House and Garden 
poles with their 
burden of wires 
ought all to 
have come 
down long ago. 
The trolley 
would be an 
equal conveni¬ 
ence and less a 
blot on the 
majesty of the 
street were its 
wires under¬ 
ground, and its 
iron lattice-work poles removed. Save lor 
the hills across the river, the street’s lower 
end has no fitting terminus. The skyline ot 
the buildings on the borders is jagged; now 
and then the huge lettering of a sign strikes 
upon the eye ; the few trees seem accidents ; 
the architecture is a jumble of unrelated 
styles—and yet this street, really majestic in 
its proportions and with a thrilling topo¬ 
graphical opportunity in its sweep up the as¬ 
cent from almost the edge of the Hudson (to 
which it should be extended) to the hill- 
throned Capitol, is the show 7 thoroughfare 
of the capital city of the Empire State. 
The very ratio between its length and its 
breadth is fine. But how far we have 
gone that we can have even such dreams of 
that dirt way of a hundred years ago ! 
There is an¬ 
other old water 
color showing 
an Albany 
street in 1802. 
This pictures 
the east side of 
Broadway from 
Maiden Lane 
to State Street 
—the view that 
the arriving 
traveler would 
have today as 
he steps out of 
the massive 
granite railroad 
station and 
turns to his left 
—if the hun¬ 
dred years had 
not wrought a 
marvelous 
transformation. 
This picture 
shows to better 
advantage the 
crude lighting 
apparatus ; i t 
reveals the un¬ 
mistakably 
Dutch architec¬ 
ture, and shows 
this street—the 
most important 
thoroughfare of the town—as paved for its 
whole width with small round cobblestones. 
The sidewalk is set off' from the roadway by 
no change of pavement but by a line of posts. 
The presence here, however, of the market 
in the middle of the street, suggests that the 
posts may be a local furnishing, put here for 
the convenience of those who would hitch 
their horses while they market, rather than 
to separate walk from road. At the extreme 
right of the picture there is shown, by a bit 
of the old church blocking the way, the 
place where Broadway and State Street 
meet—that busy corner where rise today the 
large buildings of financial institutions and 
the general post-office. So there is revealed 
the importance of location early given to 
the church—the absolute centralness of posi¬ 
tion, such as no 
other structure 
of the town 
could have, 
such location as 
the pious New 
Englanders 
gave to their 
churches when 
they put them, 
as they usually 
did, on a site 
facing the com¬ 
mon— if not, 
indeed, upon 
the c o m m o n 
itself—in the 
very center of 
the town. The 
closeness of 
connection be- 
BROADWAY, ALBANY, IN T 802 
( Photographed, by Augustus Pruyn, from a painting ) 
“ liillfl 
A MODERN SCENE ON STATE STREET HILL 
(Front a photograph by Augustus Pruyn ) 
59 
