On March 30, 1962, the Times Union editorial board urged readers, who harbored “doubts” about the wisdom of the State of New York’s plan to seize and redevelop the South Mall area, to “drive slowly—or walk—up and down these once proud streets. Then decide for yourself.” The implication, of course, was that anyone who viewed…
Double Parking while Black
On Memorial Day evening, 1962, Samuel Clark was double-parked in front of his mother’s Jefferson St. home. With his sister, Thelma Wilson, he was unpacking picnic gear from a family excursion to Six Mile Waterworks, when a police cruiser screeched to a stop, dangerously close to Thelma. Alarmed, the two siblings complained to Patrolman Paul…
We Try Harder
On August 1, 1961, the Temporary State Commission on the Capital City held the first of two public hearings on Albany’s rehabilitation. (Eight months later, of course, the Commission would approve Gov. Rockefeller’s plan to demolish 98 acres in downtown Albany for the South Mall.) The hearing, held on a sweltering night in the un-air-conditioned…
Hoax or Hope?
We are grateful to Grant Van Patten for sharing his memories and photographs with us and to Sinclair Broadcast Group for permission to use footage from WRGB’s 1962 documentary. On the evening of Saturday, July 14, 1962—just days after the first South Mall demolition—WRGB TV, Channel Six, aired a half-hour documentary called The South Mall…
Big News!
You haven’t heard from us in awhile, in part, because we’ve been busy writing grant proposals. And we just learned that that work has paid off. We’ve been awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to begin designing a website on urban renewal in Kingston, Newburgh, and New York City–as well as Albany. This new…
A First Foray into Coding
Beginning in 2014, when we started blogging about the South Mall, we were convinced that combining images and individual narratives with the changing map of Albany would help us construct a broader narrative of how urban renewal transformed our city. Of course, we didn’t have the skills to build such a website. And we still…
King Rockefeller’s “Camelot on the Hudson”
In honor of the Legislative Correspondents’ Association annual show tomorrow night, we thought we’d set the scene for an earlier show, the association’s 71st in 1971. The play that year was a Camelot spoof, starring the A.P.’s Charles Dumas as King Laughsalot Rockefeller and Charles Holcomb of Gannett News as T. Merlin Hurd, the king’s…
A Hudson Avenue Symphony
A guest post by Jack Guthy. Our thanks to Jack for sharing with us the lost soundscape of his childhood home. In the mid-1940s, my family and I lived in an apartment at 273 Hudson Ave., across from the Melody Inn, during an era of live music and lively crowds, described in William Kennedy’s O…
“M-G-M Monumentality”
Five months after Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller unveiled plans for Albany’s new State office complex, an unsigned review in Progressive Architecture (P/A) criticized the design as suffering from “M-G-M monumentality”: Half a cantaloupe sliced on the bias, a croquet wicket with avoirdupois, an upside-down orange half from a Kraft salad, and four little towers and…
The Labor Leader
Our thanks to Hank Landau and his colleagues for their help with this post. For 13 weeks in the spring and summer of 1970, 600 sheet metal workers, members of Local 83, went out on strike. All of the other unions that made up the Albany Building and Construction Trades’ Council had settled with employers…
98 Acres in Albany 