100 years ago in The Record
Thursday, May 24, 1917
Zeph Magill, the main landowner on Center Island, didn’t know until this morning that he had sold a portion of his property to one of the richest and most powerful companies in the United States earlier this week. Magill, who maintains a waste disposal facility on the island and once owned the city’s minor league baseball team, sold Henderson Bros., a boat-building firm based in Catskill, for 300 feet of land at the southern end of the island. A deed filed in Albany yesterday reveals that the land is now the property of the Standard Oil Company, founded by the legendary John D. Rockefeller. The acquisition furthers Standard Oil’s plan to make Troy and Green Island a distribution center for its northeastern markets. Steamers will dock on Center Island to transfer oil to railroad tank cars via a Green Island pumping station. Magill may be surprised by the news, but he tells The Record he’s glad to hear it. Standard Oil’s prestige “would no doubt be an incentive to other prospective purchasers, several of whom have been in communication with him lately.” Troy mayor Cornelius F. Burns shares Magill’s excitement. “If the Standard Oil company has purchased that property … it is an indication that the Hudson river is to be deepened to Troy and that one of the most foresighted corporations in the world realizes what a vantage point this city will be when the barge canal is completed.”
For the mayor, the purchase “confirms the contention that this city is advantageously located for transshipment, and certain to be enlarged as an industrial and commercial center.”
PULSE OF THE PEOPLE
A letter writer using the pseudonym “River Street” hopes to start a discussion about vagrancy in downtown Troy with his missive in today’s Record.
“I think that it is decidedly to the discredit of the police department that Troy people have to be insulted by beggars at every turn,” the pseudonymous author writes.
“River Street” cites “a frightful looking person who lies sprawled out on the sidewalk in front of Frear’s,” as well as “the eccentric person whose wild, hatless, slouchy figure is to be seen daily in the down town streets,” and “the cripple who haunts Broadway and Third streets selling pencils.
“I do not think that we should be compelled to listen to their whines and be besought to give to them to keep their lazy bodies from the poor house or the jail,” the letter continues. “River Street” wants all such people to be arrested, and hopes other Record readers will “state their feelings along the same lines.”