Albany’s Wadsworth Lab

The Wadsworth Laboratory is one of the pre-eminent public health laboratories in the nation, and has been for almost 120 years.

The first lab was established in 1901 on Yates St., between South Lake Ave. and Quail St. Originally it was the Anti-Toxin Laboratory, and while it conducted research on a variety of pathogens, a main focus was development and production of large quantities of diphtheria and tetanus anti-toxin. The anti-toxin was derived from inoculated horses that were stabled and co-located with the lab. (Procedures requiring sterile processes were generally conducted at the Bender Laboratory, around the corner on South Lake Ave. next to the Dudley Observatory. )

Over time the neighbors complaints about the horses (and other animals) grew louder. Finally, a farm was obtained on Route 155 (State Farm Rd.) in Guilderland. Today it’s the site of the Griffin Lab. In 1914 the head of the lab, Herman Biggs, M.D. was tapped to become Commissioner of the NYS Dept. of Health. Biggs appointed Augustus Wadsworth, M.D. as head of the Lab. Wadsworth would remain in that position for 30 years until 1945.

Under the leadership of Wadsworth the Lab moved to New Scotland Ave. after the first World War, greatly expanded its staffing, and its areas of research and applied laboratory sciences. For decades it’s been on the forefront of medical, scientific and epidemiological discoveries.

Perhaps most well known is the breakthough discovery of Nystatin, the first drug in the world to effectively and safely treat fungal infections, identified by 2 women, Dr. Rachel Brown and Dr. Elizabeth Hazen (who were in their 60s at the time – never underestimate the power of older women) working for the Lab.

Which brings us to a little known aspect of the Lab. Dr. Biggs and Dr. Wadsworth were both in the forefront of hiring women when others labs would not. If you look at the pictures of the earliest days of the Lab there are many women on staff. In later years staff rosters show a preponderance of female staff, including many in supervisory and management positions.

Dr. Wadsworth is revered for his pioneering work in creating rigorous laboratory standards used across the country, his focus on improving health care for NYS residents and for fostering the highest level of scientific research and inquiry; the reasons the Labs are named after him today.

The Lab is now the Wadsworth Center, with 3 locations: the Empire State Plaza, New Scotland Ave., and Guilderland, and carries on the tradition. It remains one of the most well-respected labortaories in the nation/ We’re lucky in New York State to have this resource.

(Most photos courtesy of the New York State Dept. of Health.)

Copyright 2021  Julie O’Connor

Two Women in Albany Who Transformed Medicine – Dr. Rachel Brown and Dr. Elizabeth Hazen

This is the story of two women in Albany whose discovery changed the world of medicine.

By the early 1950s there had been a number of advances that lead to the development of antibiotics (penicillin, tetracycline, etc.) for bacterial infections. But there was nothing for disease caused by fungal agents – acquired from a primary source (as is common in tropical climes) or secondary to antibiotic use (and chemotherapy). Fungal diseases can range from minor ailments – athlete’s foot, etc. – merely annoying and readily treatable with an OTC product, but they also can be severe and systemic – or in extreme cases – fatal if untreated.

But thanks to scientists from Albany that changed. Dr. Rachel Fuller Brown and Dr. Elizabeth Lee Hazen discovered the first medication that could effectively treat fungal infections without adverse human effects. The drug they discovered is on the World Health Organization’s “Essential List of Drugs” – a critical element in the medical tool kit to fight fungal infections that that can range from the merely annoying to the life threatening.

Rachel Fuller Brown
Rachel Brown was born in the late 1890s and raised mostly in Springfield, Mass. She attended nearby Mount Holyoke College (paid for a family friend). In 1920 she graduated with a double major in chemistry and history. By 1921 she’d earned an MS in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago. For several years she taught at a girl’s school, but then went on to Harvard and the University for Additional Graduate Work in chemistry and bacteriology, completing her Ph.D. thesis in 1926. But financial problems intervened, and she left without being awarded her doctoral degree.

Brown was hired by Dr. Augustus Wadsworth* (after whom the Wadsworth Lab is named) to work for the NYS Division of Laboratories and Research on New Scotland Ave (opposite Albany Hospital – the building is still there) in 1927. The lab, under the direction of Dr. Wadsworth, was internationally known for its work on immunology (diphtheria, typhoid, tetanus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, etc.) and environmental public health issue (water and food borne illnesses).

She settled into her life in Albany readily. Her major work focus in these years was development of a pneumonia vaccine. In 1933 she finally took her oral exam, was awarded her doctoral degree, and became Dr. Brown. She was a leader in the Albany’s chapter of the American Association of University Women. (AAUW), the City Club and active member of St. Peter’s Church.

Elizabeth Lee Hazen
Hazen was born in 1885 in Rich, Mississippi. She graduated with a BA in science in 1910. Initially she taught high school biology and physics, taking graduate courses during the summer, but then entered Columbia University in NYC. She received her Masters in Biology in 1917 (during World War I she was an Army lab tech), and her Ph.D. in microbiology in 1927 (doing research on ricin and the botulism toxin while working on her degree). After graduation she was staff bacteriologist at several teaching hospitals in NYC.

In 1931 she went to work for NYS Dept. of Health, Bacterial Diagnosis Laboratory Division in New York City. Hazen had major epidemiological successes – identifying the sources of food poisoning and anthrax out breaks. In 1944 Dr. Wadsworth, appointed Hazen head of a unit to investigate fungi and their relation to bacteria and other microbes. Over time she amassed her own fungal culture collection from soils she encountered during her travels.

Teamwork
In 1948 Hazen embarked on a long distance collaboration with Rachel Brown in the Albany lab, in an attempt to find a drug that would cure fungal illnesses. Hazen would identify promising cultures that might contain an organism that could fight fungal disease and mail them in mason jars to Brown in Albany., Brown would isolate the activate agent in the soil specimen and then mail it back to Hazen. In NYC it would be tested on to determine its efficacy and toxicity for humans. Finally after years of work, Hazen found sample in a cow pasture on a farm of a friend in Virginia. In 1950, from this sample Brown identified a substance that was effective – killing over 15 fungal variants, and was safe for humans. The same year they presented their finding to the National Academy of Sciences.

Success
They first named the drug fungicidin, but found that the name was already in use, changed it to “Nystatin” in honor of New York State. They worked with E.R. Squibb & Son to develop a safe method of mass production, and receive FDA approval; the drug was released for use in 1954, and was patented in 1957.

(As their work continued and showed promise, Hazen moved to Albany. Hazen ultimately settled in an apartment on State St. while Brown bought a house on Buckingham Drive. )

Royalties for nystatin totaled $13.4 million. Brown and Hazen donated half to a philanthropic foundation to further scientific research and the other half to support what became known as the Brown-Hazen Fund, to expand research and experimentation in biology and mycology (with a special focus on assisting women who wanted to pursue these careers). Between 1957 and 1978 the fund was the largest single source of nonfederal funds for medical mycology in the United States.

Both Hazen and Brown continued working for the Lab until their retirement. They received a number of awards and in 1975 were the first women to receive the American Institute of Chemists Chemical Pioneer Award.

Hazen’s book Laboratory Identification of Pathogenic Fungi Simplified (1960, with revised editions) is still in use today and is still cited in current scientific literature.

*Wadsworth was man ahead of his time. If you look at the lab staff roster as early as 1921 about 80% of the professional and para-professional chemistry and bacteriology staff was female. Mind blowing for the time.

If you want to know more about these remarkable women, we recommend “The Fungus Fighters”, Richard S. Baldwin, Cornell University Press, 1981.

Copyright 2021  Julie O’Connor

A Brief History of Albany’s New Scotland Avenue and How it Grew

At the beginning of the 1800s there was nothing on the New Scotland Plank Rd. but farmland, woods and fields. The first buildings we know are an inn, the Log Tavern* at the corner of Krumkill Rd.-a stopping point for the farmers going to and from the city, and a couple of farmhouses. The Plank Rd. was a toll road with several tollgates – one just beyond Ontario St. and another near what’s now the Golf Course.

In 1826 the Almshouse (poor house) was established in the area that today is bounded by New Scotland Ave., Holland Ave., Hackett Blvd. and Academy Rd. (Back then the other 3 streets didn’t exist.) The next building to be constructed, in the 1840s, was the Penitentiary. (The VA Hospital is there now; built in the late 1940s, after the Penitentiary was razed in the 1930s.)

In the 1870s William Hurst established Pleasure Park, a popular and successful horse race trotting track and picnic area near Whitehall Rd. and New Scotland Ave. (He later went on to own the Log Tavern.)

But Albany was growing – moving west, out Lydius St. (now Madison Ave.). In the early 1860s the area around the intersection of Madison and New Scotland started to see development, and a little stub of New Scotland Rd. from Madison to Myrtle Ave. was known briefly (for about 15 years) as Lexington Ave. In 1871 Washington Park opened and the area became fashionable. By the 1880s the Park trustees decided build a house for the Park’s Superintendent, as well as an array of greenhouses, on what is now the corner of Holland Ave. and New Scotland.

Yet development west of Myrtle Ave. was slow. In 1893 the Dudley Observatory ** moved from Arbor Hill to New Scotland and South Lake Ave. In the late 1890s Albany Hospital was bursting at the seams in its downtown location at Eagle and Howard Streets, and moved to New Scotland Ave. About a decade later the Albany Orphan Asylum moved to what is now the corner of Academy Rd. and New Scotland Ave. (from Robin St. and Western Ave.). Today the buildings house the Sage College of Albany. It was originally known as the Junior College of Albany when it first opened in 1959.)***

But within the decade residential and commercial growth exploded. Much of the land near the intersections of South Lake Ave. and Academy Rd. **** was owned by the Albany Driving Association, a private club that had a track for trotter horse races to the west of Academy Rd. The members decided to sell their vast tract of land (between New Scotland and what is now Hackett Blvd. and Forest Ave.) and established the Woodlawn Park development.

Steadily residential growth pushed west. Yet there was no trolley service. The first bus service started about1914 – the “terminal” was at the intersection of South Allen St. and New Scotland. But this was a “suburban” area deliberately designed to accommodate the automobile as the primary means of transportation.

By 1920 the Troop B Armory was constructed next to the Orphan Asylum. (Today it’s part of the Sage College Campus.) In 1921 Memorial Grove (the corner of South Lake and New Scotland) was created to honor the men who died in World War I.

And that’s how New Scotland Ave. grew. By the mid-1920s there was a fire house, a public school, and Catholic Church. By the early 1930s St. Peter’s Hospital re-located to its current spot, from North Albany. The Depression initially halted residential development, but by the late 1930s the area beyond Manning Blvd. became a highly desirable location. It was zoned residential and the municipal golf course had been built just outside the city limits in 1931. Well-off families flocked to developments with enticing names -Golden Acres, Heldervale and Buckingham Gardens. Albany annexed land in Slingerlands several times and the city border pushed close to Whitehall Rd.

1930s New Scotland Ave

University Heights

In the early 1930s Holland Ave. was created. ( It was once the route for the Mohawk- Hudson Railroad, chugging from the Point at Madison and Western Avenues. to downtown.) The Almshouse was demolished, making way for the Law School to move from State St,. the Pharmacy College from Eagle St. and a NYS Health Dept. Laboratory was built across from the Hospital. University Heights was almost complete. Then Christian Brothers Academy moved uptown from Howard St. and the Fort Orange American Legion Post ** was built next to Memorial Grove.

1940s and 1950s

The next spurt of development began after World War II. There was a severe post-war housing crisis in Albany – the last farm within the city limits was sold in 1947 for the Weiss Rd. apartments. Hundreds of houses were constructed in the area surrounding New Scotland Ave. west of Manning to accommodate growing families with baby boomers. Two churches, St. Catherine’s Roman Catholic (now Mater Christi) and Bethany Reformed, were built in the 1950s and Temple Israel re-located to New Scotland in 1953. Maria College opened in 1965.

After the annexation of Karlsfeld and Hurstville in 1967 New Scotland Ave. was complete and extended to the Normanskill.

1960s and 1970s

2000s

*The Log Tavern morphed into the Hurst Hotel, and became a favorite romantic rendezvous and “love nest”, especially for politicians’. It was destroyed by fire on election night, 1929. (Oh the irony.)

** The Dudley Observatory and Bender Laboratory (behind the Obeservatory) and the Legion post were demolished in 1970 to build the Capital District Psych Center and the attached parking garage.

***In the 1959 Russell Sage College purchased some of the buildings of what was then known as the Albany Home for Children and established the Junior College of Albany. In 2001 the College began offering 4 year degrees at the site, as the Sage College of Albany.

**** Academy Rd. was initially known as Highland Ave. – the name changed in the 1930s when Boy’s Academy moved from downtown.

Copyright 2021 Julie O’Connor

The Dudley Observatory

The first Dudley Observatory was dedicated atop a ridge in Arbor Hill in 1856. in the area now known as Dudley Heights. Funding was donated by Blandina Bleecker Dudley, widow of a wealthy Albany banker.

By the 1890s, there was need to to move the Observatory to an area with less light pollution (from the growing Arbor Hill area) and vibrations from the nearby NYCRR trains running through Tivoli Hollow. A plot of land was acquired on the corner of New Scotland and South Lake Avenue, and a new Observatory was constructed, near the County Alms House, in 1893.

By the mid 1960s the Observatory was on the move again. The land upon which it stood was acquired by NYS for an inpatient mental health hospital and the Observatory moved to a warehouse on Fuller Rd. in 1967. The vacant Observatory building was seriously damaged by fire in 1970, demolished and Capital District Psychiatric Center (CDPC) was constructed on the old site circa 1972.

Copyright 2021 Julie O’Connor

Wilson’s Nursery

After a visit to the Albany Penitentiary (as a tourist, not an inmate), one could make a rather more charming side trip to a garden at what is now the corner of Knox and Morris Street.

Wilson’s Garden was promoted in the 1852-53 Albany City Directory as “a place of great resort; the principal attraction consists of green house plants and flower, which are cultivated with much skill, and in great variety.” The Albany Morning Express recommended a visit in winter to “feast your eyes as well as your noses” in the hot-houses which boasted “blossoms of all colors” and a refreshing “spring-like atmosphere.” In the spring and summer, the grounds featured roses, morning glories, hyacinths, and lilies.

A native of Scotland, James Wilson purchased a lot of land just south of the Albany Penitentiary in 1837. The parcel, bounded by modern-day Knox Street, Morris Street, Myrtle Avenue, and New Scotland Avenue, cost $1,500. A brick house was built looking south toward the Penitentiary. The property would soon laid out greenhouses, orchards, and floral beds. Later, in partnership with Jesse Buel, the publisher and enthusiastic promoter of agricultural arts, James Wilson also established a fruit tree nursery.

Wilson’s Nursery was also renowned for strawberries. James Wilson’s cross-pollination of European and native American varieties resulted in the Wilson Albany Strawberry which, according to the Albany Evening Journal, was “the finest eye ever beheld or refined taste ever tasted.” This Wilson Albany Strawberry became so popular that, Stevenson Whitcomb Fletcher’s 1917 book, “The Strawberry In North American; History, Origin, Botany, and Breeding” reported that this “finest of market varieties” accounted for some 90 percent of all commercial strawberry cultivation in the United States by 1872.

James Wilson died at the age of 84 in 1855. His son, John, continued in the business. In 1871, he sold the property to Thomas Davidson and the name was changed to the Albany Nursery.

While Wilson’s Garden is now long gone and the area now developed with houses, Wilson’s home still stands. The brick house at the corner of Madison and Knox Street is currently being rehabilitated with respect for its origins.

The “LIFE” Magazine House of Albany: Edward Durrell Stone

On September 25, 1938 LIFE Magazine published a series of designs for 8 homes in 4 income brackets. One of the designs in the moderate income class was by Edward Durrell Stone. It became known as the “LIFE House.” In Albany. The Hockensmith Co., which was developing the Buckingham Gardens section of Albany, contracted with Mr. Stone and LIFE Magazine to obtain the plans for one of the moderate income homes ($2,000- $3,000) for construction in Albany, and built the house with some minor adaptions for the lot size by a local architect. George Hockensmith built many of the houses you will see today in the Buckingham Dr., New Scotland and Lenox Ave. area. Its real estate office was on the corner of Lenox Ave and New Scotland, and the pretty little structure is still there.

Most of us know Stone from his iconic designs for the Museum of Modern Art and University at Albany. They reflect an ultra-modern aesthetic on a large scale. But throughout his career he designed a number of private residences; one of those was a house in Albany on Buckingham Drive.

As the country started to emerge from the Depression around 1937 there was a huge uptick in the demand for housing. While Albany had suffered during the Depression, that pain was not as deep and lasting as other areas of the country. As the site of State government, many people held on to their jobs, and others tightened their belts and saved. Families continued to grow. By 1938 there was an explosion of residential development in Albany – primarily in the Whitehall Rd, Upper Washington Ave and upper New Scotland Ave. areas. But not everyone could afford a new home that cost $7,000 – $8.000 (the average price of a new home in Albany at that time.) Many of the builders were willing to hold the mortgages and buy out existing rental leases to stimulate housing growth.

The Buckingham Dr. house was designed to meet the needs of moderate income prospective home owners. It was a model of contemporary design, technology and efficiency (It was one of the “5-Star Homes” touted by the New York State Power and Light Company). It was a one story bungalow with 3 bedrooms, a kitchen, dining room and living and an attached garage (the latter was a stunning innovation). It used gas for heating vs oil or coal (a breakthrough in the late 1930s). The layout of the house was modern; rooms were meant to be more flexible and functional than older homes. The kitchen was designed around the “U-shape” with built-in (fitted) cabinets (architectural innovations from the late 1920s). Even the furnishings in the model house were modern; the living room featured “Swedish Modern” furniture in blond oak. There was such a focus on light and airiness in this compact house it was referred to as “The Apartment in the Garden”.

The Buckingham Dr. house was completed in February, 1939; hundreds thronged to the open houses for the model modern home of the future. They could see the house of tomorrow today.

Copyright 2021 Julie O’Connor

Recalling the Grocery Stores of Albany’s Past

The trick of time is that it passes slowly, and changes are incremental, so you can hardly notice it happening. The world of today looks mostly like the world of yesterday to us, and yet there have been a thousand little changes over the years that separate those worlds. When things change all at once, it seems a revolution, but when they change little by little, it just seems the passing of time.

Grocery stores are one example. Sure, 50 years ago, they were selling milk and meats, frozen foods and Cap’n Crunch, just as they are today. And yet everything about them has changed.

Grocery stores in the Capital District used to be numerous, to say the least. The 1870 directory for Albany alone listed 17 wholesale grocers. Retail grocers counted in the hundreds, at a time when Albany’s population was just about 70,000. In 1920, when Albany had 113,000 residents, there were 20 wholesalers and an even greater number of retailers, in every corner of the city.

Every neighborhood had several groceries in those days, and shopping for food was often a daily enterprise. The vast majority of these were small storefronts, usually the lower levels of residential buildings – you can often see reminders of them today, in places that long survived as neighborhood stores, as odd bump-outs on the fronts of brownstones, as enlarged entries and windows at the basement level.

Even when I was growing up in an older suburb in the ’60s and ’70s, they were still numerous. My first real job was working in one of them, one of the last of the high-quality butcher shops in the region, which was also a neighborhood grocery store.

Somewhere around the 1930s the supermarket concept was developed – a neighborhood store, but with more, and run by a central chain. There were A&P stores, and Grand Unions and Mohicans. For a while, there was a chain associated with the area’s seminal radio station, WGY Food Stores. But even as late as 1958, the chains barely had a hold. There was one A&P in Albany, one Albany Public Market, one Grand Union, four Empires, two Central Markets (later to become Price Chopper). Trading Post was the biggest chain in the city, with 5 locations.

The rest of the city’s shopping was done at small neighborhood stores with names like Gimondo, Femia, Sharkey Demaco, Rosenberg, and Tanski. Even the so-called supermarkets were very much part of their neighborhoods in those days, often repurposing previous buildings — such as the Central Markets location on Madison and Swan, which was built on the rather generous stone foundation of the Madison Avenue Second Reformed Church that had burned in 1930.

But with the move of population to the suburbs, the chains started to grow. Competition and demographics, and the willingness of Americans to drive absolutely everywhere rather than walk anywhere, contributed to bigger and bigger centrally-located, chain-owned stores, and the death of these tiny independents.

And the experience of shopping in them changed, too

The stores themselves aren’t the only thing about groceries that have changed. Almost everything else has, too, but in ways that are almost invisible. Everyone probably realizes that plastic grocery bags didn’t even used to exist, and that soda and milk came exclusively in glass bottles, and was all bottled nearby. Burlap has practically disappeared from anything but craft stores, but 40 years ago, potatoes, onions and oranges all came in burlap sacks. Meat was nearly always cut to order, and wrapped in brown butcher paper, tied with string, rather than laid out on a foam tray and stacked in coolers. Even something as simple as a box of cereal isn’t the same as it was four decades ago. The box itself is infinitely thinner for both environmental and economic reasons. The bag that actually holds the cereal used to be a satisfyingly thick, crinkly wax paper that would sort of stay closed; now it’s a thin plastic film that never will. Very little food came in any kind of plastic container at all.

Prices were not on little paper stickers (if those still exist) or posted on the shelves – they were stamped onto the ends of cans and boxes with heavy blue ink using a price stamper – the stockboy (that’s what we were) would spin the numbers on the stamper to the correct price, press it against the ink pad, and then punch the stamper against the top of the can or box. (This is now so archaic that it’s hard to even Google search for it.) When the prices needed to be changed (and in the days of inflation in the 1970s, that was often), the stockboy would clean the price off the can with a rag and nail polish remover so the new (higher) price could be stamped on.

(In the store I worked in, by the way, the markup from wholesale was 40%, much higher than the chains. That might seem outrageous, but that was money that paid local workers, sponsored the store’s Little League team, and built wealth in the community, rather than sending it off to a corporate headquarters in a remote land.)

When you carried your groceries up to the register, there were no scanners. The check-out clerk had to enter each item’s price into the cash register. Unmarked items weren’t usually a problem – the clerk knew the price of most things. Your receipt had prices but only categories that would describe the items, such as “Gr” for grocery, “Pr” for produce, etc.

The most subtle change in grocery stores, as in most stores, is the ambient music. Whereas now you can expect the odd experience of hearing The Clash sing “Lost in the Supermarket” while you are, in fact, lost in the supermarket, real music in retail spaces didn’t happen until the 1980s. For decades before that, there was something called Muzak, and its ilk: light, syrupy string arrangements of almost-identifiable melodies intended to give no offense and to set no pulse to racing. As a customer, it was just there. As an employee, it could make you insane. In the days before the Walkman was invented, I learned to play entire albums in my own head, note for note, so as to drown out the cloying melodies of the Muzak.

Today, the Albany area is, depending on how you count, down to three or four grocery chains with multiple locations (not counting Walmart or Target). Only one of them, Price Chopper, is local. Very few of them are within any of the city limits, catering almost entirely to the suburbanites.

But with the trend toward more and more downtown living, some form of the neighborhood store will have to re-emerge. Personally, I just hope it brings back burlap.

By Carl Johnson from All Over Albany.com