Troy, New York - Architecture

Architecture

Troy is home to Victorian and Belle Époque architecture. The city's architectural achievements rate inspirational and serve its citizens, visitors and onlookers as well as posterity, with as a veritable treasure chest set in masonry exteriors, as evidenced by the sheer variety of its building’s design vernacular, which includes specimens redolent of numerous ancient civilizations’ and later European edifice models. Notably, the city's First and Second Industrial Revolutions' decades-long innovations and successes enabled commercial and residential builders the financial means and engineering knowledgebase to express themselves in highly-individualized, and most often, grand masonry buildings. That opportunity to build such wondrous structures is owed, in part, too, to the fact that two major fires had devastated much of Troy’s earlier wooden structures, availing large tracts for re-development.

The Hudson and Mohawk rivers play their part, as does the Erie Canal and its lesser tributary canal systems, and later the railroads that linked Troy to the rest of the Empire State, New York City to the south, and Utica, New York, Syracuse, New York, Rochester, New York, Buffalo, New York and the myriad of emergent Great Lakes' cities in the burgeoning United States.