Hope (and a star)

At the corner of Madison Avenue and Swan Street

Lion and Shutters

A lion decorates a cast iron lintel on Swan Street overlooking the Empire State Plaza and New York State Museum.

Tubes

A trio of enormous pipes at the old City Fuel & Ice Company building at the corner of Swan Street and Park Avenue.

The old Fuel & Ice Company stands next to the former Hinckel Brewery complex and just across the corner is the eastern entrance to the Beaverkill gully in Lincoln Park.

A family member told me an unpleasant story about this place which used to supply ice to local restaurants. One day, a large rat was found embedded in a block of ice. Rats weren't too uncommon in Albany, especially around the breweries and buried streams. Rather than discard the block, the workers merely chiseled out the dead rodent and sold the remaining chunk of ice to a restaurant.

Family History

This old brick building, which stands at the corner of Swan Street and Hudson Avenue near the entrance to the tunnels that pass into and under the Empire State Plaza is a piece of personal history.

My great-grandfather was a grocer in Albany long before I was born. He had, at different times, a store on the same block of Madison Avenue which I still live on and one at this corner of Swan and Hudson.

His family lived above the store and the top floor was rented out to another family.

The store was called J. Sharkey Delicatessan - Grocery & Fruit. Don't let the name fool you, though, he wasn't Irish. His name was really Vincenzo Sciacca, but his customers has great difficulty pronouncing it. Apparently, one mispronunciation sounded awfully like sputacchiare, the Italian verb meaning "to spit." Not flattering and, when one Irish lady suggested "Sharkey," he changed the store's name...and his own.

Vincenzo was born in Sicily in 1886 and emigrated to the United States, living first in NYC and then Albany. He began a citizen of the U.S. sometime after the birth of his children as all seven of them are listed on the few naturalization papers I've found in the family files.

If you'd like to see a photo of the store as it looked back them, click here.

I've always found it interesting to look at the details of the old store photos - the piles of fresh vegetables and heavy bunches of bananas hanging just inside the window, the names of the beers (many from local breweries long gone - see the entry about the old Hinckel Brewery), the brand names which still exist today (like Miracle Whip).