Recently in Schenectady Category

I noticed that this old sign for the Thruway, probably going back to the '60s when I-890 was built a couple of miles away, was still surviving at the corner of Nott St. and Maxon Rd., even during the construction of the new Golub building, but I thought for certain it would disappear when the construction was complete. It had stood watch there, oddly far from any easy access to the Thruway and not really on a major access way, since the time when there was a Wetson's hamburgers across the street, since the Big N existed. I thought for sure the redevelopment of the block, more than 30 years after the Big N went out of business, would finally mean that this sign's time had come. But someone must have decided it belonged there still, even without any directional arrow, for they went to the effort of cutting off the top of the pole but leaving the rest for the sign's perch.

The site has changed dramatically since Google Street View last visited, but two opposing views of this corner offer an interesting pair of perspectives:

Now you see it.

Now you don't.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Thruway scheduled to be widened in Albany (alloveralbany.com)

From the Schenectady City Directory for 1862-63, my favorite image ever. Ever.

No, I don't know what it means. I don't want to know what it means. It is simply perfect just as it is.

Tne New International Year Book, "A Compendium of the World's Progress for the Year 1910," provides a neat little summary of the complicated dealings of Senator Allds, highlighted yesterday when I wondered about the headlines being displayed by Lewis Wickes Hine's Schenectady Newsies of 1910. The Allds scandal had it all: bribery, bridge and sugar beet interests, thousands stuffed into envelopes, uncovering of additional corruption, and guilty legislators who had the good grace to die before all this came to light. So, from precisely a century ago, the New International Year Book's summary of the Trial of Senator Allds:

The death of Senator John Raines in 1909 made it necessary to choose a new leader of the Republican majority in the Senate. This leader, according to custom, is made president pro tempore of the body. In January the Republican caucus selected Senator Jotham P. Allds from Chenango county in the middle of the State. A small group of Republican Senators refused to act with the caucus on the ground of personal objection to Mr. Allds. The caucus selection was, however, duly chosen and installed. Shortly afterwards, a highly sensational statement appeared in the New York Evening Post charging Senator Allds with having received bribes, the statement being based upon accusations made by another Senator, Mr. Conger. The latter was connected with bridge companies . . .

It's Schenectady's turn. Apparently during his documentation of child labor in 1910, Lewis Wickes Hine visited the Electric City, too. Unfortunately, if he recorded the names of the boys he photographed, their names have been lost. These proud newsies, none of whom looks much older than 10, are hawking the Daily Union and the Evening Star. The Daily Union began in 1894; the Evening Star began in 1886. They would merge in 1911, not long after this picture was taken, as the Union-Star. The Union-Star, published evenings in a building on Clinton Street just behind the Schenectady Savings Bank, survived until 1969, when it moved out of town to Albany, merged with the Knickerbocker News and given short lease on life.

More? Yes, if you call a French shipwreck and an Albany corruption trial more . . . .

Saturday was just an incredibly beautiful day, and I had been determined that on the first sunny day I was going to get over to Schenectady (The City That Used to Light and Haul the World) and wander around the Stockade getting pictures of all the historical markers that are scattered all over. These markers were put up by the State Education Department (apparently mostly in 1932) and are as much a part of the landscape as the buildings themselves. Brief, descriptive, sometimes fallacious, but they put the modern world into a context and say that history happened here. I love them beyond reason. Rebekah wanted to join me on this little photographic expedition, so we had a delightful afternoon wandering around the Stockade together while she learned to use the old camera. We had some great conversations about old buildings, floods, the ghost of the dog on the stoop of Arthur's, and everything else. Got some great pictures, too, which I'm still uploading -- click the picture for the markers, the others will be sprinkled around them in my photostream. Then we had a late afternoon snack in the café that has taken over the old Arthur's Market, where some form of grocery store had operated since 1795. Now it's a beautiful sort of espresso and panini place with a killer triple chocolate brownie, though I must say the service would have to come up a few levels to reach indifferent. It still seems to be something of the neighborhood gathering place that Arthur's was, something very rare in our local cities.

Also got in a short bike ride on Saturday, just enough to say I'd been out. A friend told me last fall that the rollers would make my stroke smooth as glass, and he was right -- I could really feel the difference out on the road. On the rollers, every hitch, every inefficiency is felt and challenges your balance, so you try to get rid of them, and it really pays off in efficiency on the road. I rode into some housing developments in North Greenbush that I didn't even know existed -- zero-lot-line condos and apartments as far as the eye could see. Quite unlovely. Remind me not to go back.

So, where have I been, you ask? Busy. Extremely busy. Busy-ness of the one-armed paperhanger variety. One-armed paperhanger working New Orleans in the dead of summer, using a particularly cheap variety of paste. Perhaps "Stickzit" brand. Or perhaps "Mono-Arm and Hammer".

Busy, in other words. Work has been insane. Too much to do, 300 fewer people to do it. Plus, a whole political thing going on that is the ugliest thing I've seen, and I've been doing this for a bunch of years now. They're giving backbiting, spiteful politics a bad name. And then yesterday it looked like a momentary lull in the workload, a day when hardly anyone would need me, and so after a meeting in the morning up north, I jumped on my bike. I can now report that the entire length of the bike path from the Ft. Edward feeder canal to Lake George has excellent cell phone reception. Of course it's inconceivable that I could take a ride without the cell phone, I've given up on that idea -- I'm lucky I get to take a shower after I come back from a run without getting called. But I'm not going to be such a dork, such a complete asshole as to take a headset with me on a bike ride. Which meant, yesterday, that I was such a complete asshole as to have to stop and answer the phone on a regular basis. 2-1/2 hours of riding, 45 minutes on the phone. But I made it to Lake George, and did a stretch of the trail along the old Feeder Canal that I'd never been able to do because it's a soft surface unsuitable for skates. So, in all, 32 miles in 2.5 hours of actual riding time, average speed of 13 mph (LOTS of grade crossings). My thighs both weighed a hundred pounds last night, but all in all I'm faring very well and my recent thoughts of entering a 25 or 50 mile race may not be as stupid as they may have appeared. Well, we'll see.

On my own with the kids this weekend, except that one is away for an overnight, so I've just got one. The house feels weird, but she stepped up her jabbering to fill any potential voids. Never sure what to do with time at home all by myself. Could work on the house, could write the Great Northeastern Novel (not trying to overreach by going for the Great American Novel, mind you), could take up the hash pipe.

Rebekah needed a new bike. The girl won't stop growing. The hand-me-down from last year looks like a clown bike under her. So, off we went to the Steiner's tonight. The best thing they had was a Specialized Hot Rock, exactly the same bike as I bought Hannah last spring, but this one is a 21-speed, Hannah's was a 7. They didn't have one with only 7. Can't buy younger daughter better bike. I'm not insane. I know how the seniority thing works. So, solution is that this new 21-speed is for Hannah, and Bek will get her barely used 7-speed. If Hannah buys the solution. We'll see. Saw a nice bike for The Mommy too, will have to see if she's up for it. Got myself some new gloves (really could have used them yesterday) and a bike shirt, too.

Well, mere weeks after I splurged on my iPod, Apple came out with newer, smaller, bigger iPod, of course. And they upgraded iTunes and added their much-heralded music service, which DOES rock. I will pay $1 for a song. In fact, that's what I paid for a song back in the '70s, in the day of singles, so I think that's fair. When I was first deemed old enough to bike into the wilds of Schenectady for purposes of visiting the Apex Music Corner, I believe the magical 45 was 79 cents. Ah, the time lost to Apex . . . also known as Armpit or Apeshit, since it's not possible for a 12-year-old boy to eschew satiric renaming. Somewhere recently I read among all the laments about the downfall of the music business that there's simply no real connection to the product anymore, and a number of people laid it squarely at the feet of the death of the single. Certainly it's true that no one cares any more what label something is on (perhaps that's different in the hip hop world), whereas back then, the label was part of the whole package, and people who bought records from dorky labels like Bell (think Tony Orlando & Dawn) were deserving of certain levels of ridicule. And, a la Diner, you HAD to know the names of the flip sides, even if they were rarely worth playing. Granted, albums then tended to suck; there was rarely anything beyond the singles worth hearing, so singles were the dominant form. To this day, I remember the names of flip sides to records that I hated, to records that I never even owned, to records that I haven't seen in 20 years. It's a curse, but it's also a culture. Browsing a record store was, for many many years, just the best thing I could ever think of doing. And it started at Armpit, where the top singles of the week were available for listening through a single, monaural speaker you pressed to your ear (taking care to keep its wires aligned just so. They had albums, too, and I bought a number there. The first single I ever bought was "Daniel" by Elton John, and the first album was "Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player." My taste got progressively worse from there, for a while, and then in college I constantly scoured the dusty used record stores to fill my collection with '60s British Invasion stuff and horrible pop vaguely remembered from the years before I had a radio of my own. Some of the stuff stands up. I still own it all.

Oh yeah, the iPod. Well, anyway, the new iTunes and the music service use AAC, superior to MP3 but not previously available as an encoding regime, and so I am, as we speak, re-ripping many of the CDs I had already ripped just a few weeks ago, now into the superior format. Suffering for my music once again.

Flip side of "Daniel?" "Skyline Pigeon." It sucked so bad. On MCA records, with the rainbow label.