The History of Here

Akum Norder

Description

When you buy an old house, you get much more than a house. In all its quirks, its alterations, in fragments of memory and traces left behind, you get a bundle of small mysteries. Who used to live here? Why did they come here, and where did they go? Whose name is that written on the attic wall? When did that odd little bathroom get shoehorned in there, and what did the room look like before? If you're lucky, one or two of your house's mysteries might unfold into stories. Akum Norder was very lucky.

The History of Here follows Albany, New York's, Pine Hills neighborhood through more than one hundred years of change. At its heart is the story of Norder's 1912 house and the people who built and lived in it. As Norder traced their histories, she came to see the development of her house, her street, and her neighborhood as a piece of Albany's story. In the lives of its residents, their struggles and triumphs, she saw a reflection of twentieth-century America.

Drawing on interviews, city records, newspapers, out-of-print books, and other sources, Norder's narrative makes a case for city neighborhoods: their value, their preservation, and the grassroots involvement that turns a jumble of houses into a community. Funny and thought-provoking, readable and relevant, The History of Here celebrates the sense of place that fuels the new urbanism.
Acknowledgments

1. The View from My Porch

2. The Junction at the End of Town

3. Notes on “From”

4. The Carpenter-Poet

5. By Any Other Name

6. First Footsteps

7. House, Home

8. The Newcomers

9. Marguerite

10. The Flappers in My Attic

11. The Hard Road

12. Play

13. The Gentle Man with the Meat Cleaver

14. Pioneers

15. “Where Everybody Talked about the Good Old Days”

16. Kegs, Eggs, and Beyond

17. Renewal

18. The Neighborhood You Fight For

19. Building / Community

Sources, Notes, and Notes on Sources
Index

Sujets

• Local history
• Region
• History of the Americas
• Regional
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 04 décembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438467924
• Langue: English

Extrait

The History of Here
The History of Here
A House, the Pine Hills Neighborhood, and the City of Albany
Akum Norder
Cover photo courtesy of Olivia Raffe.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 Akum Norder
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Norder, Akum, author.
Title: The history of here : a house, the Pine Hills neighborhood, and the city of Albany / Akum Norder.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, Albany, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017004239 (print) | LCCN 2017020479 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467924 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467900 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Pine Hills (Albany, N.Y.)—History. | Pine Hills (Albany, N.Y.)—Biography. | Pine Hills (Albany, N.Y.)—Social life and customs. | Norder, Akum. | Albany (N.Y.)—History. | Albany (N.Y.)—Biography. | Albany (N.Y.)—Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC F129.A36 (ebook) | LCC F129.A36 P566 2018 (print) | DDC 974.7/43—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004239
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Gary, because I never could have done it without you

Contents
Acknowledgments
1
The View from My Porch
2
The Junction at the End of Town
3
Notes on “From”
4
The Carpenter-Poet
5
By Any Other Name
6
First Footsteps
7
House, Home
8
The Newcomers
9
Marguerite
10
The Flappers in My Attic
11
The Hard Road
12
Play
13
The Gentle Man with the Meat Cleaver
14
Pioneers
15
“Where Everybody Talked about the Good Old Days”
16
Kegs, Eggs, and Beyond
17
Renewal
18
The Neighborhood You Fight For
19
Building / Community
Sources, Notes, and Notes on Sources
Index
Acknowledgments
Thank you, first, to my parents, for showing me that writing can change minds, communities, and lives: to my dad, Steve Norder, for teaching me that the route to understanding the present leads through the past; and to my mom, Lois Norder, for giving me the best writing advice I ever got: that there are no boring topics, only boring writers.
Thank you to my daughters, Cleis and Tavik, who so many times had to hear, “Not now, sweetheart, I’m writing.” I love you.
Thank you to the families whose lives were interwoven with my house’s story. This book would have been impossible without you. Thank you to Beryl Scott Glover and Catherine Scott for sharing their time and their stories with me. Thanks to Susan Galbraith, another of John Scott’s granddaughters, for her thoughtful correspondence and for the loan of a family scrapbook. Thank you to other members of the Scott family for taking the time to help connect me to the relatives with the longest memories.
Thank you to Olivia Raffe, to Bill Willig, to Michael Graham, and to Carl and Anna Patka. I appreciate your willingness to respond to a stranger’s queries.
Special thanks to the members of the Stickles and Spencer family, and in particular to Greg Spencer and Lynn Devane: I am humbled by your strength and grace, and can never find words to express my thanks for your trust in me. I’m deeply grateful for the chance to get to know your family, whose stories continue to inspire me.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who took the time to speak with me.
Thank you to Crystal Wortsman for sharing family photographs, to Carolyn Keefe for helping track down a photo of the School 16 demolition, and to the Times Union for its generous access to its photo archives. Further thanks are due to the Times Union for hosting the blog on which I hammered out early drafts of some of this material.
Thank you to the Historic Albany Foundation, whose notes on my house’s history, delivered as part of their plaque program, sparked my interest to learn more. Thanks to the staff at the Albany County Hall of Records and Albany Public Library who helped me locate documents during my research. Thank you to Tom Tryniski: he has scanned millions of pages from New York state newspapers and made them available to the public on his website, Fultonhistory.com , at his own expense.
Thank you to SUNY Press, and to acquisitions editor Amanda Lanne-Camilli, for seeing potential in this story. Thank you to Ann Pfau and David Hochfelder for their feedback and encouragement, and to Sue Petrie for her insights and advice about the publishing process. Thanks to Jeff Boyer for his excellent map.
Thank you to my neighbors for making the Pine Hills a place I love to live.
And finally, thank you to Gary Hahn, the best editor, and best husband, anyone could ever hope for; who read every draft of every chapter and didn’t hesitate to tell me when it wasn’t done yet; who created space in our family life for me to write; and who believed in me far, far more than I ever believed in myself. My love and gratitude are yours forever.
1
The View from My Porch
An item from the Albany Evening Journal on Thursday, April 3, 1879:
A son of Louis Marx, gardener on Madison avenue, having his mind full of dime novels, took $30 a few days since and left for the Black Hills to dig gold. He was heard from at Chicago this morning, and Marx has sought the aid of Chief Maloy to secure his return home.
I know a thing or two about Louis Marx’s family, for reasons I’ll explain shortly, and I wonder which of his sons it was who leapt at the chance to leave Albany for the open West.
There were four boys in the Marx household in 1879. One was two years old, and though toddlers do enjoy adventure stories, when they escape the house they never remember to bring money along. So it’s probably safe to rule him out. Neither, I suspect, was it the gardener’s oldest son, Luie. Luie would have been twenty years old, and had he run off to seek his fortune, he’d probably earned the right to seek it and then find his own way home again.
William, age fifteen, was in the prime of his restless years. No one can do daring and half-formed plans as well as a teenage boy can, and in all likelihood it was William who hopped the train, stopping to check in with the folks once he was eight hundred miles away.
But I like to think it was George. Eleven years old in 1879, he had grown up watching the wagons pass through the tollgate on the Great Western Turnpike, not far from his father’s house and farm. George could have seen how past the gate, the road stretches arrow-straight to the horizon, offering him a running start into the west. Maybe the pull of that road just became too strong. If at age fifteen a journey to Chicago is a dime-novel adventure, at age eleven it’s an epic. Maybe I vote for George because I have a daughter who’s on the brink of eleven, and I see so clearly how life swells up inside her like the opening notes of a musical. All it would take is a downbeat and a lungful of air for her to break into song.
Whichever it was, William or George, the son of the Albany market gardener was restless for change. He didn’t find it in the Black Hills, but change was coming anyway. All the Marxes would have to do was stand still, and it would sweep over them. Within the boys’ lifetimes the fields and woods of Albany’s western reaches would be graded, tamed, and covered with houses. Their family was the last to farm this side of our street, West Lawrence Street.
Fast forward one hundred thirty years or so, and we’re having a party.
Here on our slice of the old Marx farm, we’re celebrating our house’s hundredth birthday with a gathering of neighbors, friends, and others who have a connection to the house and neighborhood. There’s Greg, who grew up in my house in the 1940s. From his third-floor bedroom window he’d shoot matchsticks at the neighbors’ slate roof with his Red Ryder BB gun. Once, when he and his Red Ryder were deep in a war story, Greg took a position on the upstairs porch, drew a bead on his enemy, and fired. His enemy, unfortunately, was a cleaning lady leaving a Morris Street apartment. “Within three minutes the cops were at the door,” he remembered sheepishly, and that was the end of his sniper days.
And over here: This lady, at the party with her nephew, is the granddaughter of the house’s first owner, the man whose name is on the Historic Albany Foundation plaque near the front door. Her family gave me the photograph that sits on the hall vanity: the little boy on the sidewalk looking at—is that a monkey? Yes it is, a monkey in a braidtrimmed coat. To the side, at the foot of the stairs, an organ grinder holds its leash. Those are our stairs, our sidewalk. In the background, our neighbor’s house is being built. The year’s about 1913.
It’s a curious g