Albany Trivia
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This Albany trivia quiz has 100 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Albany sits on the Hudson about ten miles south of its confluence with which other river?
The Mohawk
The Mohawk River joins the Hudson near Cohoes, roughly ten miles north of Albany; the city grew at the head of tidewater navigation just below that junction.
Q 02Which people originally inhabited the Albany area, calling it their nation's 'fireplace'?
The Mohicans
The Mohicans, an Algonquian people, called the site 'the fireplace of the Mohican nation'; their villages lined both banks of the upper Hudson when Europeans arrived in 1609.
Q 03Which explorer reached the Albany area in 1609 aboard the Half Moon and claimed it for the Netherlands?
Henry Hudson
Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Netherlands' East India Company, anchored near present-day Albany in September 1609; the river carries his name.
Q 04The Dutch fort built in 1624 to replace flood-wrecked Fort Nassau was named for which royal house?
Orange
Fort Orange honoured the House of Orange-Nassau, whose princes led the revolt against Spain; the 1624 fort stood on the Hudson's west bank just south of downtown Albany.
Q 05Before the English renamed it in 1664, the Dutch village at Albany was called what?
Beverwijck
Beverwijck, set up as a separate village in 1652, means 'beaver district'; its fur trade with the Iroquois made it the colony's chief inland market.
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 honoured Stadtholder William III, later king of England; the English regained the town in 1674 under the Treaty of Westminster and restored the name Albany.
Q 08Which provincial governor granted Albany its city charter on July 22, 1686?
Thomas Dongan
Thomas Dongan, the colonial governor, issued the Dongan Charter on July 22, 1686; Albany calls itself the longest continuously chartered city in the United States.
Q 09Who presented the Albany Plan of Union, the first formal proposal to unite the colonies, in 1754?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin drafted the Albany Plan of Union for the Albany Congress of June-July 1754; delegates from seven colonies approved it, but every colonial assembly rejected it.
Q 10Which Albany native signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776?
Philip Livingston
Philip Livingston, born in Albany in 1716, was a wealthy merchant who signed for his colony; he died in 1778 while Congress sat in York, Pennsylvania.
Q 11Which Albany-born general and senator was Alexander Hamilton's father-in-law?
Philip Schuyler
Philip Schuyler, born in Albany in 1733, served in the French and Indian War and as a major general in the Revolution; his daughter Elizabeth married Alexander Hamilton in 1780.
Q 12Albany became New York's permanent state capital in which year?
1797
In 1797 the legislature settled permanently in Albany; before that it had met in Kingston, Poughkeepsie and Manhattan as well as Albany.
Q 13Which city is the only US state capital older than Albany?
Santa Fe
Santa Fe was founded by Spanish colonists in 1610, a few years before the first fort at Albany in 1614; Boston (1630) and Annapolis (1649) came later.
Q 21Erastus 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.
Q 22Who became the first woman elected mayor of Albany, in November 2013?
Kathy Sheehan
Kathy Sheehan, then city treasurer, won the November 2013 election and took office in January 2014 as Albany's first female mayor.
Q 23Which Albany native won the 1984 Pulitzer for Ironweed, part of his cycle of novels set there?
William Kennedy
William Kennedy, born in Albany in 1928, won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Ironweed; the 1987 film starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
Q 14In 1807 Robert Fulton launched the first successful commercial steamboat service between Albany and where?
New York City
New York City was the other end of Fulton's 1807 run; his North River Steamboat covered the roughly 150 miles to Albany in about a day and a half.
Q 15The original Erie Canal ended at Albany; where does today's Barge Canal end instead?
Waterford
Waterford, just north of Troy, is where the Barge Canal of 1918 leaves the Hudson; the original canal ran on to a man-made lagoon at Albany, the Albany Basin.
Q 16Albany's 1830s rail line became part of which company that Erastus Corning consolidated in 1853?
New York Central
New York Central was formed in 1853 by merging the small lines between Albany and Buffalo, the oldest being Albany's 1831 railroad to Schenectady; Erastus Corning served as its first president until 1864.
Q 17Construction of the New York State Capitol, declared complete in 1899, took how many years?
32
32 years passed between the start of construction in 1867 and Governor Theodore Roosevelt's declaration of completion in 1899; the cost reached about $25 million.
Q 18Why were the State Capitol's planned dome and tower never completed?
The building's weight was causing stress fractures
The building's weight was causing stress fractures in the masonry as the structure settled, so the planned central dome was abandoned and the roof was finished without it.
Q 19Which governor drove the construction of the Empire State Plaza between 1965 and 1978?
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller, governor from 1959 to 1973, conceived the plaza and pushed it through; Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd, at first an opponent, arranged the county bond financing that paid for it.
Q 20The 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 24Which two famous authors lived in Albany with their families as children, before their careers?
Herman Melville and Henry James
Herman Melville and Henry James both spent part of their boyhoods in Albany: Melville's family moved there in 1830 and he attended Albany Academy, while James's grandfather William James was one of the city's richest merchants.
Q 25Albany'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 26The Tulip Festival is held in which Albany green space?
Washington Park
Washington Park opened in the early 1870s on the site of Albany's former State Street Burying Ground; its lake, Lake House and tulip beds form the festival's centrepiece.
Q 27A four-ton statue of which advertising dog stands on a former RCA building roof in Albany?
Nipper
Nipper, the RCA Victor terrier, was hoisted onto the roof of a Broadway warehouse in 1954; the 28-foot dog became one of Albany's best-known landmarks.
Q 28The 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 cover the Pine Bush, whose dunes were blown up from the sandy bed of glacial Lake Albany; the state created the preserve in 1988.
Q 29Which endangered butterfly is the emblem of the Albany Pine Bush?
Karner Blue
Karner Blue caterpillars feed only on wild blue lupine; the butterfly was named in 1944 by Vladimir Nabokov after Karner, the hamlet in the Pine Bush where he studied it.
Q 30The University at Albany began in 1844 as what kind of institution?
A teacher-training normal school
A teacher-training normal school, the New York State Normal School, opened in Albany in 1844; it became a teachers college in 1914 and joined the State University of New York in 1948.