Great Western Turnpike and toll-gate
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of turnpikes unfurled from Albany, beckoning settlers to explore the new republic. You're standing near one of the most important.Western Avenue began as the Great Western Turnpike. Chartered in 1799, it was the main route for overland travel to Buffalo. Its toll-gate house stood about where Marion Avenue hits Western today. Though built by private investors, turnpikes brought a lot of money to Albany; early nineteenth-century settlers would outfit here before beginning their journeys.Even after the Erie Canal and the railway thinned the traffic, the turnpike helped shape the neighborhood. Farmers entered Albany here on their way to the downtown markets, and wagoneers hauled in sand for construction projects. They kept hotels near the Madison-Western Junction busy into the late nineteenth century.In time people saw the toll-gate as a roadblock. “Albany should no longer be kept fenced in,” as one account put it in the 1870s. “The city [is] rapidly increasing and the toll gates [are] decidedly in the way.”The gate that stood here was demolished in 1906.
Manning Boulevard
The story of Manning Boulevard begins more than a mile away, in Washington Park: Both were part of a nineteenth-century city beautification plan.In the 1870s and 1880s, planners imagined Washington Park as the jewel in a ring of greenspaces and boulevards around the city, linked to provide a circuit for an afternoon carriage ride. As part of the plan, Western Avenue west of the park got the works: granite paving, curbs, sidewalks and twin rows of Norway maples. Here, at the boulevard, the route was to turn north.The Board of Commissioners of Washington Park adopted a proposal to use the city’s destitute as construction labor, with the crews switched out frequently in order to spread the wealth. It was one of those ideas that worked better on paper: The crew changes meant the work advanced in fits and starts. Ultimately the ring of boulevards was never completed, but this section between Western and Washington avenues nevertheless became a city showplace and a site of fashionable homes.Manning Boulevard was named after park commissioner Daniel Manning, who had been treasury secretary under President Grover Cleveland.
South Manning Boulevard
The land between Western and New Scotland avenues was dotted with gullies and swampy patches that shaped – and slowed – its development. Case in point: Warren's Pond.According to old accounts, the pond occupied a ravine that stretched from the west side of South Pine Avenue to about where Marion Avenue is today. In the neighborhood's early years it was a popular site for skating, sledding and tobogganing. The Albany High School and Albany Academy hockey teams would practice there, and it was also used as an ice pond.In 1915, the Common Council authorized the purchase of land to extend Manning Boulevard to New Scotland Road. A Pine Hills oldtimer, writing to the Knickerbocker News in 1973, described watching the workmen drain the pond, then use teams of donkeys to fill it with sand graded off the surrounding hills. South Manning opened as far as New Scotland in 1925 and was hailed as a much-needed cross-town route.
Original Pine Hills development
As Albany's expanding streetcar network allowed people to live farther from their workplaces, families looked to move out of the crowded city center. A pair of lawyers named Louis Pratt and Gaylord Logan were one jump ahead of the trolleys. In the late 1880s, they teamed up with some associates to buy a couple of farms west of Allen Street, and they began selling off plots as the Albany Land Improvement and Building Company. They named their development Pine Hills.Compared to most downtown residences, Pine Hills lots were huge. Light and air could enter the houses on all sides, and the separate lots eased fears about the spread of fire. Quality was another selling point: Albany Land Improvement put a lot of money into infrastructure such as paving, drainage, sidewalks, and trees. And they restricted commercial uses of the properties – including a provision against selling "intoxicating liquors" west of Allen Street. The Albany Land Improvement Co. promoted Pine Hills as “the most healthful and desirable residence section of the city.”A number of prominent Albany residents – bankers, lawyers, businessmen – took Pratt and Logan up on their deal, buying lots and building houses along Pine Avenue and Allen Street. But the developers' plans sputtered: The Albany Land Improvement Co. was wiped out in the financial panic of 1893. The bank foreclosed on their loan, and Pratt and Logan's lots were sold off on the cheap. For the Pine Hills neighborhood, it was a temporary stop; those streetcars were coming, and other speculative developers were waiting to take the throttle.
School 16
As the Pine Hills grew in the early years of the twentieth century, neighborhood parents complained to the Board of Education that in bad weather, School 4 (3/4 mile away at Madison & Ontario) was too far away for their children, even by trolley. School 16 opened here on North Allen in 1906 with a staff of seven female teachers, all graduates of Albany High. It expanded almost immediately, with another teacher hired the next year and a four-classroom addition built in 1912. And still the superintendent wrote in 1913: “So rapid has been the growth of the city in this section that at present this school is seriously crowded.”Old School 16 was demolished in August of 2005; the modern school building you see today opened in 2007 as Pine Hills Elementary.
The Junction
As the state historic marker suggests, this unassuming site looms large in American railroad history.The first steam-powered passenger train in the country left from the junction of Lydius Street and the Great Western Turnpike in 1831. (Where was that, you ask? Right here: Lydius' name was later changed to Madison, and the Great Western Turnpike is now Western Avenue.) The company behind this grand experiment was the Mohawk and Hudson, one of the first railroads in the country. The locomotive was the DeWitt Clinton, one of the earliest built in America. The cars were souped-up stagecoaches fitted to run on rails. And the passengers? They didn't know what they were in for.Why start the railroad up here, so far from the bustle of downtown Albany? Because from here a train could make a relatively flat run to the outskirts of Schenectady. That summer day in 1831, civic officials and honored guests boarded the train, sitting both inside and atop the carriages. A blast from a tin horn, and – thump – the cars, connected by lengths of chain, lurched forward and threw the riders from their seats. Burning embers showered down on them, and they struck at each other to put out the flames. But the train was moving.Farmers and their families lined the route, at least till the engine neared. Then their horses bolted, sending carts tumbling in every direction. The train made it to Schenectady and back – and as a mode of transportation, the horses’ days were numbered from that moment forward.In 1844 the train was rerouted to leave downtown Albany through Tivoli Hollow.
Aurania Club.
The Aurania Club was a venerable Pine Hills tradition — and a tale of turn-of-the-century nimbyism.In 1901, the trustees of the Albany Hospital for Incurables thought this growing section of town would be a good spot for their new facility. Neighborhood residents did not agree. “Anxious” was how the Albany Evening Journal put it, as in, “The people of the Pine Hills … are anxious to have the hospital authorities select some other site.” The neighborhood association formed a committee to push hospital officials and the mayor to build elsewhere — and some nearby homeowners pooled funds to purchase the property the hospital wanted. They incorporated as the Aurania Club, a neighborhood social club, and built their clubhouse on South Allen at Yates Street in 1902. For decades to come, the rambling wooden house with broad verandas was the site of innumerable dinner-dances, card parties, smokers, teas, New Year’s Eve galas and other highlights of the uptown social calendar.In 1964 the club’s headquarters burned in a suspicious fire. The only part of the clubhouse that could be saved was a 1928 brick addition that contained the ballroom; that section is still standing today. Club members rallied, razed the rubble and built a low, modern brick clubhouse that opened in 1965. In 1984, remaining members voted to sell the property to the Elks.
Steamer No. 10
Steamer 10, designed by prominent Albany architect Albert Fuller, became part of the Albany Fire Department in September of 1892. That the neighborhood had earned its own fire station by the early 1890s reflects its growth – and the growth the city expected in the future.At first, the Steamer 10 firemen fought blazes with the help of a steam-powered engine pulled by horses. Thanks to an apparatus called a quick-hitch harness, which hung from the ceiling and could be dropped onto the horses below, the men could be ready to answer a call in less than ten seconds. The department switched to motorized trucks in the teens. A police precinct house, added on to the back of the firehouse, opened in 1928.In 1988, the company – by then known as Engine 10 – moved west to Brevator Street at Washington Avenue. City officials made plans to convert the old firehouse into a neighborhood library, but engineers determined the structure couldn't handle the weight of the books. Instead, the library went into the former New York Telephone Co. building on Western Avenue, across the street; and the firehouse became Steamer 10 children's theater in 1991.
Madison Theatre
“One of the finest residential theatres in New York State”: That's what a trade magazine wrote about the Madison not long after its grand opening. It was one of the first theaters in the nation that was designed and built to show that marvelous new sensation of the 1920s – talking pictures.Designed by Thomas Lamb, a theatre architect also responsible for Proctor's in Schenectady, the Madison cost the Stanley Mark Strand Corporation $250,000 to build in 1929. When it opened, it was majestic: The lobby featured an Art Deco chandelier and the drapery-hung hall held 1,400 upholstered seats.For most of the twentieth century the Madison – and its Saturday double feature – was one of the landmarks of a Pine Hills childhood. But by the 1990s the small cinema was struggling. Owners tried to keep it alive by carving it into five, then seven, screening rooms. But dogged by financial troubles, it closed its doors in 2003. The next year, CVS proposed tearing down the Madison to build a larger drugstore with a drive-through window. Neighbors, preservationists and others organized successfully to fight the project and promote the theatre to potential buyers. It was purchased by an Amsterdam businessman in 2005, and passed to its current owners – the team behind Tierra Coffee Roasters – in 2013. Their renovations have included cutting the number of screens, restoring retail space and adding a live performance venue.
Pine Hills mural (1977, updated 2012)
How do you paint “community”?That was the question Constance Dwyer Heiden faced in 1977, when she took on the task of creating a City Arts Office-sponsored mural on the side of what was then Mack's Drugs. Heiden, who grew up on North Main in the 1950s and ‘60s, saw it as an opportunity to pay homage to the neighborhood she loved – and she did it with a tribute to the small businesses at the heart of the Pine Hills. “How many hours I’d spent in Mack’s Drugstore and Stittig’s and the Petit Paris, and Ann Petersen’s – we’d go there to get our hair cut,” Heiden said. “Mom would run out of something and we’d have to run over to Cal Heller’s, a narrow store where the groceries were stacked up to the ceiling.”A panel on the left pays tribute to the city with a rendering of City Hall; on the right is the Steamer 10 firehouse. The numbers at the top? They’re from the addresses of her childhood home and the homes of family friends.By the time it was 35 years old, the Pine Hills mural was flaked and faded; and in 2012 neighbors organized to save it. Heiden, living in Pennsylvania, came back to Albany to oversee its renovation.
Ridgefield Park
In the mid-1880s, a group of local swells was looking for a place to play sports. They bought this parcel along Partridge Street and constructed a baseball diamond, a cricket pitch, a bicycle track, and more, opening these grounds as the Ridgefield Athletic Association in 1885.One of the Association’s first projects was building a 55-foot-high toboggan run. For a few winters in the 1880s, Ridgefield tobogganing was hugely popular among Albany's society set, even drawing mention in The New York Times and a visit from the governor.At least two major-league baseball players got their start playing for Ridgefield teams: Eddie Phelps, who caught for the Pirates in the 1903 World Series; and James Bentley Seymour, who has been called "perhaps the greatest forgotten name of baseball."Around 1899, the club transferred its fields and clubhouse to the YMCA. In 1938, the Y made Ridgefield the site of Albany's first summer day camp, offering the time-honored trifecta of sports, crafts, and nature study. Ridgefield became a city park in 1968.
1000 Madison Avenue (former Pine Hills library)
One of the most fondly remembered addresses in all of the Pine Hills, this stately Victorian was home to a branch of the Albany Public Library for many years. Well-worn stairs and the smell of books -- for a few generations of Pine Hills children, this was a second home.The ca. 1899 house was built for the president of the Helderberg Cement Company. It was a private residence until becoming a library in the early 1950s. The creaky, leaky house may not have been ideal for its new purpose (the Knickerbocker News once called the building “entirely inadequate”) but many of the features that made it ill-suited to be a high-circulation library – its cramped spaces, irregular nooks, many stairs, round tower – are the very ones that made it such a delight for patrons, especially young ones.The building never had been city property; St. Vincent de Paul parish had owned it and collected a nominal rent for its use as a library. In 1985, The College of Saint Rose bought the mansion, and in 1990 the Pine Hills Library moved to its current location at 517 Western, in the old telephone exchange building near the Madison-Western Point. Today, 1000 Madison houses the administrative offices of The College of Saint Rose.
994 Madison: The Hawley property and the “glass school"
For many years, the pupils of Vincentian Institute’s grade school met near here to study under roofs of glass, in hopes of maximizing their exposure to what administrators believed were the health-giving rays of the sun.This house at 994 Madison once belonged to a man named George Hawley, and before that to his in-laws, the Amsdells. Beer made the family fortune: Theodore Amsdell had been co-owner of Amsdell Bros. Brewery; later, he and George bought the Dobler Brewery. George and his wife, Theodora, shared a love of gardening and would send flowers from their two large conservatories to city hospital wards.After the Hawleys' deaths, their home and grounds were purchased by St. Vincent de Paul parish and became part of its school, Vincentian Institute. With the conservatories, V.I. founder Father William Charles saw a chance to test the principles of a 1930s health craze, therapeutic sunbathing, According to practitioners, exposure to sunlight would promote general health and help cure all manner of ills. So the greenhouses were converted into classrooms for the primary grades. Father Charles was so pleased with the results that the school went on to add more steel and glass classrooms.The glass school buildings have been demolished. But if you walk behind the Hawley house – today, Saint Rose's Huether School of Business – you'll see the school's latticed metal bell tower, set there as a memorial to a place that for many Albany families was an anchor of neighborhood life.
The College of Saint Rose
This home at 979 Madison, today a part of The College of Saint Rose, was once the whole college.The house was the first property purchased by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet for the establishment of a college for Catholic women. Previously it had belonged to one branch of the Keeler family, famed Albany restauranteurs. The sisters bought the house and grounds in the spring of 1920, and that fall they welcomed the college's first students – all 19 of them. Student rooms, library, classrooms, chapel, dining room, faculty residences — all were here in the college’s first year, plus a chemistry lab out in the detached garage.The college bought additional properties as its enrollment and course offerings expanded. To your left is St. Joseph Hall: It was the school's first “new” classroom building, constructed by the growing institution in 1923. By the end of the decade, enrollment was over 200.Saint Rose became fully coeducational in 1969. At that time, the college's full-time undergraduate enrollment was less than a thousand students. Today, the college has more than 4,000 students in its graduate and undergraduate programs and a campus that includes more than six dozen buildings in the Pine Hills neighborhood, many of them former houses.
Vincentian Institute
Vincentian Institute, the parochial school operated by St. Vincent de Paul parish, opened in this building in 1917. It added a grade per year until the school offered K-12 education, with the first high school class graduating in 1925. The school grew with the neighborhood, expanding this building and adding other properties (including the “glass school,” another Pine Hills tour stop). As at the glass school, V.I. Founder Father William Charles was a believer in sun exposure, so gym class here (including basketball!) was once held on the roof.By the end of the 1960s, enrollment at Vincentian Institute was in sharp decline: Families were smaller, and the suburbs were calling. The high school was the first to succumb to the changes: It closed in 1977, merging with Cardinal McCloskey High School to become Bishop Maginn. The grade school closed after the 1984-1985 school year.The building now houses senior apartments and the Albany Police Athletic League youth center.
School 4 (location of Pine Hills Park, Madison at Ontario)
An absent school built to serve a now-forgotten neighborhood: This stop is about things you don't see.In the nineteenth century, this area was known as Paigeville, a working-class Irish and German neighborhood that used to fan out along Madison and Western near Ontario and Partridge streets. It was probably named for John Keyes Paige, a prominent citizen (and onetime Albany mayor) who’d had his “country seat” nearby. Albany Public School No. 4 was built here in 1892 to accommodate the children of Paigeville.The school was lost to fire on a Saturday night in 1922. It was replaced with a building designed by Marcus T. Reynolds, the architect known for Albany landmarks such as the D&H Building, the Delaware Avenue firehouse, and Hackett Middle School. The 1967-'68 school year closed the books on old No. 4: Shortly after school let out for summer vacation, a ten-foot section of the building's roof collapsed. Engineers declared the building to be structurally unsound, and it was demolished in 1969.
Alumni Quadrangle
Educational institutions loom large in Pine Hills history. Here's more proof: Alumni Quadrangle, a dormitory complex that's part of the University at Albany, SUNY.The institution that eventually became UAlbany was founded in 1844 as the State Normal School. The college, which trained young women and men to be teachers, established a campus about a half-mile east of here in 1909.For most of its first hundred years, the college had no dormitories. Instead, school administrators would recommend "suitable" boarding houses and rooms in the homes of "respectable families" to students coming from out of town. As the school grew, so did the need for student housing. The Alumni Association purchased land here and funded the building of two dormitories. The oldest, Pierce Hall (around the corner on Ontario), opened in 1935 as a women's residence. It was the first dormitory at a New York state school. Sayles Hall, for men, opened 1941. The other dorms here date from the 1950s.
St. Vincent’s Male Orphan Asylum (LaSalle School)
Founded in 1854 amidst a wave of cholera deaths, St. Vincent’s Male Orphan Asylum provided a home, an education, and vocational training to orphaned and abandoned boys. (A sister facility, for girls, was at 106 Elm Street.) Its founder was John McCloskey, at that time bishop of Albany and later the first American cardinal. To raise funds to support the orphanage, a paying school was founded elsewhere in Albany; today, we know it as Christian Brothers Academy.The orphanage added buildings over the years to accommodate as many as 350 boys in its care. The oldest buildings you see here date from the first decade of the twentieth century.In the 1920s, the facility changed its name to LaSalle School. And though it is no longer an orphanage, LaSalle still holds to its mission of helping boys through difficult times: It is now a residential and outpatient treatment center.
Maternity Hospital and Infant Home
Look just under the roofline on the north side of the pastoral center, and you can still make out the words “The Anthony N. Brady Maternity Home.”Opened in 1915 and funded by a large donation from Brady, a wealthy local businessman, the hospital worked in tandem with a recently built facility next door, a home for the care of orphaned and destitute children from birth to age 6. Both the maternity hospital and the infant home were under the direction of the Sisters of Charity.There were a few growing pains: Pine Hills neighbors complained to the bishop in 1914 that it was “annoying” to hear the babies crying at the infant home, and “that the weeping of the infants caused a depreciation of the property in the vicinity.” They asked him to find a way to make it stop. According to a newspaper report, the bishop “promised to take the matter under consideration.”The Brady Hospital closed in 1966, when a maternity wing opened at St. Peter’s Hospital. The infant home, renamed St. Catherine's Infant Home in 1951, is now St. Catherine's Center for Children. The Brady property was dedicated as the Roman Catholic Diocese’s Pastoral Center in 1989.
