South End

CITY NEIGHBORHOODS:

Picturing the People and Places of Albany

THE SOUTH END

Today, the South End is a patchwork of diverse homes and businesses. Located in the Southeast corner of the City of Albany, it covers the area from State Street southward as far as Kenwood, paralleling the Hudson River. The flats of the Pastures along the west shore of the Hudson River rise steeply to the hills with Delaware Avenue on the west. The South End was green farmland until 1793 when the Dutch Reformed Church began to divide and auction lots in “The Pastures” where city dwellers’ cows grazed on summer days. West of the Pastures above South Pearl Street the farms of Peter W. Yates, Philip Schuyler, Hendrick Hallenbeck, and Philip Van Rensselaer stretched westward across undulating hills and ravines.

The Beaverkill and Ruttenkill, emptying into the Hudson River, were filled in during the early nineteenth century creating sites for more houses, stores, and churches. Land speculators and homeowners century constructed rows of brick houses on a maze-like grid of side streets radiating east and west from South Pearl Street. Adjacent to the waterfront, the source of Albany’s trade and wealth, an area of shops and warehouses became a gateway to Albany for generations of people. Successive waves of Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians and Blacks settled into the South End making their first homes in tightly packed (four and five story) large brick row houses. People from around the world built lives in apartments within any easy walk of work in boatyards, foundries, brickyards, breweries, railroads, and stores, family, neighbors and churches.

Always changing, parts of the South End have been renewed periodically as a result of flood, fire and change. Almost every spring through the 1930s the Hudson’s waters advanced up Ferry Street fed by the thaw. On August 17, 1848 fire destroyed 37 acres of houses and businesses between Broadway and Herkimer streets. People did not stay long - moving up the hill and south along Pearl Street. A business district grew up on South Pearl Street during the late 19^th century, making it an economic hub of the city. By the early twentieth century, as some people prospered and began to move west to the suburbs, sections of the neighborhood continued to grow and change. The area remained a vibrant collection of communities, supported by the growth of a Black community around lower Madison Avenue after WWII.

More than any event in recent memory, the construction of the South Mall changed the character and psychology of the South End neighborhood. Beginning in 1962, the demolition of hundreds of homes and businesses in a forty-block area, between Eagle and South Swans Streets, marked the neighborhood. Since the 1970s a collection of gleaming modern marble towers, the Empire State Plaza , built as a home for New York State government, looms over the area. The Empire State Plaza polarized the city, becoming a symbol of loss for some people and renewal for others. As the South End grows and changes, it continues to be home to many people as well as a vibrant neighborhood.