Albany Scrapbook
It is an incongruous cast of characters, but they all have at least two things in common. Henry Hudson, a slave named Pomp, Mario Cuomo, Philip Schuyler, the inventor of basketball (perhaps), a nineteenth century detective named Elisha Mack, an eighteenth century geographer named Simeon DeWitt, Charles Dickens, the putative Dauphin of France, Fidel Castro, Herman Melville, a renaissance man named Solomon, Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Evers, early stage star Joseph Kline Emmet, both Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth, a Native American known as Orson, and a host of other colorful and compelling characters cross paths in the annals of Albany, New York, one of America's oldest and most fascinating cities. And they also appear in the pages of Albany Scrapbook Vol. 1. Kenneth Salzmann's book explores the history and-sometimes-the folklore of Albany through four centuries. In chapters that look at everything from old Albany's early days as an important outpost for Dutch fur traders to the settlement's first homicide to the region's early theatrical fare and its rich political history, Albany Scrapbook expands upon a series of magazine columns Salzmann, a freelance writer, wrote for a 1980s weekly magazine called Albany, New York.