This week I was able to acquire a photograph of St. Paul’s Lancaster Street building that I had never seen before. Originally published in the Albany Times Union, it shows the church as it looked late in the winter of 1962.

St. Paul’s Lancaster Street, March 1962

The publication date, March 28, 1962, is a significant one: this was the day after the Temporary State Commission for the Capital City announced that the State would take 98.5 acres of downtown Albany by eminent domain for the South Mall. St. Paul’s Church was in the middle of this “take area.” You can read the story of the congregation’s efforts to save the building in an earlier post.

I earlier shared this photograph taken just a few months later, around April of 1962.

St. Paul’s, freshly painted, about April 1962

But this new discovery provides an opportunity to post three other photographs from our archives that also show the building in the three years before its demolition in October 1964.

St. Paul’s Lancaster Street, August 1963

St. Paul’s Lancaster Street, early 1964

St. Paul’s Lancaster Street, 1964