Albany featured on itunes podcast
4-part series,“tales of Old Albany,” to debut September 1
On July 11, 1804, Dirck Ten Broeck, the son of the former Albany mayor who built the mansion that still bears the family name, was headed to a meeting in New York City to see his mentor Alexander Hamilton. Ten Broeck had been a law clerk for the older man, a Founding Father of the United States and former secretary of the treasury, before opening his own law practice.
On his way to the meeting, Ten Broeck was stopped in the street and told that Hamilton had been mortally wounded that morning across the Hudson River in Weehawken, N.J., in a duel with political rival Aaron Burr. Ten Broeck was at Hamilton’s side when he died the following day, and he described his feelings in a letter to his father, Abraham Ten Broeck.
“It’s this incredibly heartbreaking letter that you can just tell was written in the throes of grief,” said Aaron Holbritter, cofounder of Albany-based theater company Creative License. The letter was the inspiration for “My Now Departed Friend,” the first episode of a new podcast series called “Tales of Old Albany” that Creative License is co-producing with the Albany County Historical Association.
The first episode of the four-part series will be available on itunes starting Sept. 1, with subsequent episodes of the series, titled “The Schuy-
lers and the Ten Broecks,” coming online at two-week intervals through October. The episodes will run 20 to 30 minutes apiece. They will also be available through links on the websites of the historical society (tenbroeckmansion.org), which has its headquarters at Ten Broeck Mansion, and Creative License (creativelicenseonline.com).
Episodes in the first series will look at the long friendship of the Ten Broeck and Schuyler families, their respective patriarchs’ roles in the Battle of Saratoga, and the lives of some of their offspring. The first series was researched and written by former ACHA intern and current Schuyler Mansion interpreter Jessie Serfilippi, who worked with Holbritter to craft scenes that amplify and dramatize material from letters and other historical documents. A planned fifth episode will be round-table discussion with Serfilippi and representatives from Ten Broeck and Schuyler mansions.
Prominent area actors involved in the podcast series are Chris Foster as Abraham Ten Broeck and Patrick White as Philip Schuyler, joined by Creative License mainstays Ian Lachance (Dirck Ten Broeck) and Isaac Newberry (Alexander Hamilton), as well as Krysta Dennis (Angelica Schuyler Church) and Angela Potrikus (Elizabeth Van Rensselaer Ten Broeck), among others. Holbritter and Creative License co-founder Casey Polomaine will act as the story’s narrators. All participants are volunteering their time, Holbritter said. He said future series have not been finalized but may include subjects such as Stephen and Harriet Myers, an Albany couple prominent in the Underground railroad; the building of the Empire State Plaza; and LGBTQ history in New York’s capital city.
The episodes are being recorded in the basement of Ten Broeck Mansion, which the historical association operates as a museum.
“There was definitely a strange feeling as Ian was recording the Ten Broeck letter,” said Holbritter, noting that it was being read aloud in the same house where Abraham Ten Broeck likely read it for the first time 214 years ago.