Albany Trivia
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This Albany trivia quiz has 97 free questions with answers and covers the capital of New York from its Mohican and Dutch beginnings to today's Capital District. Expect the founding story (Henry Hudson, Fort Nassau and Fort Orange, Beverwijck, the Duke of Albany), the colonial and revolutionary years (the Albany Congress, Philip Schuyler, Philip Livingston), and the boom era of steamboats, the Erie Canal and the first railroads. It then moves through the State Capitol and its missing dome, Nelson Rockefeller's Empire State Plaza and the Corning Tower, the O'Connell machine and Erastus Corning's 41-year mayoralty, plus the things locals love: the Tulip Festival in Washington Park, Nipper on the roof, the Pine Bush and its butterfly, William Kennedy's Ironweed, the Great Danes and Albany's list of American firsts. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who has lived in the 518; the rest reward real Albany history buffs. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on Albany and its landmarks, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Albany sits on the Hudson just south of its confluence with which other river?
The Mohawk
The Mohawk joins the Hudson at Cohoes, a few miles above Albany. Its valley is a natural passage through the Appalachians, which is why the Erie Canal set out west from here.
Q 02Which people originally inhabited the Albany area, calling it their nation's 'fireplace'?
The Mohicans
The Mohicans called the place 'the fireplace of the Mohican nation'. They are far from the last of anything: their descendants are today's Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin.
Q 03Albany printer John Wesley Hyatt invented celluloid while seeking an ivory substitute for which game's balls?
Billiards
Billiards. A New York supplier had offered $10,000 for a replacement for ivory, and Hyatt's experiments in Albany produced the first practical plastic, soon moulded into false teeth and piano keys as well.
Q 04Which Dutch fort, built on the Hudson in 1624, was the trading post that grew into Albany?
Fort Orange
Fort Orange was put up in 1624 by settlers who were mostly not Dutch at all: they were Walloons, French-speaking Protestants from what is now Belgium.
Q 05Before the English renamed it in 1664, the Dutch village at Albany was called what?
Beverwijck
Beverwijck became a village in its own right in 1652, when Peter Stuyvesant took the settlers around the fort out of the local patroon's control and put them under the Dutch West India Company.
Q 06Albany was named in honour of the Duke of Albany, a Scottish title held by which future king?
James II
James II, then Duke of York and Albany, was the brother of Charles II; both New York and Albany took his titles when the English seized the colony in 1664.
Q 07When the Dutch briefly retook Albany in 1673, what did they rename it?
Willemstadt
Willemstadt lasted barely a year. New York City had become New Orange in the same Dutch reconquest, and the 1674 Treaty of Westminster handed both towns back to England.
Q 08Which provincial governor granted Albany its city charter on July 22, 1686?
Thomas Dongan
Thomas Dongan signed it three months after New York City's charter. It gave Albany the exclusive right to negotiate with the Native nations and made it the upper Hudson's only market town.
Q 09Who drafted the Albany Plan of Union, the 1754 proposal to place the colonies under one government?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin drew his 'Join, or Die' snake cartoon to sell the idea. Delegates from seven colonies adopted the plan in Albany, and then every colonial legislature turned it down.
Q 10Which Albany native signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776?
Philip Livingston
Philip Livingston, born in Albany in 1716, made his career as a New York City merchant. Though dying of dropsy, he went back to Congress in May 1778 and died in York, Pennsylvania weeks later.
Q 11Which Albany-born general and senator was Alexander Hamilton's father-in-law?
Philip Schuyler
Philip Schuyler hosted the wedding himself: Elizabeth married Hamilton in the parlour of the family's Albany mansion in 1780, and the house is now a state historic site.
Q 12Which Hudson Valley city was New York's first state capital, before Albany?
Kingston
Kingston became the first capital in 1777, and British troops burned it that October. The legislature then moved from town to town until it settled in Albany for good in 1797.
Q 13Which city is the only US state capital older than Albany?
Santa Fe
Santa Fe was founded by the Spanish in 1610, four years before the first trading fort at Albany. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 then kept the Spanish out of it for twelve years.
Q 21Who became the first woman elected mayor of Albany, in November 2013?
Kathy Sheehan
Kathy Sheehan, then city treasurer, won the Democratic primary that September, which all but decided it: Democrats have held Albany's mayoralty without a break since the 1920s.
Q 22Which Albany native won the 1984 Pulitzer for Ironweed, part of his cycle of novels set there?
William Kennedy
William Kennedy saw Ironweed turned down by publishers thirteen times before Saul Bellow pressed Viking to think again. The novel then won the Pulitzer and became a film.
Q 23Which future novelist moved to Albany as a boy in 1830 and briefly attended the Albany Academy?
Herman Melville
Q 14Whose steamboat began the first commercially successful service between New York City and Albany in 1807?
Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton's boat needed 32 hours of steaming for the 150 miles, under five miles an hour, and stopped for 20 more at the riverside estate of his wealthy backer.
Q 15The original Erie Canal ended at Albany, but where does today's Barge Canal leave the Hudson instead?
Waterford
Waterford is where the Barge Canal, finished in 1918, leaves the Hudson. Unlike the old hand-dug channel it uses the rivers themselves, and a flight of five locks there lifts boats to the next one.
Q 16Albany's 1830s rail line became part of which company that Erastus Corning consolidated in 1853?
New York Central
New York Central was Corning's 1853 merger of ten small lines between Albany and Buffalo. It was run from Albany until Cornelius Vanderbilt took over in 1867 and moved the head office to Manhattan.
Q 17Construction of the New York State Capitol began in 1867 and took how many years to finish?
32
32 years. Three successive teams of architects worked on the Capitol before it was finished in 1899, and the changes of hand left it a blend of Renaissance and Romanesque styles.
Q 18Which governor drove the construction of the Empire State Plaza between 1965 and 1978?
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller expected voters statewide to reject a bond issue for an Albany project, so Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd helped him pay for the plaza with Albany County bonds instead.
Q 19The Corning Tower on the Empire State Plaza holds what distinction?
Tallest building in New York outside NYC
Tallest building in New York outside NYC, the Corning Tower rises 589 feet over 44 storeys, with a free observation deck on the 42nd floor.
Q 20Erastus Corning 2nd was mayor of Albany from 1942 until his death in which year?
1983
1983 was the year Corning died in office, on May 28, after 41 years as mayor, one of the longest mayoral tenures in US history.
Herman Melville's family retreated to Albany when his father's import business collapsed in Manhattan. The father died two years later, and Herman, aged 12, was sent out to work as a clerk.
Q 24Albany's Tulip Festival, held each May, celebrates the legacy of which colonial settlers?
The Dutch
The Dutch founded Albany as a fur-trading post; the tulip became the city's official flower in 1948 under Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd, and the first Tulip Festival followed in 1949.
Q 25The Tulip Festival is held in which Albany green space?
Washington Park
Washington Park hosts it every Mother's Day weekend. Since the first festival in 1949 it has opened with volunteers in Dutch costume scrubbing State Street and the crowning of a Tulip Queen.
Q 26A giant statue of which advertising dog stands on the roof of a former RCA building in Albany?
Nipper
Nipper was a real dog from Bristol, painted listening to a phonograph three years after he died. The picture, His Master's Voice, was then registered as a trademark and became Victor's, later RCA's.
Q 27The Albany Pine Bush preserve protects a rare inland example of what kind of ecosystem?
Sand-dune barrens
Sand-dune barrens of pitch pine and scrub oak grew on the sand left behind when Glacial Lake Albany drained thousands of years ago. The surviving stretch has been a preserve since 1988.
Q 28Which endangered butterfly, first described by Vladimir Nabokov, takes its name from a hamlet in the Albany Pine Bush?
Karner Blue
Karner Blue caterpillars eat only wild lupine, so the butterfly vanishes wherever the plant does. Nabokov, a serious butterfly scientist as well as a novelist, described it in 1944.
Q 29The University at Albany began in 1844 as a 'normal school', a college that trained people for which profession?
Teaching
Teaching. The school kept 'Teachers' in its name until 1959, and the university's Latin motto still means 'wisdom, both for its own sake and for the sake of teaching'.
Q 30The University at Albany's sports teams are known by what nickname?
Great Danes
Great Danes was a student's idea. She won a $25 savings bond in 1965 for suggesting the dog, which she praised for its size, strength, courage, speed and stamina.