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Founded by Dutch fur trappers in the early seventeenth
century, ALBANY made its money by controlling
trade along the Erie Canal, and its reputation by being capital
of the state. It's not an unpleasant town, just rather boring,
with its contemporary character almost exclusively shaped by political
and bureaucratic affairs, though there are a few livelier areas
on the fringes.
A good place to start a tour is the Quackenbush
House , the city's oldest building, built along the river
in 1736 and now serving as part of the Albany Urban Culture
Park . The modern visitor center next
door at Broadway and Clinton (MonFri 9am4pm, Sat & Sun 10am4pm;
tel 518/434-6311, www.albany.org ) has free maps and occasionally
leads guided tours of the downtown area, where
there are a number of Revolutionary-era homes. It also has engaging
displays tracing Albany's history, with a special emphasis on
the impact of the Erie Canal, and maps detailing driving tours
of the surrounding area, taking in a still-functioning set of
locks from the original canal along with the
impressive industrial legacy of Troy , across
the Hudson via I-787 N.
Uphill from the waterfront, carved out from the
heart of the city in the Sixties and Seventies as part of a controversial
urban renewal project, Nelson A. Rockefeller's Empire
State Plaza replaced 98 acres of nineteenth-century buildings
(and displacing hundreds of Albanian families) with a complex
that includes a subterranean retail arcade lined with impressive
modern art. The view from the Corning Tower 's
42nd floor observation deck (daily 10am2.30pm; free) looks out
far across the state, beyond the twisting Hudson River to the
Adirondack foothills, the Catskills and the Berkshires in Massachusetts.
It also peers down on the neighboring Performing Arts Center,
known locally as " The Egg " (tel 518/473-1845)
which adds the only curves to the Plaza's harsh angularity.
The New York State Museum (daily
9.30am5pm; free; tel 518/474-5877), one level down at the south
end of the plaza, reveals everything you could want to know about
New York State in imaginative if static tableaux. The excellent
section on New York City history is better than anything like
it in Manhattan itself, with exhibits on immigration and skyscraper
construction, storefronts and trolley cars, and the original set
of Sesame Street .
The most engaging part of Albany is the few blocks
west of the plaza, stretching between Washington and Madison avenues
to the open green spaces of Washington Park ,
laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape
architecture. The recently renovated Albany Institute
of History and Art , 125 Washington Ave (TuesSat 10am5pm,
Sun noon5pm; $5, free Wed; tel 518/463-4478), has a good range
of Hudson River School paintings, and the neighborhood is full
of the same sort of nineteenth-century brick-built homes Rockefeller
had pulled down to build his Empire State Plaza.
