1000 Madison Avenue (former Pine Hills library)

One of the most fondly remembered addresses in all of the Pine Hills, this stately Victorian was home to a branch of the Albany Public Library for many years. Well-worn stairs and the smell of books -- for a few generations of Pine Hills children, this was a second home.

The ca. 1899 house was built for the president of the Helderberg Cement Company. It was a private residence until becoming a library in the early 1950s. The creaky, leaky house may not have been ideal for its new purpose (the Knickerbocker News once called the building “entirely inadequate”) but many of the features that made it ill-suited to be a high-circulation library – its cramped spaces, irregular nooks, many stairs, round tower – are the very ones that made it such a delight for patrons, especially young ones.

The building never had been city property; St. Vincent de Paul parish had owned it and collected a nominal rent for its use as a library. In 1985, The College of Saint Rose bought the mansion, and in 1990 the Pine Hills Library moved to its current location at 517 Western, in the old telephone exchange building near the Madison-Western Point. Today, 1000 Madison houses the administrative offices of The College of Saint Rose.