Below is a portion of a map from the City Atlas of Albany, New York, 1876 showing picnic grounds off Second Avenue in the center of the photo.
The area west of
Second Avenue and Garden Street extending out to the Delaware Turnpike, now
Avenue, was known as Blackman’s Farm and also Blackman’s Bush. The name eventually changed to Colling’s
Grove after Leonard Colling purchased 25.9 acres for $5,000 in 1868. Still, later came another name change to
Dobler Park, after the Dobler Brewing Company purchased the land in 1899. The park became an enormously popular picnic
ground for the German element until the land was sold in 1909 and sub-divided
into building lots. In 1903 and 1904, Fritz
Erhardt operated a saloon on the premises of Dobler Park before becoming the
proprietor of Shafer’s Grove in 1905.
According to city historian Virginia Bowers, parades and picnics were
common in the “South End” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;
many would start at the bottom of Second Avenue and South Pearl Street and
proceed up Second Avenue to Colling’s Grove, where food, drink, music, and
dance was enjoyed by all. The annual
German “Schwabenfest” of the Schwabenverein was also held each summer
on these picnic grounds.
On September 19,
1904, Albany’s first annual Deutsch Tag
or German Day was held at Dobler Park and was “an unqualified success.”[1] The
night before, the German Hall Association arranged an enormous vocal and
instrumental concert at the Harmanus Bleecker Hall to inaugurate the first Deutsch Tag. A children’s chorus of 250 voices, a male
chorus of 120, and a mixed chorus of 250 entertained the German citizens of
Albany throughout the night. The Albany Argus praised the German concert,
stating, “…yet it was nevertheless distinctively an Albany audience, the Germans
have become so thoroughly assimilated in the civilization of the new world that
all, whether born here or in the Fatherland, are Americans.”[2] German
Day celebrated the arrival of the “German Mayflower,” the Concord, and the
subsequent establishment of the first German colony in America at Germantown,
Pennsylvania. The colony was established
on October 6, 1683 by Franz Daniel Pastorius and was composed of mainly
religious refugees from the Palatinate.
On August 28, 1905 and August 13, 1906, German Day celebrations were
also held at Dobler Park. The third
annual German Day of 1906 saw over four thousand people attend the
festivities. The celebrations included a
parade in the morning, a picnic, and a field day at the park, both in the
afternoon and evening. At the fest, confirming
the importance and industriousness of the German people, the Times Union proclaimed; “There is no
city in this broad land which owes more to the sturdy descendants of the land
of the Rhine than does Albany.”[3]
Another picnic area
popular among the Germans was the vicinity south of Dobler Park, known as
Schaller’s Grove. The grove was
established in 1903 and was used until the early 1950s when New York State
procured the land for the New York State Thruway.[4] A
smaller recreational area east of Dobler Park was Grandview Park, off lower
Second Avenue, circa 1912. Around 1914,
northwest of Dobler Park another picnic ground popular with the German element
was Marshall’s Grove, located on Delaware Avenue. The German Holy Cross parish held picnics and
field days at this locale.[5]
[1] Times Union, September 17, 1904, 6:2;
September 19, 1904, 1:2. Albany Argus,
September 19, 1904, 8:1; September 20, 1904, 3:3.
[2] Albany Argus, September 19, 1904, 2:4.
[3] Times Union, August 13, 1906, 1:6; July
21, 1906, 2:3.
[4] Knickerbocker News, July 25, 1960, 9A:1.
Bowers, “The Texture of a Neighborhood,” p. 208.
[5] Times Union, July 20, 1914, 6:3.
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