For the walking tour I would like to look at the Albany Waterfront and the impact that it had on local residents and businesses as well as connecting Albany to other towns and cities. The tour would include discussions on shipping, smuggling, and sailing. Stops would include Canal Locks, Jennings Landing, USS Slater, etc.
The Albany Dock Image Flickr
1850 Albany on the water
1891 Steamboat landing Albany map
Hudson River Steamboat Greeting Card
1845 Hudson River
William Henry Bartlett 1840’s Print
1893 Canal Lock
Barclay Street Morning Line for Albany Steamboat
Hudson River Steamboat 1887
Samuel Schuyler Skipper 1800’s
Francis March Skipper 1800’s
What a great idea. A couple of thoughts to keep in mind: parts of the waterfront are no longer there, or aren’t very accessible for pedestrians, whether because they’re literally interstate or just a hike down streets with no sidewalk. You’ll need to consider the route you’re sending people in, and how you’re handling locations that are no longer accessible, so some time on google streetview may be necessary. For your steamboat postcards/views of Albany, you could put those pretty much anywhere in the waterfront park, just give some consideration to why you’re putting what where.
The skippers are great! As I recall, there’s also watermen and ferrymen in the 1815 directory as well, many of them also black. It appears that those three newspapers on the external site are back up, so it might be worth looking through those to see if you can find a reference to docks/shipping (even business ads). A quick look through a couple of random grabs and it looks like there’s advertisements for steamships taking passengers and freight, as well as hotels and traveller’s restaurants. Could be interesting to do something like choose a year and do a walking tour of where a traveller might have gone vs where a skipper on the ship might have gone once they got to Albany–one to the hotel and then the opera and one to the grocery and then home.
Oh: you might have difficulty showing causality/connection to other cities within the scope of the primary material itself, so that’s some heavy lifting your secondary research might be able to do for you. ie, looking at the scholarship on the impact of the canal system, the way Albany was integrated into a larger transportation network, etc.