The New York state capital, Albany (pop. 95,658) was founded in 1609 when Dutch traders traveling up the Hudson River from New Amsterdam on Henry Hudson’s ship Half Moon went ashore and established a fur-trading post. As the gateway between upstate New York and the increasingly powerful New York City port, Albany remained a powerful trading center through the 1820s and 1830s, extending its reach with the opening of the Erie Canal and the city’s growth as a central railroad terminus and manufacturing center. Nowadays, the legendary canal has long since vanished, and the glamorous New York Central railroad’s French renaissance–style, turn-of-the century Union Station, at Broadway and Clinton Street, has been transformed into the sleepy corporate headquarters of the Fleet banking group—Amtrak passenger trains now stop at a lonely platform on the opposite side of the Hudson River.
As the seat of the New York state government, however, Albany still wields obvious political power. Its rich array of museums, parks, and tree-lined boulevards—plus a few barely preserved historical neighborhoods that survived the wrecker’s balls in the early 1960s—confirm the fact that the Capital City is still very much alive and well. The towering granite slabs and flying saucer–like structures that stick out at the heart of the 100-acre Empire State Plaza government center hold exhibition halls, theaters, a 44-story observation tower, and the excellent New York State Museum (daily; 518/474-5877), which includes a sensitively organized exhibit on the state’s Iroquois and Mohawk Native American cultures, centering around a reconstructed longhouse. The huge area devoted to the history of the metropolitan New York City area is as good or better than anything in “The City That Never Sleeps,” with a re-created Upper West Side Hispanic barber shop, a Horn and Hardart Automat food dispenser, a restored 1940s car from the A-train subway line, and a solemn gallery documenting the September 11, 2001, destruction of the World Trade Center. Exhibits on the rest of the Empire State fill the rest of the museum, highlighted by a fully-functioning (and rideable!) Herschell carousel.
