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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.
Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections):
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