The original Albany General Hospital building was completed in 1924. John Hammell was the masonry contractor for the building.
I don’t have any firm information regarding who took these photos, but since they are in the family archives, it seems as though there is a reasonable chance that Great-Grandpa Hammell took these to document his involvement in the project.
I imagine the men in the above photo were at least part of Great-Grandpa Hammell’s bricklaying crew for the hospital project
Here is the building after it was completed. (Apparently this was a professional photo sold as a commercial postcard, not a photo taken by Great-Grandpa Hammell. See comment.)
This photo seems devoid of people except the person standing at the top of the entry stairs. That person appears to be a young girl, though the photo is not clear enough even to be sure of that, let alone make identification.
Given the lack of other human activity and the fact that most of the windows appear to be open, my guess is that this photo was taken immediately after the building was completed (possibly things were still drying inside, or at least they were airing out the construction smells).
Seven years after this building was completed, Mom (Florence McClain) worked in it for a few years as a nurse. More about that in this post. I wonder whether she thought about the fact that she was working in a building her grandfather had built.
It is probably not a surprise that this building is no longer standing. The practice of medicine has changed radically since 1924, for one thing. The current Albany General Hospital building replaced the one pictured above on the same site in 1965.
One day after creating this blog post, I discovered (quite by accident) that the Albany Regional Museum (armuseum.com) has in their collection a postcard bearing the same photo of Albany General Hospital as the “completed” photo in this post. The difference between theirs and the one in the family archives is that theirs has a caption burned into the photo along the lower left border (of the sort that was common with commercial postcards of the time). So it is likely that the “completed” photo is actually a commercial postcard. My apologies for that error.
In my defense, this was a time when it was common to print personal photos on postcard stock, so it isn’t always easy to distinguish between personal photos and commercial ones.
Don’t you worry ! NO es un problemo.
Gary
No apology necessary, Lloyd!
I also thought Great-Grandpa built the County Court House. Is that true, or was that just my mind exaggerating his accomplishments?
Yes, Great-Grandpa built the courthouse (or at least was the masonry contractor for that building).
This catalog of John/Jack Hammell’s buildings appeared in the Albany Democrat-Herald, September 12, 1996, in an article written by Connie Petty. (Sorry about the corners at the top. This just barely fit in my scanner. I think you can make out the missing words.)
