Arbor Hill Historic District-Ten Broeck Triangle (Boundary Increase)

The Arbor Hill Historic District is an area of approximately six large blocks comprising the intact remnant of Albany's Arbor Hill neighborhood, a residential area which developed in the period 1830-1910. The area known as Arbor Hill, lying generally north of Clinton Avenue and west of Pearl Street, was surveyed and subdivided as, early as 1764. However, it was not until the 1830s that Arbor Hill became a distinguishable neighborhood characterized by detached vernacular residences for persons of modest means. After mid-century, the eastern portion of Arbor Hill became transformed by the construction of two parks, a magnificent Gothic church and the fashionable townhouses facing them. It is this residential enclave which was designated as the Ten Broeck Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1978. New research has indicated that the history of the Ten Broeck Triangle (as it is popularly called) is closely interwoven with that of the neighboring streets and can best be understood in of Arbor Hill. Thus, this nomination expands the Ten Broeck Historic District and renames it, using the more historically correct and comprehensive designation "Arbor Hill."

The Arbor Hill Historic District includes all that part of this historic neighborhood that retains integrity of feeling and association. It is made up primarily of attached and semi-detached residences representing a variety of nineteenth-century architectural fashions. Excluded from the district are those portions of the neighborhood west of North Swan Street which have lost integrity through extensive alteration and demolition. Simple Greek Revival and Italianate style structures predominate in the expansion area, while the stylish Italianate and Romanesque style brownstones of the later nineteenth century are concentrated in the Ten Broeck Triangle.

In 1764, Patroon Stephen Van Rensselaer laid out streets and building lots on his lands immediately adjacent to the northern boundary of the city of Albany. Most of the Streets in the district date from this early plan: a major corridor (now Ten Broeck Street) running north onto the steep hill and four parallel streets (now First and Second streets, Ten Broeck Place, and Livingston Avenue) running northwestward along the hill's gradual slope to be crossed at right angles by two streets (now called North Swan and North Lark streets). There was probably a scattering of houses there in the eighteenth century, but the only building remaining from that period is the Ten Broeck Mansion (National Register listed 1971, included in the Ten Broeck Historic District, 1978). Abraham Ten Broeck built the mansion in 1798 and gave it the name then common for the district: Arbor Hill. (It should be noted that twentieth-century usage refers more generally to the entire area north of Sheridan Hollow as "Arbor Hill," reflecting the submergence of neighborhood distinctions during the twentieth century transformation of the whole area into a ghetto occupied almost exclusively by blacks.)

It was not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century that the city's expansion reached Arbor Hill and houses became numerous there. That it was a distinctive neighborhood even at this time can be inferred from the addresses listed in the city directories of the 1830s and 1840s: "Littlejohn, Levi, forwarding merchant,... res. 20 Third, Arbor Hill." (1843). Residents of the area were small businessmen, such as grocers, and artisans, such as carpenters and coopers, and their surnames were predominantly Irish and English. Their houses were simple, freestanding dwellings of brick or wood with simple Greek Revival detailing. Well-preserved examples of housing from this period are found on the numbered streets in the expansion area, for example, at 31, 47, 22, and 32 Second Street, 27-29, 33 North Swan Street, and 62, 64, 74 and 76 First Street.

By 1850, the map of Albany showed fairly dense development of Arbor Hill. Houses occur on both sides of the numbered streets and Lumber Street (now Livingston Avenue) all the way west to Lark Street and beyond. By contrast, the map shows neighboring Clinton Avenue to the south as a mere scattering of houses and lands to the north completely undeveloped. At this period, only a handful of buildings are shown in the area covered by the Ten Broeck Historic District.

At mid-century, the entire north end of Albany was occupied primarily by the Irish, a well-established Albany group recently swollen by massive immigrations. To serve this north end population, St. Joseph's, the city's third Roman Catholic parish, was formed in 1842. Within a dozen years, the parish had outgrown its original church and thus, in 1855, began construction at a new site on Ten Broeck Street of a magnificent new Gothic church designed by Patrick Keeley. The building is the centerpiece of the Ten Broeck Historic District.

It was after the 1845 relocation of the Rensselaerswyck burial ground, making way for Van Rensselaer Park, that the lower blocks of Arbor Hill began the rapid transformation that created the Ten Broeck Historic District. With the park and St. Joseph's Church as catalysts, Ten Broeck Street became the site of fashionable townhouses for the wealthy, especially the wealthy Irish, among whom were the nouveau riche barons of North Albany's lumber yards. Where there had been only a few houses in 1850, by 1875 Ten Broeck Street was almost completely filled with large brick rowhouses, sumptuously ornamented, and the area was known as Millionaire's Row.

While this intense development was taking place in the listed area, the expansion area was also developing with two- and three-story brick rows filling in among the smaller buildings of the earlier time. Particularly along First and Second streets, the larger brick Italianate buildings were constructed for lawyers, doctors and the more successful businessmen, including owners of large grocery stores. Thus, many uses in the expansion area are similar both architecturally and in the backgrounds of their builders to those in the listed district. In some cases, the same persons who built residences on Ten Broeck Street were building speculative housing in the expansion area. For example, Robert Aspinall, a mason and builder who lived at 32 First Street in the listed area during the 1860s, built a row of speculative houses on North Swan Street at that time.

North Swan Street had become established as Arbor Hill's commercial district by mid-century. Although most of the buildings there pre-date 1860, many have been subjected to a series of commercial re-modellings and few retain complete integrity of their original designs.

The prosperity and expansion of the city at the end of the nineteenth century contributed to the continued development of the Arbor Hill neighborhood. Fashionable townhouses were added to Ten Broeck Street and new houses were built on First and Second streets. Construction of St. Joseph's Park was followed in 1881 by a new road, St. Joseph's Terrace, which was subdivided in 1891 and soon filled with row-houses and apartment blocks in the latest architectural fashions.

Both St. Joseph's Church and the associated school were important neighborhood institutions. The school occupied a succession of buildings until 1905 when the present St. Joseph's School was built on North Swan Street. A four-story brick block with Romanesque detailing, it is the largest building in the expansion area.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the character of Arbor Hill was changing as new immigrant groups moved into the inner city and the wealthy moved into the suburbs. Arbor Hill, reputedly the location of the city's first black neighborhood, was by 1922 the locus for such important black institutions as the Third Street AME Chapel, the IBPOE, a VFW and American Legion Post, and the female Lundles. After World War II, southern blacks came to Albany in huge numbers, many of them settling in the area north of Sheridan Hollow, all of which was by then loosely known as Arbor Hill. Avid slum clearance by the Urban Renewal Agency in the 1960s destroyed all old buildings north of Livingston Avenue to make way for a public housing project. Spot demolition decimated the numbered streets west of North Swan.

What remains in the trapezoid defined by Ten Broeck, First, and North Swan streets and Livingston Avenue is the intact portion of a neighborhood which at one time stretched westward to Lark Street and north to Colonie Street (one block north of Livingston Avenue). Constructed between 1835 and 1905, the buildings of the expanded Ten Broeck Historic District represent a wide range of architectural styles and degrees of architectural sophistication, a variety which in turn reflects the socioeconomic diversity found among the people who built them.