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

What was there? Sunnymede Cottage

In the mid-1880s after completion of the Washington Park the Commissioners of the Park determined there needed to place for the Superintendent of the Park to live to be able to oversee the Park. They decided it couldn’t be in the Park itself (a residence would mar the grand vistas), but needed to be close. They purchased a piece of land a couple of blocks away on what was called the “Alms House Road”, to the rear of the Albany Penitentiary, (that’s what we know as Holland Ave. today), just on the corner of the New Scotland Plank Rd.

At that time there was almost nothing there, except the Almshouse (about where the College of Pharmacy is today), a cluster of buildings (including an industrial school and a smallpox hospital) and a small farm surrounding the Almshouse. and the Penitentiary.

An adorable fairy tale cottage was built with an almost fairy tale name, “Sunnymede”. Land was set aside for greenhouses, a nursery garden, storage buildings and barns. The Commissioners of Washington Park were given authority over all parks in the city; the cottage became the home of the City’s Superintendent of Parks and the Parks Dept.

Soon, the early 1890s, the Dudley Observatory was constructed down the road on So.Lake Ave. (demolished in the early 1970s for the Capital District Psych Center). Then came the Albany Orphan Asylum* on Academy Rd. (then Highland Ave.), Albany Hospital across the way and the New Scotland Ave. Armory* in the early 1900s. In the 1920s the Medical College re-located from Eagle St. to the Hospital. In the 1930s the Penitentiary behind Sunnymede was demolished. Albany Law School, the College of Pharmacy and Christian Brothers Academy (now used by the Pharmacy College) moved from downtown at about the same time and they were joined by a NYS Health Dept. lab. on New Scotland Ave.

 

Even after the construction of the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in 1951 behind it (on what had been the Penitentiary grounds), the Parks Dept. remained snugged into that little corner.

Finally in 1964, after almost 80 years, the City sold land to the Hospital for??? A parking lot of course! With the money from the sale it built a new Parks Dept. in Hoffman Park just off Second Ave. Today, there’s a Hilton Garden Inn and, yes.. a parking garage in that location.

*Orphan Asylum buildings and the Armory are now part of the Sage College of Albany campus.

Copyright 2021 Julie O’Connor

The Albany Penitentiary

With the old downtown Albany jail becoming inadequate to house what were characterized as “the vilest dregs of society, the rakings of the gutter and the brothel, the profligate, and even the diseased,” Albany County resolved in 1843 to create a new style of penitentiary aimed at “moral reformation of the convict,” but one where “labor performed in the prison shall produce a sufficient income for its maintenance.” With a state law authorizing construction in 1844, the new institution was sited just a few blocks south of what would become Washington Park, bounded by South Knox Street, Myrtle Avenue, Lark Street and Leonard Place, in lovely country environs.

For some it truly became a prison of their own making, as county prisoners from the old jail were put to work building the new one. They moved themselves in by 1846, and continued to build, including a women’s wing. When completed, the penitentiary covered 3 acres and enclosed by a 14-foot crenelated brick wall. It was so impressive it was referred to for generations as “the Castle on the Hill”. Surrounding the building were 12 acres of “well laid out grounds, ornamented with trees, shrubs and flowers with a meandering brooklet and wandering driveways and paths of approach.” For a fee of 25 cents visitors could stroll the gardens and enjoy the view from “Penitentiary Hill”.

The goal of the institution was to show not only that prisoners could earn their own keep, but that by making them busy they would not return to their criminal ways The Albany Penitentiary’s success as a model reformatory (whipping and the crucifix: no; cold shower punishment: yes) was quickly rewarded. The State Legislature passed a succession of laws permitting other counties to use the facility. The growing roster of inmates was put to work caning chairs and making inexpensive shoes. Female inmates worked doing laundry.

The Civil War threatened this model of penal self-sufficiency. Petty criminals were forgiven their sentences if they enlisted in the Union Army. The number of inmates fell and the southern market that supported the penitentiary’s shoe making factory disappeared. But penitentiary officials were alert to opportunities. When they learned that the District of Columbia’s penitentiary was being taken over by the United States Arsenal, they arranged for Albany to be the penitentiary for the District. This began in September 1862 with the transfer of 131 convicts, and continued for decades after the war ended; over time felons convicted in other federal courts were sent to Albany. . Confederate prisoners of war (including Samuel “One-Armed” Berry, one of Quantrill’s Raiders), Ku Klux Klan members, D.C. swindlers, Tom Ballard – the most famous counterfeiter of the 19th century, and petty criminals serving six months or less and guilty of such offenses as assault, horse theft, and indecent exposure, all ended up in the same institution.

The most famous convicts ever sentenced to time in Albany never arrived. Four of the convicted conspirators in the Lincoln assassination — Dr. Samuel Mudd, Edman Spangler, Samuel Arnold, and Michael O’Laughlen — were sentenced to Albany. They boarded a ship in the Potomac expecting a long trip north but were surprised to find themselves sailing to a military prison in the Dry Tortugas, islands at the end of the Florida Keys. Despite his cries of injustice at the sentencing, Dr. Mudd, convicted of conspiracy for setting John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after the assassination, apparently found the extremely southern prison more to his liking. A friend wrote to Mudd’s daughter that, “He is doing a great deal better than he would have done at Albany.”

For decades the penitentiary made a tidy profit. But by the early 1900s, counties across the state were building their own penitentiaries and there was a growing Federal prison system – the penitentiary went into the red. The rapid explosion of residential development in the Delaware Ave. area and the conversion of the mostly wild and over grown Beaver Park to the community Lincoln Park in the early 1900s dictated a new location for the prison.

By 1920, plans were being made for a new penitentiary. But this is Albany, so things take time. Overcrowding in Albany city schools forced the issue. In 1927 William S. Hackett Jr. High School was built on the penitentiary grounds on Delaware Ave. The old Albany Penitentiary was finally closed after a new one opened in 1931, well out of the city, on Albany Shaker Road. The penitentiary was razed in 1933; the demolition crew found the remnants of underground dungeons with chains and manacles attached to the thick foundation walls. (So much for a model of modern prison reform.)

The City briefly considered building a new high school on the site, but decided to renovate existing School 14 in the South End to become Philip Schuyler High School. In 1941, the land was dedicated as the Hoogkamp (after the Mayor at the time) Girl Scout playground and camping area. That lasted for a nano until the outbreak of World War II, when area was given over to Victory Gardens. It was sold to the federal government in 1946 for the current V.A. Hospital, which opened in 1951.

Interior Albany Penitentiary

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.