page_title: Broadway–Livingston Avenue Historic District
section_title: First passenger steam rail
hierarchical_section_title: Broadway–Livingston Avenue Historic District / History / First passenger steam rail
caption_attribution_description: English: Site of recently demolished and cleared buildings, both contributing properties to the Broadway–Livingston Avenue Historic District, Albany, NY, USA. Compare with opposite angle view here, taken 15 months earlier.
context_page_description: The Broadway–Livingston Avenue Historic District is located at the junction of those two streets in Albany, New York, United States. It includes seven buildings remaining from an original 20, all contributing properties, and a Warren truss railroad bridge. In 1988 the area was recognized as a historic district and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
  It is the only intact concentration of 19th-century commercial and residential architecture on Broadway north of downtown Albany. Most of its buildings are two- and three-story rowhouses interspersed with brick commercial buildings of comparable scale and built between 1829 and 1876, a time period when the neighborhood enjoyed great prosperity as the eastern terminus of the Erie Canal. The bridge was built in 1900 to carry the New York Central Railroad tracks across Broadway at Colonie Street.
  Urban renewal programs had cleared much of the surrounding land when the district was designated. Many of the buildings in the district were in poor condition at that time, and more than half have been demolished since then, leaving vacant lots.
context_section_description: The development of rail transport that followed the canal also impacted the area. In 1831 the first passenger steam rail service in the United States opened between Albany and Schenectady. Throughout the next decade passenger cars that had been ferried across the river were hauled up the steep hill on State Street downtown and then put on the tracks to Schenectady. In 1844, the tracks were shifted to the current route up the less steeper Patroon Creek ravine. A large freight transshipment complex was built nearby to unload freight from trains to boats and ferries, then reload it at a similar depot on the east side. The workers necessary for this operation settled in the neighborhood. Small businesses, serving the area's residents, opened in spaces like 802 Broadway.
  One of those early houses, the non-extant 799 Broadway, was converted into a police station in 1863, reflecting the neighborhood's growth. After the Civil War a bridge was built, reducing the neighborhood's economic importance somewhat, although at the same time 810–812 Broadway was built as an art-supply store. Canal traffic declined as well with the improvements in railroading. In 1900 the present Warren truss iron bridge was built as part of an extensive project that reshaped the city's railroads. A new bridge across the Hudson replaced the first one and the Union Station was built downtown. The demolition of the Broadway station to clear the way for the new station and the filling in of the canal (rerouted to carry larger barges) for expanded freight yards deprived the neighborhood of its economic center.
caption: District buildings in 2012, after demolition of 808 and 810–812 Broadway
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