn't been invented, yet there were still three options for getting from Albany to Troy: stage, steamboat, and railroad. (Not to mention getting on your own horse). Hell yes, I'd pay 12-1/2 cents for a steamboat ride up the Hudson.
A friend asked me if I could figure out exactly when the original Dunn Memorial Bridge (dedicated August 19, 1933, replacing the old Greenbush Bridge) was demolished. Once its replacement, the current bridge connected to I-787 and the vestiges of the South Mall Expressway, was in place, the process of demolishing the "old" lift bridge began. (I put old in quotes because, 37 years old at its replacement, it was newer than the current Dunn, which is now 41 years old.)
Turned out to be harder to track down than I had hoped. Google's news
archives do have a substantial collection of the Schenectady Gazette,
but the Albany Times-Union and the Troy Record and all the defunct
evening papers are not available. However, there must have been a slow
news day in Sarasota, Florida on May 12, 1971, or maybe the editor just
liked pictures of bridges being blown up, because the front page of the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune featured these AP news photos of the demolition
of the Dunn.
The approaches had been demolished in February 1971. The remaining towers were demolished in June, not without incident - two men planting demolition charges on the towers fell 50 feet into the Hudson but survived.
The new bridge was not fully connected until 1974, when the ramp from the Empire State Plaza to the Dunn and I-787 was opened.
Is there a site specializing in Capital District highways and bridges? Of course there is.
Have I previously written about the Dunn's namesake, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Parker F. Dunn? Of course I have.
I suppose that in some of the big cities there might still be the staple-gun crews that run around tacking band flyers to telephone poles, but they are merely diluted descendants of the mighty bill poster of the 19th century. The phrase "Post No Bills" seemed only a curious relic to me as a youth, something I saw in cartoons and old movie backgrounds but could make little sense of, the old usage of "bill" or "handbill" as a sheet of advertising having all but vanished. Once there was a thriving business in advertising through posting of bllls, advertising sheets that were glued to buildings, fences, and just about anything that would stand still. This ad is from 1895, when Mrs. M.E. Dundon of Troy proclaimed the power of pasted-on advertising: "The Brush A Power In The Land." And, more to the point, "Cash Buys Paste." Indeed it does.
(A version of this was previously published at All Over Albany.)
So, what is a Menand?
Well, the question really is, who was Menand?
For the answer, you'd have to look back to the late 1800s, when
everyone from well-to-do collectors of exotic flora, to prosperous
homeowners with gardens, to cemetery visitors who wanted to pay tribute
to a loved one -- would go to Menand's.
Louis Menand was
the son of a gardener in Chalons, Burgundy, France. As early as he could
remember, he was fascinated by horticulture. "I was eight or nine years
old," he later wrote, "when I began to try to grow plants from
cuttings. I have always been fond of cutting, properly or figuratively
speaking, except cutting my fingers."
Eventually Louis became an estate gardener in Paris and later in the
Champagne region. In 1837 he came to New York and went to work at
nurseries in Halett's Cove, which would later become Astoria. There he
met a young piano teacher from Albany named Adelaide Jackson. They
fell in love and were married in her family home on Park Place in
Albany, and soon took up residence in what they called "the haunted
house" on the Albany-Troy Road (Broadway). Louis began selling
plants. After a rough first year ("more than modest, that is to say
meagre, I might say miserable!!"), things began to pick up.
Menand had a fair collection of "hardy perennial plants," which had
become pretty popular in the Albany/Troy area. Later he sold Norway
spruces, balsam firs and other popular trees and shrubs. In 1847 he
was able to buy several acres of land on what is now Menand Road, where
Ganser-Smith Park is now located, for his greenhouses and nursery.
He cultivated plants that, no doubt, had never before been seen in
this old Dutch town -- camellias, palm ferns,
cacti, and orchids, among others. Forty years later, an article in The
Gardeners' Monthly and Horticulturist would proclaim:
"It is Mr. Menand's aim to exhibit at least one specimen of
every known variety ; and whenever a new one is produced in any quarter
of the world, it will not be long before it may be found at Menand's.
Thus it often happens that persons who search in vain for rare specimens
in New York and elsewhere, are generally directed to 'a crazy Frenchman
at Albany,' where they are sure to find what they want and carry it
away, provided their purse is long enough. In fact, it is Mr. Menand's
aim to furnish anything from a strawberry to a tree."
He was noted for importing exotic plants from Europe, and commanded
an impressive price for his best camellias: "a little plant four inches
high would sell for $25."
Menand won significant awards for his plants through the years, and
continued to grow. He bought 31 acres near the entrance to Albany Rural
Cemetery, where he set up his son with a half dozen hot houses devoted
to growing cut flowers, roses, carnations, pansies, geraniums and "an
almost endless variety of other species suitable for cemetery
decoration." These included all manner of shrubs, which no doubt still
influence the scenery in the cemetery.
His greenhouses were so popular that the Albany and Northern Railroad
added a stop there in 1856, named "Menand's Crossing," which the
succeeding Delaware and Hudson Railroad renamed "Menand's Station."
The title is about as direct as the rest of the book, originally
published in 1892 and then updated in 1898. The ramblings of this
"crazy Frenchman at Albany" shed very little light on the actual events
of his life but give an incredible sense of the energetic character of
Louis Menand. There are exuberant paeans to his wife Adelaide (whom he
calls "Phanerogyne," meaning "remarkable woman," who died in 1890.
There are rambling thoughts on the various revolutions and republics in
France, a scathing appraisal of his arrival in a free land "where
slavery was flourishing as carnations," and tales of intrigues at flower
exhibitions, all told in the least linear style imaginable. (The
version available here on Google Books includes several handwritten
notes by Louis.)
Louis Menand died in 1900 at the age of 94. It wasn't until 1924 that
the apostrophe-free name of Menands became official, when the village
was incorporated.
They talked about aluminum siding as a technique for making old houses look new again. From a distance, these sheets, which never needed painting, looked like freshly painted wood . . .
"If you're in aluminum storm windows," the driver said to Trout, "you must be in aluminum siding, too." All over the country, the two businesses went hand-in-hand.
"My company sells it," said Trout, "and I've seen a lot of it. I've never actually worked on an installation."
The driver was thinking seriously of buying aluminum siding for his home in Little Rock, and he begged Trout to give him an honest answer to this question: "From what you've seen and heard -- the people who get aluminum siding, are they happy with what they get?"
"Around Cohoes," said Trout, "I think those were about the only really happy people I ever saw."
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.
From the wonder that is the Library of Congress's American Memory project, rare film of Albany as it was in 1901. Or at least of the Fire Department as it was in 1901. This was filmed by the Thomas A. Edison Co., and is described as "A sidewalk crowd on a main street of Albany, N.Y., watches as
fourteen pieces of horse-drawn fire equipment quickly pass by."
The stately elms and horse-drawn fire engines are long gone, but make no mistake: those Belgian pavers are still there, and they crop up to the surface with astonishing regularity. And some streets in Albany are still entirely paved in granite block.
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.
Louis Menand was
the son of a gardener in Chalons, Burgundy, France. As early as he could
remember, he was fascinated by horticulture. "I was eight or nine years
old," he later wrote, "when I began to try to grow plants from
cuttings. I have always been fond of cutting, properly or figuratively
speaking, except cutting my fingers." 
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