A few months ago, I blogged about the flights of stairs leading up from Sheridan Hollow. Pictured above is the unused flight leading up to a weed-covered gate near the Erastus Palmer house on Columbia Place.Very near this set of crumbling steps was the old Hawk Street viaduct. This pedestrian bridge, considered an engineering marvel when it was completed around 1890, spanned a thousand feet over Sheridan Hollow to connect the neighborhoods around the Capitol to the northern part of the City.
The viaduct is long gone. I've only seen it in photos on old postcards. As of the early 90s, a small remnant of the south abutment was supposedly visible near these stairs. Even that seems to have vanished, apparently beneath the parking garage.
I'm glad you posted about this, because it prodded me to find the postcard of the Hawk Street Viaduct that I had buried somewhere in the system:
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I was just at the NYS Museum this Saturday and they have a huge image of the original viaduct near the "Underneath Albany" (Uncovering Albany? don't remember the exact name) section.
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ReplyDeleteI remember walking across the the viaduct when I was a young boy with my two brothers, they would take me along with the rest of the boys on Clinton ave to the park across the street from the capital to play touch football, drummer George Leary http://www.jango.com/music/Marks+and+Leary
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