School 4 (location of Pine Hills Park, Madison at Ontario)

An absent school built to serve a now-forgotten neighborhood: This stop is about things you don't see.

In the nineteenth century, this area was known as Paigeville, a working-class Irish and German neighborhood that used to fan out along Madison and Western near Ontario and Partridge streets. It was probably named for John Keyes Paige, a prominent citizen (and onetime Albany mayor) who’d had his “country seat” nearby. Albany Public School No. 4 was built here in 1892 to accommodate the children of Paigeville.

The school was lost to fire on a Saturday night in 1922. It was replaced with a building designed by Marcus T. Reynolds, the architect known for Albany landmarks such as the D&H Building, the Delaware Avenue firehouse, and Hackett Middle School. The 1967-'68 school year closed the books on old No. 4: Shortly after school let out for summer vacation, a ten-foot section of the building's roof collapsed. Engineers declared the building to be structurally unsound, and it was demolished in 1969.