New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed $200 million for improving downtown Albany. Here are two suggestions, with more to come, for using what I trust would turn out to be a very modest portion of the money. I think we have to do the first.
1) House the unhoused, to the greatest possible extent. This would eliminate a moral stain on our wealthy society and encourage suburbanites who venture downtown for a show or a game to walk around and spend more money before leaving again.
2) Help the Albany City School District move its offices that are currently in the Old Albany Academy Building (OAAB) to the former College of St. Rose campus, as the Times Union reported was planned for three of its locations, and turn the OAAB into a museum of Albany or of electricity-based science and technology or of the overlap between science and the rest of our culture. While doing fundamental research in the OAAB, Joseph Henry essentially invented the telegraph, the first killer app of electricity. Herman Melville was a star pupil of Henry, seems to have been inspired by him, and wrote about technology in his famous works. The OAAB was then also the "national center of work on meteorology," an effort on which Henry collaborated, in the 19th-century version of exploration via big data. Unfortunately, Joseph Henry was a racist who later denied audiences the chance to hear Frederick Douglass speak at the Smithsonian on the basis of Douglass's skin color. Fortunately, Albany has Henry Johnson, whose story could be told beside Joseph Henry's, in part to explain why, today, there's less of the virulent stupidity that afflicted Albany's otherwise great son Joseph Henry, whose rags-to-first-rank-scientific-glory arc is so inspirational as to be suspicious. There would be ample space in the OAAB to mention Andy Rooney, Learned Hand, Stephen Vincent Benét, and other Albany luminaries, too. Most importantly, visitors could stand where humanity created the first killer app of electromagnetism, the basis in nature of our technological civilization.
Incidentally, I read in the school's history that Joseph Henry got his teaching gig at Albany Academy because the previous math teacher, with the bullseye name O'Shaughnessy, had been dismissed, owing to a scandal. Certainly, it's possible for a nineteenth century teacher with the floridly Irish Catholic surname O'Shaughnessy who stands in the way of a rising titan of science to commit an offense, but it's funny how things find ways of working out in this world.