Here Comes The Sun

Sunny architectural detail on Hudson Avenue just west of Swan Street and the Empire State Plaza.

Out of Fashion

Located on Hudson Avenue, just a door away from the former Hudson Theatre, this vacant building was once home to a cleaners.

In more recent years, it seemed to house some sort of antique store. At least, that's what it appeared to be with vintage and quasi-vintage items piled indifferently in the windows. I don't know if the two items in the cleared patch of window - a religious portrait and a heavy felt banner - are leftovers from the shop or not. It was one of those little stores that was never open and never had hours posted.

Now, the windows are soaped over and there's some signs of life in the form of a work permit for roof repairs.

The main attraction here, though, is the lemon yellow and brown vintage sign. Even with a word missing, it still maintains a bit of retro style.

The Hudson Theatre

When I looked up the Hudson Theatre at an on-line database of old movie houses, it was listed as "demolished." In 2007, for that matter. Well, the database was wrong. The former Hudson Theater is still standing on the avenue of the same name, just west of the Empire State Plaza's Swan Street tunnel entrances and exits.

Of course, it's no longer a theatre. The days of movie theaters and vaudeville stages spread throughout Albany's downtown are long gone, with the exception of the historic Palace Theatre, of course...and there's the former Madison, a former silent-era theatre further uptown. The Hudson ceased operations as a theater in the 1950s and all the theatre fixtures and furnishing were torn out as the building was converted to a warehouse.

This building on the 200 block of Hudson Avenue was built in 1872 as the Albany Card & Paper Company factory. It wasn't until 1916 that it became a theatre. I don't know what films played there, but 1916 was the year of D.W. Griffith's controversial epic, Intolerance, starring a beautiful young Lilian Gish.

Movies came to an end at the Hudson in 1933, a time when my family lived just down the street. The building remained vacant for about twenty years before being turned into a warehouse. It was renovated some years ago and now contains apartments.

The former entrance with the letters HT above and the word HUDSON inlaid below are the last remnants of a theatrical past.

The Old Mission

This 19th-century building stands across Hudson Avenue from the Post Office and just around the corner from the Times Union Center (sometimes, I almost still call it the Knickerbocker Arena).

For a long time, 50 Hudson Avenue housed the Capital City Rescue Mission, one of the area's leading homeless shelters. The Mission has long since moved to a more modern facility on South Pearl Street.

Before becoming the City Mission in the 1950s, this building was home to a succession of seedy establishments including a Chinese laundry, a grocery store, an opium den, a brothel, and a tavern patronized by notorious gangster Legs Diamond during Prohibition.

In 1987, a cache of morphine vials (labeled morfina in Spanish) was found packed into a suitcase wrapped in a burlap potato sack and stashed in a high crawlspace here. The brown leather suitcase, filled with wax-sealed amber vials was discovered above the third floor during roof repairs. Authorities were able to date the find by newspapers concealing the vials...the drugs were tucked away, probably by a dealer, in 1921. Just who owned the illicit bottles and why he (or she) never returned for the suitcase is just another mystery...

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).

The Charm of Random Details

One thing I really love about older buildings - and we've got plenty of those here in Albany - are the little details you find on them. A carved cherub or a fluted column or a beautifully curving iron rail. Small things that add a bit of charm, even to some very utilitarian structures.

This building, with its old street sign and ornamental carving, stands at the corner of Broadway and, obviously, Hudson Avenue.