Pine Hills Turtle

When I was very little, two of these large concrete turtles stood on Madison Avenue near the long wall that runs in front of the Price Chopper supermarket.  I remember playing on them after visits to the nearby Pine Hills library or before shopping.  The pair have since been moved across Madison on the lawn of the Steamer Ten Theatre. 

Found By Chance

This lovely stained glass window appears to have been salvaged from a church or chapel and mounted on an addition to the back of a house on South Lake Avenue.

While I've passed this house before, I had never noticed the window until a casual stroll this past weekend when I turned a corner at random and there it was.

The Madison Theater

Badly painted detail on the facade of the Madison Theater.

This Pine Hills landmark was built in the late 1920s and its design was the work of Thomas Lamb. Lamb also designed the wonderfully preserved Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, several Broadway theatres, many movie palaces, and Manhattan's Academy of Music building.

When last I heard, the Madison was for sale.

More on its history can be found here.

Mural at Madison and Main

When I was little - think late 70s and early 80s - a number of murals decorated walls around Albany. I remember the colorful silhouettes on Lark Street at Washington Avenue, leaping dancers on the wall overlooking the Dunkin Donuts at the other end of Lark, a wilderness scene of moose and bears on lower New Scotland Avenue. Most of the murals are long gone. This one, on the side of the Pine Hills CVS is one of the few that survive. The faded painting shows Albany's City Hall on one side, the old fire and police station on the other (the firehouse is gone and now home to the Steamer 10 Theatre for children, though the police station remains). In between are some of the businesses that called this stretch of Madison Avenue home. Many of those businesses are gone, too.

Filling In The Space

A coffee sack outside the new Tierra Coffee Roasters (formerly Muddy Cup Cafe) in the Pine Hills neighborhood. The frame used to hold posters for the adjacent Madison Theatre.

Pine Hills Tiles

Small colorful tiles are a pretty surprise on the sides of an otherwise plain building housing a convenience store in the Pine Hills neighborhood.

Rail History In Pine Hills

This marker, identifying the spot where the first chartered railroad in New York State began its debut trip from Albany to Schenectady, stands on the point where Western Avenue (seen above) converges with Madison Avenue in Pine Hills. The company was chartered in 1825 and the first train - yellow passenger cars drawn by the famous DeWitt Clinton steam locomotive - departed from Albany near this intersection on September 24, 1831. The sixteen-mile trip through the Pine Bush took about forty minutes.

Tree Lamp

A street light peeks out from a cluster of old evergreens in the Pine Hills neighborhood.