Isaac G. Perry

Washington Avenue Armory, Albany, New York

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The Washington Avenue Armory, at the corner of Washington Avenue and Lark Street in Albany, around 1900-1906. Image courtesy of the Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2019:

This building was completed in 1890 as the armory for the Tenth Battalion of the state militia. It originally consisted of an administrative area here in the front section of the building, with meeting rooms for the various companies within the battalion, and a large drill hall directly behind it. The armory was located in the midst of an urban environment, surrounded by rowhouses and commercial buildings and only a few blocks west of the capitol, and it served as both a place for military training and as a social club for the unit’s members.

The entire building was constructed of brick, with brownstone trim from East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. It was designed by prominent architect Isaac G. Perry, and it features a Romanesque design that gives the armory the appearance of a medieval castle. This style of architecture was common for public buildings of the late 19th century, and particularly for state armories in New York and elsewhere. For these armories, the architecture was not merely decorative; the building’s massive, imposing appearance conveyed a sense of governmental authority and strength, and it could be used as a fortification in the event of civil unrest.

During the late 19th century, concerns about civil unrest were largely based on a number of violent labor disputes that occurred around the country starting in the 1870s and 1880s. This would continue for the next few decades, including at least one deadly strike that occurred here in Albany in 1901. That year, the city’s trolley motormen went on strike, and the United Traction Company replaced them with non-union operators. In response, the strikers and their supporters vandalized a trolley, cut the overhead trolley wires, and sent at least one of the replacement motormen to the hospital.

The Tenth Battalion was assembled here at the armory before dispersing by company to protect the company’s powerhouse and two trolley barns during the night of May 15. The next morning, they were supplemented by the arrival of the 23rd Regiment from Brooklyn. This unit had prior experience in dealing with strikes, and they also had the advantage of not having any local connections to the strikers. However, perhaps because of that, these outside soldiers caused further violence when several opened fire on a crowd, killing two bystanders who were not involved in the strike.

In addition to its military use, though, the armory was also used for a variety of civilian purposes, including as a venue for sporting events, dances, concerts, lectures, and expositions. One early event was a wrestling match featuring the reigning world heavyweight champion, Joe Stecher, who easily defeated Mort Henderson, the “Masked Marvel.” Later in 1920, Albany residents could pay 50 to 75 cents to “watch” the World Series here, which was reproduced on a board based on live play-by-play telegraph reports.

Over the years, perhaps the armory’s best-known use has been as a basketball arena. It was the home court of the city’s first professional basketball team, the Albany Senators, which began playing here in the 1919-1920 season as part of the New York State League. Basketball was still a relatively new sport at the time, and there were no nationwide professional leagues, but the New York State League was one of many regional leagues, with teams such as the Schenectady Dorpians, the Utica Utes, and the Gloversville Glovemakers.

The Senators played particularly well in their first year, and they finished the season as co-champions along with the Troy Knights of Columbus. During that year, the team’s starting lineup included Marty Friedman and Barney Sedran, both of whom were later elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Both were short by modern basketball standards, and Sedran is, at 5’4”, the shortest player in the Hall of Fame. Another notable teammate of theirs here in Albany was Harry Riconda, who was the Senators’ leading scorer for the 1919-1920 season. He was also a professional baseball player, and he played parts of six seasons as a Major League Baseball third baseman between 1923 and 1930.

More recently, the armory has been used by Albany Patroons, a minor league basketball team that began playing here in 1982. The team moved into the new Knickerbocker Arena—now the Times Union Center—in 1990, and three years later they moved to Hartford. However, a new Patroons team was formed in 2005, and returned to the armory for its home games. This team folded after the 2009 season, but it was replaced by a third iteration of the Patroons in 2018. The new team continues to use the armory, more than a century after the original Albany Senators played here.

Throughout this time, the armory remained in use by the National Guard until 1989. Since then, in addition to basketball games, it also hosts a number of other events, particularly concerts, and it has a seating capacity that ranges from 3,600 for basketball games to 4,300 for concerts. On the exterior, very little has changed in the building’s appearance since the first photo was taken at the turn of the 20th century. It stands as an important landmark along Washington Avenue, and in 1995 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

New York State Executive Mansion, Albany, New York

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The Executive Mansion on Eagle Street in Albany, around 1900-1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2019:

This house underwent several different transformations during the 19th century, but the original structure was built in 1856 as the home of businessman Thomas Olcott, the longtime president of Mechanics and Farmers Bank. At the time, it was a comparatively modest Italianate-style house, but it was extensively remodeled in the 1860s by its second owner, Robert L. Johnson. He added Second Empire-style details to the exterior, including a Mansard roof, bay windows, and a tower on one corner.

In 1875, toward the end of Johnson’s ownership, the house was rented by Governor Samuel J. Tilden, who worked a half mile away from here at the old state capitol. Tilden served as governor for two years, from 1875 to 1876, and he was also the Democratic nominee for president in the highly controversial 1876 election. Tilden won the popular vote, but the results from four states were contested. All of these states were ultimately awarded to his Republican challenger, Rutherford B. Hayes, giving him 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184. To this day, Tilden remains the only presidential candidate to lose despite receiving an outright majority of the popular vote.

Tilden retired from politics after the election, and his successor here in Albany was Lucius Robinson. In 1877, during Robinson’s time as governor, the state purchased this house from Johnson and established it as the official residence of the governor. Then, in the mid-1880s, the state hired architect Isaac G. Perry to renovate the house. At the time, Perry was also supervising the construction of the new capitol, and his work here at the Executive Mansion involved an expansion of the house and a complete redesign of the exterior. The project was finished around 1887, giving the house a Queen Anne-style design that rendered it nearly unrecognizable from its previous appearances. The first photo, which was taken around the turn of the century, shows the exterior view of the house after this remodeling.

In the meantime, the house was occupied by several other notable governors during the late 19th century. From 1883 to 1884, just prior to Perry’s renovations, it was the home of Grover Cleveland. Like Tilden, he also ran for president while serving as governor, and he received the Democratic nomination in 1884. He proved more successful in the general election, though, defeating James G. Blaine to become president. Cleveland lost the following election in 1888 to Benjamin Harrison, but he won again in 1892 and served for another four years. In the process, he became the only president to serve non-consecutive terms, and he was also the only Democrat to be elected president in the half-century span between James Buchanan and Woodrow Wilson.

From 1895 to 1896, the executive mansion was occupied by Levi P. Morton, who had previously served as vice president under Benjamin Harrison. He was dropped from the ticket for Harrison’s unsuccessful bid for re-election in 1892, but this apparently did not hurt his political career, because he was elected governor of New York two years later. As a result, he is the only former vice president to hold a statewide elected office after the end of his vice presidency.

Morton was the first in a line of six consecutive Republican governors who were elected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among these, the most famous was Theodore Roosevelt, who served from 1899 to 1900. A native of New York City, Roosevelt had previously been to Albany as a state legislator in the early 1880s. He left politics soon after the death of his first wife Alice in 1884, and he went on to have a successful career as a writer, with most of his books focusing on either American history or hunting.

Roosevelt would continue writing for the rest of his life, but did not stay out of politics for very long. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1886, where he finished a distant third in the general election, but he was subsequently appointed to the United States Civil Service Commission. From 1895 to 1897 he served as president of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners, and then he spent a year as Assistant Secretary of the Navy before resigning to join the famous Rough Riders regiment during the Spanish-American War.

Returning to New York as a war hero, Roosevelt easily received the Republican nomination for governor in 1898. He defeated Democrat Augustus Van Wyck in the general election, and began his term as governor on January 1, 1899. When he had last held elected office here in Albany 14 years earlier, he had been a 26-year-old widower with an infant daughter. Now, at the age of 40, he was remarried to his second wife Edith, and they had five more children, the youngest of whom was just a year old.

On his first night as governor, Roosevelt stayed out too late, and when he finally returned to the Executive Mansion he found that the servants, assuming he was already in bed, had locked the doors. Rather than awaken his family, he decided to break into the house by climbing through a window. Many years later, Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris would use this incident as a way of foreshadowing the disruptive effect that the new governor would have on state politics, particularly in his clashes with Thomas C. Platt, a state senator and boss of the state’s Republican Party.

As it turned out, Roosevelt’s political opponents here in New York would inadvertently advance his career, and less than three years after crawling through the window here in Albany he would find himself living in the White House. Resolving to rid New York of the controversial Roosevelt, Senator Platt had suggested him as William McKinley’s vice presidential candidate for the 1900 election. At the time, it did not seem to be a particularly risky move; no former vice president had gone on to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836, and Platt hoped that Roosevelt would fade into political obscurity just as almost every other vice president had done.

The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket went on to an easy victory against Democrat William Jennings Bryan, and Roosevelt was sworn in as vice president on March 4, 1901, just two months after his term as governor ended. Unfortunately for Platt and his wing of the Republican Party, McKinley was shot by an assassin on September 6, 1901, and died a week later. Roosevelt then assumed the presidency, and was subsequently elected to a second term in 1904.

After Roosevelt, the next New York governor to run for president was Charles Evans Hughes, a New York City attorney who served as governor here in Albany from 1907 to 1910. He resigned near the end of his second term when William Howard Taft appointed him to the United States Supreme Court, and Hughes served as an associate justice until 1916, when he resigned after receiving the Republican nomination for president. However, he lost the election to incumbent Woodrow Wilson, whose razor-thin margin of less than 4,000 votes in California determined the election. The loss cost Hughes his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, but he continued to have a successful political career, serving as Secretary of State in the Harding and Coolidge administrations before being reappointed to the Supreme Court in 1930, this time as chief justice.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, serving as governor of New York continued to be a major stepping stone to the presidency. In 19 presidential elections between 1876 and 1948, 13 of them featured a sitting or former New York governor at the head of at least one of the major party tickets. After Hughes’s loss in 1916, the next was Al Smith, who was governor from 1919 to 1920, and 1923-1928. He challenged Herbert Hoover in the 1928 election, but lost in a landslide, failing to even win his home state.

Smith’s successor as governor, who was also the next Democratic candidate for president, was somewhat more successful in presidential elections. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had previously run for vice president in 1920, served as governor here for four years, from 1929 to 1932. During this time, the Executive Mansion underwent some modifications to accommodate his disability, including the installation of wheelchair ramps and an elevator. In addition, the greenhouse was transformed into a pool, as Roosevelt believed that the therapeutic value of swimming in hot water would improve his condition.

Roosevelt’s first term as governor coincided with the start of the Great Depression, and he became a leading supporter of progressive policies at the federal level. His re-election in 1930 established him as a major presidential contender, although as the 1932 Democratic convention approached he faced opposition from here in his home state. Al Smith, a more conservative Democrat, hoped to block Roosevelt and gain the nomination instead, but the convention ultimately choose Roosevelt, who went on to win all but six states in the general election, defeating a very unpopular Herbert Hoover.

Roosevelt would go on to win an unprecedented four presidential elections, serving throughout the rest of the Great Depression and almost all of World War II. None of these elections were particularly close, but his most successful challenger, in terms of both the popular and electoral votes, was a fellow governor of New York, Thomas Dewey. He had been elected governor in 1942, becoming the first Republican to win the office since Nathan L. Miller in 1920, and two years later he ran against Roosevelt, receiving 99 electoral votes and nearly 46% of the popular vote.

Dewey was the Republican nominee again in 1948, when the Chicago Tribune famously but erroneously declared that he defeated Truman. Although most experts projected that he would win the election, he ended up earning a lower percentage of the popular vote than he had in 1944, and carried just 16 states. However, these two presidential losses did not hurt his career here in Albany, and he served as governor until 1954. His 12 years as governor were, at the time, the longest in the state’s history since George Clinton served 18 years from 1777 to 1795.

Since Dewey, no other New York governors have been nominated for president. However, several of his successors have gained national prominence, perhaps most notably Nelson Rockefeller. He was the grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, and he was first elected governor in 1958. He would go on to be re-elected three more times, surpassing the length of Dewey’s tenure, and he still remains the state’s longest-serving governor since Clinton. Rockefeller served here in Albany until 1973, when he resigned to join the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans. A year later, he was appointed vice president under Gerald Ford, after Ford assumed the presidency in the wake of Nixon’s resignation. He went on to serve as vice president until the end of Ford’s term in 1977.

During Rockefeller’s many years as governor here, the capitol area underwent a dramatic transformation. Most notably, this involved the construction of Empire State Plaza, a massive complex of government buildings that extends westward from the Capitol to the rear of the Executive Mansion. The mansion itself also saw changes during this time. In 1961, only two years into his time as governor, the mansion was heavily damaged by a fire. Some called for it to be demolished or for the state to purchase a new house elsewhere in the city, but Rockefeller preferred to preserve the fire-damaged building, and it was subsequently restored and, in 1971, added to the National Register of Historic Places.

In recent years, not all of New York’s governors have spent much time actually living here in the Executive Mansion, but it remains the state’s official residence of the governor. Today, the trees in the foreground hide most of the house from this angle, and the grounds now have much more security than when the first photo was taken at the turn of the 20th century. However, the exterior appearance of the house still looks much the same as it did back then, and it stands as one of the most important historic buildings in Albany, due to its association with so many of the most influential American politicians of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

New York State Capitol, Albany, New York (2)

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The New York State Capitol, seen from the grounds on the east side of the building, around 1895-1910. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The building in 2019:

As discussed in more detail in the previous post, the New York State Capitol was built over the course of 32 years in the late 19th century. Its construction involved many delays, four different architects, numerous design changes, and substantial cost overruns, but by the time it was completed in 1899 it was one of the grandest state capitol buildings in the country. The first photo was taken around this time, showing the main entrance on the eastern side of the building, with its massive exterior staircase leading up to the portico.

A little more than a decade after its completion, the capitol had a fire that caused extensive damage to the western side of the building. The governor’s Executive Chambers, which are located here on the eastern side, were unaffected by the fire, and the two legislative chambers only suffered water damage. However, the State Library, with hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable books and manuscripts, was lost in the fire, and the library’s night watchman also died in the disaster.

Overall, aside from the fire the only significant changes to the capitol have been interior renovations over the years. The building is now joined by the massive Empire State Plaza immediately to the south of it, but the exterior of the capitol itself still looks essentially the same as it did when the first photo was taken. Today, the only real difference in this scene—other than the trees—is the statue of General Philip Sheridan, a New York native who served with distinction during the Civil War. This statue was designed by prominent sculptors John Quincy Adams Ward and Daniel Chester French, and it was installed in 1916 in the center of the park here on the east side of the capitol.

New York State Capitol, Albany, New York

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The New York State Capitol, seen from Eagle Street on the east side of the building, around 1900-1906. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The capitol in 2019:

For a state capital, the city of Albany is relatively small, with a current population of just under 100,000. This modest size is even more apparent when contrasted with New York City, which is nearly a hundred times larger than Albany. However, while the city itself might be small, New York more than makes up for it with one of the most impressive state capitol buildings in the country, which stands here on a hill just to the west of downtown Albany.

Albany became the capital of New York in 1797, and for much of the 19th century the state government was housed in a capitol building that stood on the far left side of this scene, directly in front of what is now the southeastern corner of the current capitol. This building was completed in 1809, and it remained in use even as its much larger replacement rose behind it in the late 1860s and 1870s. The state legislature finally moved into the yet-unfinished capitol in 1879, and the old one was demolished in 1883, although the new one would not be completed until 1899, after many years of construction delays and cost overruns.

Work on the new capitol had begun in 1867, and its initial design was the work of Thomas Fuller, a Canadian architect who had previously been involved in designing the buildings on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. His plans called for a Renaissance Revival exterior, although the construction work had only progressed as far as the ground floor by 1875, when he was dismissed from the project. The state then hired architects Leopold Eidlitz and Henry H. Richardson, who designed the next two floors before they too were dismissed in 1883 by then-Governor Grover Cleveland. Both Eidlitz and Richardson were pioneers of the Romanesque Revival style of architecture, and their involvement is visible in the exterior design of these two floors, which are significantly different from the ground floor.

Architect Isaac G. Perry then oversaw the final stage of construction, although Eidlitz and Richardson continued to be involved in the design process, and the upper floors have many of the same Romanesque features as the second and third ones. The capitol was also intended to have a Romanesque-style tower in the center, although this was ultimately never completed, in part because of concerns that the ground beneath the building would be unable to support its weight. However, financial issues likely played a role in this decision as well. By the time the building was declared completed in 1899, its original estimated construction costs had ballooned to a staggering $25 million, equivalent to over $750 million today. Finishing the tower would have meant spending even more money, not to mention prolonging a project that was already nearly a third of a century in the making.

The first photo was taken shortly after the capitol was completed, showing the large exterior staircase on the eastern facade of the building. It has a total of 77 steps and extends outward 166 feet from the front of the building. Built in the 1890s, it was one of the last major exterior features added to the capitol, and it was designed by Isaac Perry. He had also intended to build a large gable above the entrance, similar to the one on the west side of the building. However, structural concerns about the added weight forced him to abandon this plan, and he instead built a balcony over the entrance.

Unfortunately, the building’s troubles did not end with its completion. In the early morning hours of March 29, 1911, a fire started in the Assembly Library on the third floor. It soon spread to the nearby State Library, where hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable books and manuscripts provided more fuel for the blaze. By the time the fire was brought under control, the library was a total loss, and the fire caused extensive damage to the upper floors on the western side of the building, including the collapse of the tower at the southwestern corner. The fire also claimed the life of the State Library’s night watchman, 78-year-old Civil War veteran Samuel Abbott, whose charred body was found under the debris two days later.

The eastern side of the building, shown here in these photos, was unaffected by the fire. This included the governor’s Executive Chamber, located on the second floor in the southeast corner, on the left side of this scene. The flames did not reach the legislative chambers, which are located on either side of the building in the center of the east-west axis, but both rooms suffered water damage, and the legislators temporarily met across the street in City Hall while the capitol was repaired. In the end, the fire caused over $2 million in damage to the building, not to mention the priceless contents of the State Library, and none of these losses were insured by the state. The exact cause of the fire was never determined, but the most likely culprit was faulty electrical wiring, which had been installed in the early years of electric lighting.

Overall, though, despite the early troubles of the capitol building, it has stood here as a major landmark for well over a century. During this time, it has seen the rise of many notable politicians, particularly governors, who have gone on to achieve national prominence. Three of the governors who served here in this building subsequently became president: Grover Cleveland (1883-1885), Theodore Roosevelt (1899-1900), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1929-1932). Of these, both Cleveland and Franklin Roosevelt were sitting governors when they were elected to the presidency, and Theodore Roosevelt was the governor when he was elected vice president in 1900.

Other prominent governors have included Charles Evans Hughes (1907-1910), who later became Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the United States; Al Smith (1919-1920, 1923-1928), the 1928 Democratic presidential candidate; and Thomas E. Dewey (1943-1954), who ran for president as the Republican candidate in both 1944 and 1948. The 1944 presidential election was particularly interesting in that it pitted the sitting New York governor against a former governor, Franklin Roosevelt. More recently, Nelson Rockefeller (1959-1973) served as vice president under Gerald Ford, after his 14-year tenure here as governor. Another vice president, Levi P. Morton, was also governor (1895-1896), although he was not elected to this office until after his term as vice president.

Today, more than a century after the first photo was taken, much has changed in the area surrounding the capitol, particularly to the south on the left side of the scene. During the Rockefeller administration, all of the buildings in the blocks to the south of the capitol were demolished as part of a large urban renewal project in order to create the Empire State Plaza, a sprawling complex of state office buildings. Although not visible in this particular view, the Modernist and Brutalist-style buildings of the plaza provide a sharp contrast to the elaborate 19th century architecture of the adjacent capitol building.

As for the capitol itself, it has undergone interior renovations over the years, but on the exterior it remains essentially the same as it did at the turn of the 20th century. It has been a source of controversy over the years, both for its expense and for its visual appearance as an odd hybrid of Renaissance and Romanesque architectural styles. However, it remains in use as the capitol of one of the largest states in the country, and it is probably the most recognizable historic landmark in the city of Albany.