The Arbor Hill Historic District–Ten Broeck Triangle, originally the Ten Broeck Historic District, is a seven-block area located within the Arbor Hill neighborhood north of what is today downtown Albany, New York, United States. In 1979 its easternmost third, the Ten Broeck Triangle, the second oldest residential neighborhood in the city, was recognized as a historic district and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Four years later, the district was increased to its current size and renamed to reflect its expansion to include some of the rest of Arbor Hill.
The future district was first established by its oldest contributing property, the Ten Broeck Mansion, built at the end of the 18th century by a prominent local family. It lent its name to the Ten Broeck Triangle, established in the middle of the following century when successful businessmen, primarily lumber dealers, built large houses along Ten Broeck Avenue with the fortunes they had made from trade on the Erie Canal. It was one of the first neighborhoods to develop north of the city's downtown as it grew during the 19th century.
Its fortunes began to slip as the city expanded westward to new neighborhoods like Washington Park which attracted the city's affluent. As the 20th century began, it gradually became a more middle-class neighborhood, then, after the Great Migration, predominantly African American. As an effective racial ghetto, the neighborhood and its historic buildings suffered the effects of disinvestment and decline. The designation of the historic district, and other efforts by preservationists later in the century, have begun to reverse that trend. In the late 2010s Albany mayor Kathy Sheehan and her husband bought and rehabilitated one of the district's vacant townhouses to make their home.
Over 200 buildings, mostly a mix of rowhouses and detached houses built between the 1840s and 1870s, are listed as contributing properties. The largest, the Ten Broeck Mansion, is also the only property in the district listed on the Register individually. The district also includes two churches, including St. Joseph's Church, reflecting a later popularity with immigrants.
Geography
The district occupies the southeastern portion of Albany's Arbor Hill neighborhood. Its southern corner is Sweet Pilgrim Baptist Church at the junction of Ten Broeck Street and Clinton Avenue (part of U.S. Route 9), a block west of the Palace Theatre and across from Albany's Family Court building. The district's boundary, at that point also the eastern boundary of the Broadway portion of the Clinton Avenue Historic District follows the rear lot lines of all the houses on the east side of the street, past St. Joseph's Church and Van Rensselaer Park north to Livingston Avenue. There, the Ten Broeck Mansion, originally known as Arbor Hill, which later became the name for the district, occupies a large parcel at the intersection's southwest corner.
The boundary then turns northwest along the south side of Livingston and follows it to North Swan Street, which it turns to follow south. A hundred feet (30 m) south of the intersection, it takes in the properties on the west side and continues to do so for the next three blocks. These include Bethany Baptist Church, St. Joseph's Youth Center and some commercial properties along the adjacent blocks and the public basketball courts at the Second Street intersection.
Midway between First Street and Clinton the boundary turns southeast to follow the rear property line of the lots on First, again the boundary with the Clinton Avenue Historic District. This line becomes Ludlow Alley shortly before North Hawk Street. After a short southward jog to take in the two properties on that street north of Clinton, it returns to the alley and follows it back to Clinton at Ten Broeck.
The irregular polygon within this boundary includes six large blocks covering . In addition to the streets already named, the entirety of St. Joseph's Terrace and Hall Place are within the district. It has 220 contributing resources, with only two non-contributing modern properties. One hundred of those properties are houses, primarily two- to three-story wood frame or brick structures built between the 1820s and the early 20th century. The remainder are either small commercial buildings or institutional structures such as the three churches in the district.
Open space within the district is mostly planned, such as Van Rensselaer Park, the neighboring space around the church known as St. Joseph's park, and the large parcel at the district's northeast corner where the Ten Broeck Mansion and its gardens (and former carriage house) are located. There are a few vacant lots and parking lots. The expansion added North Swan Street Park and the basketball courts to the south. Mature trees are abundant throughout.
Topographically the district rises almost a hundred feet (30 m) from its eastern and southern edges to level terrain along North Swan between Second and Third. This reflects the ravine there, one of the few remaining from when Albany was first settled as most were later partially filled in to facilitate development, now the neighborhood of Sheridan Hollow, which separates Arbor Hill and the district from downtown Albany.
To the north of the district are newer housing projects built during the urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 1970s. On the west of North Swan are similar neighborhoods but with newer, less coherent architecture (One building near the district, the Stephen and Harriet Myers House, is listed on the Register). The Clinton Avenue Historic District on the south includes the city's densest concentration of 19th-century rowhouses, mostly brick. To the east, downhill to North Pearl Street (New York State Route 32), are neighborhoods of mixed older and newer buildings and vacant lots, slowly being redeveloped, closer to the Hudson River.
History
The district has passed through several distinct historical periods. For a long time after Albany was established as a city, the district remained undeveloped and outside city limits, a place where the city might expand in the future. When it was developed, after independence, this was limited.
After the Erie Canal was built, the pace of development increased, requiring the removal of a cemetery. Most of the current stock of buildings date to the mid- and late 19th century when the district was one of Albany's most desirable addresses. Later, as the affluent moved to the suburbs in the early 20th century, it became denser, and in the 1920s came to be identified more with the city's growing African-American population.
Due to that racial stigma, the neighborhood declined in status over the course of the 20th century. That trend began to reverse with the formation of community organizations in the 1970s and serious, ongoing efforts at historic preservation and restoration.
1686–1796: Prehistory
The settlement that became Albany was established by the Dutch in the early 17th century as Fort Orange. The development around it was known first as Wiltwyck, becoming Albany when the English assumed control of New Netherland in 1667. It formally became a city with the grant of the Dongan Charter in 1686. Then, and for many years after, it was confined to the fort and the area around it enclosed by a stockade, corresponding roughly to its present downtown. The prominent ridge beyond Sheridan Hollow to the north was first referred to as Arbor Hill during that period.
The stockade era reflected the threat that still existed to the frontier town from the French, which ended with the 1763 defeat of New France in the French and Indian War. The next year, Stephen van Rensselaer II, the patroon of his family's lands to the north of the city in what was then the town of Watervliet, including the future district, began having them surveyed. As the city could now safely expand, he had streets and building lots laid out in what came to be called Colonie, largely along the lines they were actually built. He designated the land that is now the park named after his family to be the burying ground for inhabitants of his Rensselaerwyck manor.
1797–1844: Early development
Development was delayed because of the Revolutionary War, but by the late 18th century some houses had been built in the area. Foremost among them was what is now known as the Ten Broeck Mansion, built by another landed descendant of Dutch settlers, Abraham Ten Broeck, after his previous house burned down. By 1797, when he and his wife Elizabeth built the brick Federal style mansion on five acres (2 ha) that they leased from her brother, Stephen van Rensselaer III, he had served as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, a general commanding New York's militia at the Battle of Saratoga and later Albany's mayor and a state senator.
Ten Broeck named the mansion Prospect due to the commanding view it offered of the Hudson and its river traffic (some other accounts suggest he called it Arbor Hill from the beginning). He lived there until his death in 1810; Elizabeth survived him by three years. By that point a few other houses had likely been built nearby, but not enough to make the group a neighborhood, even after Colonie was annexed by the city in 1815. The mansion was sold to new owners who, over the next three decades, refurbished and expanded it with elements of the similar Greek Revival architectural style.
The northward expansion of the city envisioned by the elder van Rensselaer finally came to pass after 1825, when the Erie Canal was opened. Many new arrivals to the city, drawn by the canal and its economic opportunities, needed places to live and work. They looked north, along Broadway and North Pearl. Some found the mansion neighborhood and the blocks to its west to their liking, enough that city directories of the period show a few residents and businessmen listing "Arbor Hill" as their address. During the 1830s, they built some of the first houses in the district after the mansion. A few from this period, such as 10 Ten Broeck Place and 31 Second Street, survive. Similarly, the mixed-use Greek Revival buildings around the intersection of Second and South Swan were built in the early 1840s.
1845–1899: Intensive development
Intensive development of the neighborhood was the result of an 1845 change. The soil of the Rensselaerwyck cemetery was particularly sandy and loose. Since it sat on a slope above the streets, heavy rains would often wash away markers and expose the underlying coffins and remains. By the early 1840s, there were many calls to move the bodies elsewhere. One of the most vocal advocates for such a move, Joseph Hall, a gardener who lived on the section of Third now known as Ten Broeck Place, had Hall Street named for him when it was opened in 1849, four years after the cemetery was moved.
While the former burying ground site was made into a park instead of being built on, construction on other parcels increased. The year the graves were moved, 41 Ten Broeck Street, the earliest dated house on that street after the mansion, was erected. The brick rowhouses at 15–23 and 35–39 Ten Broeck followed. In 1848, the neighborhood regained some of its original prestige when Thomas Worth Olcott, a prominent banker, bought the Ten Broeck Mansion and formally renamed it Arbor Hill. He and his family expanded it over the next several years. The King Building, an elaborate Greek Revival duplex, was built over four years in the 1850s at 27–29 North Swan in front of the archway that provided access to the mansion's grounds on the rear.