ALBANY – On a recent Sunday afternoon, I walked down a sun-dappled stretch of Chestnut Street known as “Brides Row” in the city’s Center Square neighborhood.
I passed along a charming line of a dozen similar row houses built in 1899 of yellow brick, with a graceful bow window on the second floor and a stately stone stoop with wrought-iron railings. I stopped at 156 Chestnut St.
A small Historic Albany Foundation plaque noted it was the birthplace of Erastus Corning 2nd, mayor of Albany, born Oct. 7, 1909.
Several people walked past, without a glance. It’s a safe bet that today’s Albany schoolchildren would draw a blank if you mentioned Corning, who stood like a colossus across an astonishing span of five decades as Albany’s “mayor for life.”
If Bill Hogan, a Times Union reader, had not sent me an email mentioning the 40th anniversary of the death of Albany Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd on May 28, 1983, I would not have remembered.
Two generations after his death, Corning is mostly forgotten.
I am Corning’s biographer. And yet I overlooked the milestone. Shelley’s elegiac poem, “Ozymandias,” came to mind. Fame was fleeting even for the “king of kings” Pharaoh Ramses II, whose monumental sculpture lay in ruins.
I spent four years of nights and weekends, while working full-time as a reporter at the Times Union, taking the last full measure of Corning. I pored over dozens of boxes of archival material, interviewed 200 of his contemporaries and read through a stack of yellowed Corning clips that reached to my waist from the newspaper’s morgue.
The result was my first book, a 568-page biography titled “Mayor Erastus Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma.” It was published by Washington Park Press in 1997. The New York Times Book Review called it “a minor classic.”
It’s been said that Albany has only one…
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