Pine Hills in the 70s

Morris Street between Partridge and South Main Streets: some of us called it the longest uninterrupted residential block in the city of Albany, and if that’s not true I don’t want to know. My family lived there from my birth in 1968 until shortly after I graduated from Albany High School, but I may as well have been born in the Pine Hills branch of the Albany Public Library. Not the branch as it exists now – not the branch undergoing reconstruction at “the point,” where Western and Madison Avenues converge – but the old Victorian house, converted into a library, which sat at 1000 Madison Avenue, next to and in front of the old V.I. Elementary School. (The house is still there, now owned – as so many of the Pine Hills’ finest old homes are – by the College of Saint Rose.)

Unfinished hardwood floors which creaked. A musty smell. And lots and lots of books. Searching for a non-fiction title from the card catalog, you’d follow the Dewey Decimal numbers around one room of the hundred-year-old house, perhaps into a hallway (bookshelves there, too!), and maybe find yourself in yet another room before finally locating your book. The Young Adult section was the small southeast bedroom, where you could find some classics among the Robert Cormier and Norma Klein.


The children’s section was on the second floor, as was a little room where they showed free movies on a film projector – anything from an old “ABC After-school Special” to the PG version of “Saturday Night Fever.” I remember the interior of that building well, and I miss it. As a lifelong reader, my journey into the world of books began in that old house, on its second floor. Taking a shortcut through V.I., I could be on Madison Avenue, and specifically the Pine Hills branch of the library, in about three minutes. Is it any wonder I was in that Victorian house all the time?

The large building at 568 Morris Street, now a women’s dormitory for Saint Rose, was a convent in the early 70s. We had nuns, in full habit, wandering down Morris, up South Main to Madison Avenue, perhaps to Mack’s Drugstore (which became a CVS Pharmacy) or maybe to the small independent bookstore, Clapp’s. (Something tells me they weren’t the type to take in a movie at the then-single-screen and spacious Madison Theater.)

Those two blocks of Madison between Main and Allen have seen many businesses come and go, and I can still remember the day Price Chopper suddenly appeared on one corner. There was briefly a small pizzeria and ice cream parlor run by an Italian family. A liquor store on the corner of West Lawrence. A Sherwin-Williams paint store where we’d stop on our way to school to warm-up on winter days, until we’d get kicked out. A dry cleaning store, uncomfortably hot, on Madison near Allen, and a coffee shop near there, too. All gone.

I’ll miss those places, as well as the former Public School #16 (bulldozed and turned into “Pine Hills Elementary”), with its catacombs, mysterious hallways, “duck and cover” drills, big and small gyms, and blatant use of asbestos. And yet somehow, inexplicably, the Pine Hills is still mostly the way I remember it from thirty-to-forty years ago. I imagine it’s the feel of the neighborhood which has remained unchanged, and many of the houses, too. Does anybody have one for sale on my old block?


I posted this piece on the website for my local newspaper, the Albany Times-Union. They approved it without further editing, and have now published it (in slightly different form) as part of a new book called "The Story of Albany."